¶ In the Decameron, IV, viii, we’re back to courtly love. Girolamo, sent out of town to get him away from an artisan’s daughter, is distraught to find, upon his return, that she has married someone else. So what does he do? He lies down in bed next to her and resolves to do. (He holds his breath, in fact. I believe that this is impossible.) And then, what does his former lady-love do? Although she’d forgotten all about him, and rather wished that he wouldn’t lie down next to her &c, all it takes is the sight of his corpse at the funeral to rekindle her passion. “What a wonderful thing Love is, and how difficult it is to fathom its deep and powerful currents.” Stendhal says somewhere (and I wish I could source this) that people wouldn’t think about falling in love on their own; they have to read about it first. Boccaccio seems to have been intent on making sure that everyone read about it, over and over and over.

But the best part of the tale is this dry bit of business, before Cupid’s arrow strikes the second time:

“Girolamo,” she whispered, “it’s time for you to be going.”

On receiving no answer, she assumed that he had fallen asleep. So she stretched out her hand to wake him up and began to prod him, but found to her great astonishment that he was cold as ice to the touch. She then prodded him more vigorously but it had no effect, and after trying once more she realized that he was dead. The discovery filled her with dismay and for some time she lay there without the slightest notion what to do.

In the end she decided to put the case to her husband without saying who was involved [remember, the married couple is in bed, with the husband on one side of the lady and Girolamo’s corpse on the other], and ask his opinion about what the people concerned ought to do about it; and having woken him up, she described her own recent experience as though it had happened to someone else, then asked him what advice he would give supposing it had happened to her.

To this, the worthy soul replied that in his view, the fellow who was dead would have to be taken quietly back to his own house and left there, and that no resentment should be harboured against the woman, who did not appear to him to have done any wrong.

“In that case,” said the girl, “we shall have to do likewise.”

¶ In the Aeneid, Aeneas bumps into the recent suicide, Dido, but, what do you know: she won’t hang around to listen to his explanations. (The gods made me do it.)

And at last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,
feeling back to the shadowed forests where Sychaeus,
her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,
meets her love with love. But Aeneas, no less
struck by her unjust fate, escorts her from afar
with streaming tears and pities her as she passes.

Now, just how does one pull off the neat trick of escorting from afar? The Latin is almost cute, as if saying makes it so.

nec minus Aeneas, casu concussus iniquo,
prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem.

This gallant but utterly pointless and unlooked-for gesture that must have sent elegant minds of the Seventeenth Century into raptures.

¶ And so, farewell to C K Williams, at least for a time. The New Poems, angrier and more topical than his earlier verse, read like notes toward a lamentation. “Cassandra, Iraq” is a poem worth puzzling over.

She’s magnificent, as we imagine must be
who foresee and foretell and are right and disdained.

This is the difference between us who are like her
in having been right and disdained, and us as we are.

Because we, in our foreseeings, our having been right,
are repulsive to ourselves, fat and immobile, like toads,

Not toads in the garden, who after all are what they are,
but toads in the tale of death in the desert of sludge.

We’re toads, the poet says, because we can’t figure out what to do about the awfulness of, specifically, the American misadventure in Iraq. I myself am not shamed by this; I think that Williams overlooks, as many on the Left do, the awful potential for another civil war that the Christianist stab at ascendancy has exposed. Wishing that this country were not so prone to the religious convulsions that engendered it is not, in the end, good enough; and the convulsion that just now seems to be dying down of its own accord could only have been stilled by a fearfully greater one. What toads need to do is learn American history — really learn it. Be that as it may, Williams ends his poem with an irresistible but somewhat impenetrable suggestion. Having noting that Cassandra could not foretell the manner of her own death, he concludes,

Her abductor dies, too, though, in a gush of gore, in a net.
That we know; she foresaw that — in a gush of gore, in a net.

Gore’s Internet?

Tomorrow, a few poems from Seanus Heaney’s District and Circle.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero (Nº 15 — halfway through!): Joel Comm of JoelComm.com. More unexplained mysteries of SEO — I know, I could find out about it elsewhere, but the true theme of this book does seem to be Search Engine Optimization and Its Discontents — but also more than a little murk about what the site of the day is about. Finally: “I’m part of an unintentionally underground niche — the whole Internet info-product marketing niche. Marketing seminars, e-books, and so forth.” Ah! And so forth! Yesterday’s entry, for example: “Kindle Your Revenue Stream.” I just want someone to pay for my Kindle.

¶ In Chapter XXVII of Le rouge et le noir, Stendhal’s contempt for Julien’s fellow seminarians rises to excoriation, as he protrays a Church of such corrupted piety — its very priests honor the pope in exchange for good dinners and lots of casuel (perks) — that Julien’s almost helpless excellence earns him the nickname “Martin Luther.” The chapter portrays a gang of mediocrities enforcing their low standards out of sheer self-interest. How to prevent this sort of thing is one of the most vexatious of human problems. How to keep ten dim-witted thugs from trumping one first-class mind. Not to mention trouncing.

¶ Writing about Richard Rhodes — one of his few living subjects and the author of two very superior books about the invention, if that’s the word, of thermonuclear devices, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb — Clive James gets at one of the weaker habits of mind of those inclined toward the Left:

The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past [i e, the world would be a better place if the atomic bomb had not been developed], administered by better me. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes’s book about Los Alamos is to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don’t take that fact in, but they won’t be serious.

¶ In the Decameron, a tale from the (Florentine) proletariat. Two young and comely workers in the wool trade meet in a garden that, for a change, belongs to neither of their families nor to the convent in which one of them is immured. The boy, Pasquino — already, the commedia dell’arte nomenclature — interrupts his love-making to brush his teeth with a sage-leaf. Unfortunately, it has been breathed upon by a great venomous toad, and Pasquino dies. Does Simona, the girlfriend, worry that she’ll be caught in flagrante? Not a bit of it. It’s for murder that she’s hauled in! As she is not a lady, she has no cause to worry about her honor. But she does prize her good name as a solid citizen, so she demonstrates to the podestà how Pasquino came to grief. This kills her, too.

This tale (IV, vii) is not only short but starkly denuded of the superlatives that garland all the earlier love-stories. Neither Simona nor Pasquino is the most handsome, the most beautiful, &c. McWilliam’s notes tell sus that the lovers “have special significance as the first working-class hero and heroine in the history of European tragic literature.” Well, they both die. I wouldn’t call the story tragic.

¶ In the Aeneid, the Sibyl persuades a reluctant Charon, who has gotten in trouble on previous occasions for ferrying (famous) mortals across the Styx and who is disinclined to allow Aeneas to embark, by brandishing the golden bough. In contrast to the dead souls, apparently, Aeneas is suddenly “a giant,” and his weight is almost more than the boat can bear. We’ve all been in something like it at one icky time or another:

                            gemuit sub pondere cumba
sutilis et multam accepit rimosa paludem.

¶ C K Williams: a poem from August 2005, “Rats.”

and the president

and his energy-company
cronies still insist
global warming
isn’t real. The rats

rove where they will
now, shiny and fat,
they’ve appropriated
the whole lawn.

Not the most poetic lines in the history of verse, but “rove” is worthy of the great Augustans.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Deborah Petersen, of Life in the Fast Lane. I’m probably not going to get this right, but Ms Petersen appears to be the dispatcher of her husband’s Canadian trucking company, Fast Lane. I guess it’s not a full-time job. Why is her blog so popular (and it is popular, apparently)? Because Ms Petersen has studied SEO — search engine optimization, the technique or set of techniques that floats through these pages like a miasma. Most of the bloggers so far seem disdainful of SEO, in much the same way that doctors are disdainful of vitamin supplements. If you’re doing a good job, you don’t need the boost. (One’s Inner Publicist: Are you CRAZY?) Editor Michael Banks treats SEO as a Masonic secret, too precious to be discussed in any detail. I guess I won’t be learning about that from Blogging Heroes.

¶ In Le rouge et le noir, our cynical hero, Julien, is out-cynicized by his fellow seminarians, who, mostly drawn from peasant backgrounds, believe in good meals, warm cassocks, and the power of not thinking. Again, I flip to the English translation and learn precisely nothing. Well, most of the time. Every now and then there’s an idiom the sense of which I’d never extract from a dictionary. The really tough ones all seem to involve en and être.

Les gens adroits parmi les séminaristes virent qu’ils avaient affair à un homme qui n’en était pas aux éléments du métier.

translates as

The sharper ones among the seminarians saw that they were dealing with someone who was not without some elements of their calling.

¶ Writing about Jean-François Revel, Clive James becomes almost intemperate. I think that I share James’s dislike and contempt for ideology, but it has been much less salient in my life than it doubtless was in his. One of the good things about the countercultural Sixties was that everyone was really too stoned for ideological rigor. How else could boomers have become the sterling investment bankers who mastered the universe in the Eighties?

Although I feel slightly left out of James’s side of the conversation, I get it in the end.

After the verbal battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument. Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the bien pensant left: un totalitarisme végétarien. The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn’t telling them that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they though that way because they were bad writers.

Zing!

¶ An interesting detail in today’s tale from the Decameron (IV, vi): The podestà, having wrestled in vain with the heroine’s chastity, has to explain the situation to the girls father.

The chief magistrate, thinking it preferable to make a clean breast of his attempt on the girl rather than to wait for her to denounce him, began by praising her for her constancy, in proof of which he went on to describe how he had behaved towards her. On discovering how resolute she was, he had fallen deeply in love with her.

Some “clean breast.” The original does not use such a figure of speech, but is more naked about tactics; I’d render it thus: “The podestà, preferring to accuse himself than to being accused by her…” This curious story, like IV, ii, seems to run two tales together: first, that of the woman who must honorably dispose of the body of her secret husband after his death from natural causes, and that of a powerful man who claims to have fallen in love with a woman whom he was unable to rape.

¶ In the Aeneid, the Sybil leads Aeneas into the underworld. It is impossible not to think of Dante, who enlarges considerably on most of Virgil’s lines. Interestingly, Dante crowds the hither bank of the Acheron not with Virgil’s unburied (as, Palinurus) but with people who never made up their minds about belief.

Heaven case them forth — their presence there would dim
   The light; deep Hell rejects so base a herd,
   Lest sin should boast itself because of them.
                                         (Inferno, III, 40-42; translation by Dorothy L Sayers)

¶ C K Williams: These New Poems are vastly more accessible than the ones in A Dream of Mind. In “The Blade,” a poem dated to the 2004 presidential election, the poet compares the US to Franco’s Spain, in the grip of “fearmongering, slander and lies.” I’m sorry that I didn’t know the poem at the time.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Ken Fisher, of Ars Technica. “Ars Technica has developed a huge following by focusing not just on technical topics, but on the full range of human arts and sciences.” A cursory glance at the site suggests this may be the most preposterous statement in Michael Banks’s book. Ken Fisher comes off, though, as somewhat more serious (in the French sense) than any of the previous heroes.

¶ Now that I have The Red and the Black on hand, I see that I was doing fine with the original: the translation doesn’t really clear up any of the little mysteries that I attributed to faulty comprehension. My ancient Livre de poche edition, I find, even prints a paragraph of today’s chapter (XXV, “The Seminary”) out of place, where it makes no sense.

¶ Writing about Marcel Reich-Ranicki — a German critic whose name one sees more and more — Clive James introduces me to a new and delightful word: Mumpitz, “that useful German word for exalted twaddle.” Of which there is apparently none in the writings, easily read in German according to James, of this issuer of death-certificates (to “dead” works of art).

¶ No more Mitfords for the time being, now that I’ve done with the latest collection of letters. Something tells me that I won’t be able to stay away from Jessica’s letters for long, though. Of all the sisters, she seems to have had the keenest sense of linguistic absurdity, than which there is no greater teacher.

¶ The Decameron, IV, v: The story of Isabella and her pot of basil. Well, that’s how Keats told it, inspired by Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s doomed heroine is called Lisabetta. There’s a picture at the MFA in Boston that was here for a show a few years ago, by John White Alexander, painter of the Met’s great Repose. My, what a big pot, you think — if you don’t know the story, which is that, long-story-short, Lisabetta put the head of her murdered lover, Lorenzo, in a pot, which she planted with basil that she watered with her tears. (The former gardener in me bristles: too much salt!).

So of course I had to read the Keats, which comes in sixty-three strophes. Two super lines for the tongue, the first a cool dismissal of mercantile wealth, the second a wild cry of grief.

Enriched from ancestral merchandize,

and

Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,

And one very arresting strophe.

Who hat not loiter’d in a green church-yeard,
  And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
  To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry death hath marr’d
  And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

¶ That’s enough verse for today, so we skip the Aeneid and C K Williams. Clive James writes a note — no more — about Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), a public intellectual who may have been the first to ask whether the excesses of the French Revolution were “worth it” — still a question the asking of which can land you in hot water with the Left, which, frankly, Clive James has had enough of. Insofar as Leftists rely on theories, I quite agree. There is really no need for theories when confronted with injustices all round. It seems to me that the Right is pretty dependent on theories, too, most notably tiresome myths about private property (which is protected by law in order to avoid violence, not to guarantee claims) and “personal responsibility.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: John Neff of Autoblog. It’s curious, but a blog about cars seems about as go-ahead as a blog about powdered wigs. Curious geographical slips: “We meet about every three months, either in New York City at AOL headquarters in Rockefeller Square, or in Dulles, Virginia, where the main office is.” Have they changed “Vienna” to “Dulles”? They certainly haven’t built Rockefeller Square yet, not in New York anyway. Plaza and Center, yes, but no Square.

¶ “Go-ahead” is a term used by Diana Mosley in a letter about one of her father’s ill-advised investments: “In those days wirelesses and plastic were both rather go-ahead.” The scheme in question envisioned “making millions” by encasing radios in plastic simulacra of fine old Chinese porcelains. Oh, dear; sounds straight out of Wodehouse.

Diana to Deborah, March 1998:

I’m not nearly as clever as you are & I terribly regret your one blind spot, you would LOVE not just Proust, but Flaubert, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe’s novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, all these brilliant treasures & many more. I think possibly it comes from impatience, you want to be up & doing, well you are & think of the wonderful achievements! You have got the patience to plant trees, hedges,you know they take ages but once they’re in they grow & you can be doing again, something else. You don’t want to sit ruminating over a book, you want quick action. I do regret it, can’t help it, thinking how you would laugh at Proust’s jokes or be terrified by Conrad’s descrip of the slow fire in a cargo of coal ready to turn & drown them all if the wind changes. It’s true my world is peopled by characters in books, & it’s a mystery how you, so interested in human nature, can do without it seen through eyes of genius. But perhaps it’s clever nature at work which gave you a task far more important than just loving to read. Your fund of wonderful human sympathy is much more unselfish, in face reading is selfish & would probably waste your time which you spend making life bearable for one & all. So in the end I applaud your choice. It is much clever to do than just to think.

Deborah’s reply (excerpt):

Oh, Proust, shall I try it now or is it too late? I do hope it’s too late.

If I were to start up a school today, I’d have the sixth-graders spending their mornings doing morning reads just like mine — so many pages of this, so many lines of that, with brief commentary — and their afternoons memorizing poetry. Seventh-graders, in lieu of sex ed, would study Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, with the teachers required to Explain Everything.

¶ The Decameron, IV, iv: Love via hearsay, the story of Gerbino and the Tunisian princess, who fell in love by report, as it were, never seeing one another until the moment of death (as it turned out). Being slow, it was not until today that I reflected on the trouble that handsome young men must have gotten into by reading these tales aloud in mixed company. Just imagine the reaction of a cloistered fourteen year-old girl to Gerbino’s address to his pirate crew!

It is my conviction that no mortal being who is without experience of love can ever lay claim to true excellence. And if you are in love, or have ever been in love, it will not be difficult for you to understand what it is that I desire. For I am in love, gentlemen…

¶ In the Aeneid, the Cumaean sybil tells Aeneas to fetch the golden bough if he wants to visit the Underworld on a return ticket. This quest is rather overshadowed by the big funeral for Misenus, Aeneas’s trumpeter, who got in an ill-advised pissing match — blowing, actually — with Triton. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003) rather useless on Misenus. Someone among Virgil’s patrons must have had a place at Misenum, the Neapolitan suburb named after the herald.

¶ C K Williams’s New Poems: shorter lines, for one thing. A reference to Iraq, in “Blackbird.”

I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

Patience, my dear poet; patience.

¶ Clive James on Proust: Just a page or two, but James’s point is that Proust, “the greatest French writer,” infuses all of Cultural Amnesia.

This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Peter Rojas, of Engadget. This book has no place in such august company, but I don’t think that I could get through it otherwise. On the Simple Life:

When I decide I want to learn something about a field or an area, I just subscribe to blogs in that area, sometimes at random. For example, about a year ago I decided to learn about widgets. I literally Googled “widgets blog” and found a bunch of blogs. As I read and linked to more blogs, it became obvious what the best blogs in that field were.

I added those to my RSS feed, and deleted some of the other ones that weren’t so good. And that gave me a pretty good sense of what was going on in the widget blogosphere.

It’s a really good way to familiarize yourself with a field. Just start reading the blogs. You won’t need to really spend a lot of time sweating over what is the best, because it will become apparent in a few weeks.

Well, what are you waiting for?

¶ Jessica to Deborah, March 1995:

Enclosed: a killing article by Xopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, at least I loved it. Did you catch the telly programme about Mother Teresa? I always thought she was just a boring old saint, hadn’t realized she’s a disgusting old fascist.

Deborah to Diana, July 1996:

Reading the obits. of Decca, the Mitford Girls are described variously, as Famous Notorious Talented Glamorous Turbulent Unpredictable Celebrated Infamous Rebellious Colourful & Idiosyncratic. So, take your choice. The D Express has a long article about us called ‘Sex and Power.” I suppose anyone who is married, & most who aren’t, have what is now called Had Sex* at some point in their lives. As for Power I don’t quite see how that comes into it. So why are we different from anyone else.

                                                            Much love, Debo

* Look at the people walking down Oxford St, all products of Having Sex.

As The Mitfords draws to a close, far from wondering what made the sisters different, I’m convinced that Zeus or someone equally Parnassian was involved in their parentage.

¶ There is an opera in there somewhere… The Decameron, IV, iii: the three sisters, their three lovers, and a miscellany of vengeance suggesting that it is early days, indeed, on the narrative front. Although one of the three sisters is tied up in a sack, the dramatic possibilities so adroitly exploited in the plot of Rigoletto remain entirely unexplored.

¶ The Aeneid, beginning of Book 5: The Cumaean sibyl’s cave. What I’m looking for — and may find tomorrow — is the prophecy explains what the Sybil is doing up on the Sistine ceiling.

¶ CK Williams: “Helen”:

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?

A Dream of Mind climaxes in a poem about the death of a lover that, without any explicit allusions, seems shot with classical mythology, most notably to the story of Orpheus and Euridice. My critic faculties busily protect me from this obviously powerful poem.

¶ Clive James, nominally on the subject of Jean Prévost, but really out to dish Sartre:

Unlike his fellow resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so admirably represented in the Thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labor once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialties, each with its resident panels of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Robert Scoble, of the tech site Scobleizer. And today’s insight: “So thinking about the blog is part of the blogging process?” “Yeah.” I looked for this gem in vain among the Power Points. It appears that Mr Scoble is at Davos as we speak (or maybe not). I wonder if I’ll ever be invited to the humanist equivalent of Davos. Will there be an equivalent? Online, at best — humanism is very, very ill-paid.

¶ Le rouge et le noir: Sorel arrives in Besançon, and visits his first café — where he almost gets into a fight, little would-be Napoleon that he is. How understandably reluctant he is to toddle off to the seminary! If there were ever a young man without a “vocation,” it’s Julien Sorel.

¶ Over the weekend, I finished another section of The Mitfords, and now have only the last to read. We’re down to Diana, Decca, and Debo. It’s getting gowlish!

¶ In the Decameron (IV, ii): “He who is wicked and held to be good, can cheat because no one imagines he would.” This reads like a mash-up of two stories, the first a tale of one very silly woman, Mona Lisetta ( given many mocking nicknames — Lady Numbskull, Lady Birdbrain, &c), who believes that she’s so sexy that the Archangel Gabriel lusts after her, and the more slapstick account of comeuppance, in which the Archangel’s impersonator is tarred and feathered, only with honey instead of tar. Throughout, however, the tale is yet another attack on the hypocrisy of the religious orders.

¶ The end of the fifth book of the Aeneid, at last! The strange death of Palinurus — time to re-read Cyril Connolly?

¶ C. K. Williams: the end of “A Dream of Mind,” — again, at last. These poems seem to take place in the absence of gravity; I never know which way is up. Nor, for that matter of that, do I really know what the poet is talking about. This book (also called A Dream of Mind) concludes with a final long poem, “Helen.” I shall try to read it in one sitting, and then close this collection and move on to someone else.

¶ Clive James on Beatrix Potter. “Her stories attract tweeness toward them — the Peter Rabbit Ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child — but are never winsome in themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language.” Even better:

Written in a age when it was still assumed the children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by just overhead and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children’s books, even at their worthily—meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mark Frauenfelder, of BoingBoing.net. Something to take up later today, when writing for tomorrow about blogs:

Q: What tips or advice would you like to hear with bloggers?

A: I think it’s really important to write a good headline. It’s better to be accurate than it is to be cute or clever. When you make a post, do a little summary of what it is in the headline, because a lot of people read blogs through RSS and go to the headline first to see what’s going on. It can make a difference in whether you get read.

As for the blog post itself, if you’re writing about something out on the Web, give a good short description of why it’s interesting. When I see something I want to talk about, I outline some of the questions that readers might ask, like “Why is this interesting?” or, “Why is this important?” I write down the answers, and then I post.

¶ Diana to Deborah, in September 1980, on the subject of Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence: “Isn’t it amazing who the person one’s writing to influences one.” Indeed.

Not so much fun:

But what happened with Jebb’s silly film shows the depth of seething hatred Decca feels for us. It is much more painful to hate than to be hated, & I am aware that her life is in many ways rather awful, but not quite awful enough to excuse her behaviour. As far as I go, I put her out of my mind.”

Greetings from the Learning Curve! I used the Dragon to dictate this morning’s read, and as a result the whole business took ages. I’ll get better at it, though. Dictation certainly beats trying to prop thick books open while typing from them. The thing is not to put the books away until they’ve been consulted for cleanup. I wonder: are there any conceptual artists out there who are “working with” unpasteurized dictation? Talk about absurdity on the cheap!

¶ The theme for stories on the Fourth Day of the Decameron is “those whose love ended unhappily.” The first tale, about Ghismonda, the daughter of a jealous prince, tells us that “she was youthful and vivacious, and she possessed rather more intelligence than a woman needs.” It’s curious that the story has never received operatic treatment. It has a climactic scene to rival Salome, followed by a kind of Liebestod. Before dying, however, Ghismonda rattles off the old medieval delusion about the wheel of fortune, so beloved perhaps because it offered the promise of respite from an increasingly stratified society.

Many kings, many great princes were once poor; many a ploughman or shepherd, not only in the past but in the present, was once exceedingly wealthy.

¶ The Aeneid: The Trojan fleet is set on fire, but most ships are saved in a providential thunderstorm. Aeneas is advised to leave the women and children behind while he sets out for Rome with just his fighting men. This seems to be the first appearance of women among the band of Trojan exiles; they’ve been introduced, not surprisingly, only to be got rid of.

¶ C K Williams, “To Listen”:

For the dead speak from affection, dream says, there’s kindness in the voices of the dead.
I listen again, but I still hear only fragments of the elaborate discourse the dead speak;
when I try to capture its gist more is effaced, there are only faded words strewn on the page
of my soul that won’t rest from its need to have what it thinks it can have from the dead.

Sometimes, I think that this is what poetry is for: memorizing lines that seem right even though they’re not understood; later, their sense becomes clear, enlightened by experiences that we would have missed without them.

¶ Clive James on Alfred Polgar:

Critics are always remembered best for how they sound when on the attack. Schadenfreude lies deep in the human soul, and to read a tough review seems a harmless way of indulging it. But the only critical attacks that really count are written in defense of value.

(In an interesting note: “Alfred Brendel put me onto Polgar.”)

¶ In September 1979, Diana writes Deborah to regret that she can’t come to Sophy’s wedding because her husband, Sir Oswald Mosley, is too ill to be left in France. “I will get her present next week, there’s a list at PJ isn’t there.” PJ stands for the stylish emporium in Sloane Square. Last night, Kathleen and I had dinner with the banker who lives right behind Peter Jones. Her life is being made a perfect hell by adjacent construction (nothing to do with the shop). The runaround that she gets while trying to find someone responsible to talk to sounds perfectly universal.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mike Masnick, of Techdirt. Aha! Someone else who claims to have been a blogger before there was blogging. An interesting thing about this business site is that its legitimacy is thought, correctly, I’m sure, to be enhanced by the presence of advertising. Some of the advertisers are clients of the firm!”

¶ Speaking of business, while slogging through an impenetrable passage having to do with commercial leases in Le rouge et le noir, I accepted the fact that I am going to have to get a trot. I can’t go on wondering if Stendhal is addicted to non sequiturs.

¶ Decameron: The Fourth Day. The introduction, an authorial aside defending the burgeoning of vernacular literature — Boccaccio was writing in a world more or less without it (aside from, ahem, Dante) — has on at least once occasion served as a replacement for yesterday’s very saucy tale about putting the Devil in Hell. Not that today’s is without its capsicum: “Their bills are not where you think, and require a special sort of diet.” If you ask me, this is a jolly improvement on the original, which says only, “tu non sai donde elle s’imbeccano.” McWilliam’s little crack about the “special diet” is wonderfully “off-color”…. ¶ In the Aeneid, the funeral games come to an end at last with the boys’ mock battle, and we approach a scene that I have seen on a museum wall somewhere — at the Met? The burning of the Trojan ships. Goody! Something to look forward to for tomorrow. Not…. ¶ C K Williams, “The Knot.” I’ve no idea what this means, but it’s a pretty line: “knots of purpose we could touch into as surely as we touch the rippling lattice of a song.” I have no patience for the metaphysics of this verse, for the poet’s mad persistence in distinguishing between “spirit or flesh.” There is certainly flesh, and their may be spirt, but they are not elements in a dualism. That’s over!…. ¶ Clive James, nominally on Octavio Paz but actually, and with sweet infatuation, about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of whom he writes, fetchingly: “Though her faith was real, it undoubtedly came in handy.” Sterling. At the end, he returns to the more recent Mexican poet:

The correspondence [of Sor Juana Inés was lost through sheer carelessness: the Spanish carelessness that Paz defines in scathing terms: “It is said that the passion that corrodes the Spanish peoples is envy, but worse and more weighty is carelessness: the creator of our deserts.” When he brings in a phrase like creador de nuestros desertos, Paz shows us the transatlantic cable that runs from Unamuno and Ortega to himself and Vargas Llosa: the charge of energy that brought Spanish civilization to life again, offshore in the Americas. Spanish expository prose in the twentieth century was a miracle that these men created, but they didn’t dream it up out of the air. There was already a long heritage of rhetorical strengtrh in the poetry, where the telling phrases lie separate that would later be strung together in a coruscating style.

¶ Diana to Debo, October 1978, oh, what a treat! (But I suppose I had better mention that “Colonel” is Gaston Palewski, Nancy’s BF who, after twenty years of fooling around, up and married somebody rich. Nancy’s horrible cancer commenced presently. You decide.)

It was so rich having a chat yesterday.

I don’t think I told you a very odd thing about Colonel. We were alone & he suddenly said he’d been terribly hurt because Naunce didn’t mention him in her testament. So I said ‘But her will was just one line leaving everything to Debo,’ & he said ‘Oui, je sais, mais elle aurait pu quand même dire un mot de moi.’

Well, can you imagine, isn’t that wanting everything all at once! He maried [somebody else], & yet he expects that! I feel certain he simply wants it for his biographers, if any. He was almost in tears. When I told him about the telly thing, he cheered up & wanted to know who is to act him in it. I’m afraid vanity is strong. He must be very put out by the Pop dying because he knew him from Venice & loved saying so.

“I’m afraid vanity is strong… and loved saying so” — English doesn’t get more delicious…. ¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Frank Warren, of Post Secret. Goodness! When did I last check it out? Perhaps I ought to link to it, under a new heading, “Divertissements” or “Sunday Morning” — how long, I wonder, are Internet weekends going to continue to be dead? The Post Secret postcards are titillating to read, of course, but it’s the sharp designs that carry the site. There is, it’s true, a nasty pong to it all: it’s one thing to hear somebody’s deep dark secrets, but quite another to know that somebody is doing some pretty awful things! Kathleen would take one look at Post Secret and, after that, never again…. ¶ Stendhal: “Le grand malheur des petites villes de France et des gouvernements par élections, comme celui de New York, c’est de ne pas pouvoir oublier qu’il existe au monde des êtres comme M de Rênal.” Yes, the great misfortune of elected governments such as New York’s is the occasional inescapability of beings such as M de Giuliani.

¶ Boccaccio’s word, translated by McWilliam as “adolescent,” is fanciullesco. “Girlish” would have been better. I wish that we could simply import “fanciullesco” into English. McWilliam notes that III, x — the story of Alibech and Rustico — used to be too hot to handle (translate). And no wonder! “La rissurezion della carne”! How’s that for a euphemism (for an erection). Putting the “devil” back into “hell.” Stelle!…. ¶ In the Aeneid, an archery context. Footnotes might explain what Acestes’s arrow, bursting into flames, portends (not that I’m keen to know)….¶ C K Williams: “rising perhaps out of the fearful demands consciousness makes for linkage, coherence, congruence” — I hope that Steve Laico will have some tips for improving wi-fi service to the bedroom this afternoon…. ¶ Clive James, nominally on Grigory Ordzhonokidze:

The great mystery of the socialist totalitarian regimes has not been how they grew into killing machines — in retrospect, nothing seems more logical — but how the machines were put into reverse.

And he solves the mystery by taking Ordzhonokidze literally: the true victims of totalitarian oppression are the executioners. (A theme of Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillantes)…. ¶ Debo to Decca, February 1978 (winding up the Peace Talks after the Great Scrapbook War):

I couldn’t sleep that night nor for many a night after; it made me miserable and still haunts after 9 months. I LOATHE a row of any sort, probably much more than you do because I note whenever you give an interview it ends with “I love a scrap” or something like, but I know those scraps are matters of principle or theory or political something and not inter-family — still you are more of a row-er than me I guess.

[…]

I wrotre to you once before to say something of this sort, as we are all getting OLD & will soon be quietly dead so I guess it’s better not to delve into row-making subjects.

How wrong, Your Grace; how wrong!….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: David Rothman, of TeleRead. Like all the others, I’ve never heard of him, but for once you’d think that I might have done. I thought about getting a Kindle, but on the day when that impulse ran at its hightest, Amazon was so behind in production that sales were halted. Cooler reflection inclines me to watch and wait, as the instrument’s performance will improve as its price drops. (God bless the early adopters.)…. ¶ Is Stendhal making musical jokes?: “Il essaya de la cacher avec le verre vert, mais il lui fut absolument impossible de faire honneur au vin du Rhin.” Verre vert, vin du Rhin? Do admit.

Big Daddy’s, the newest neighborhood eatery, on Second at 83rd. It is almost as retro as the diner in Pleasantville — clientele included! The sound system, however, played “Love Shack,” by the B-52s. It’s really a very B-52s kind of place.

Yesterday, I just jumped in and filed the first “Morning Read” entry, without any explanations. I relied, somewhat lazily, on the snapshot of the stack of books to provide an idea of what the text referred to. It might not be readily evident that I have been reading bits of these books every morning for several months now. Well, most weekday mornings. The rubric is: a story from the  Decameron; one hundred lines of the Aeneid; two poems by C K Williams, from the recent Collected Poems; one essay from Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia; a year’s worth of letters from The Mitfords; and one chapter each from Stendhal’s’ Le rouge et le noir and from Blogging Heroes. I would never make it through most of these books without a plan.

During the holidays, I neglected the morning read routine — but not The Mitfords. With less than twenty years to read through, I’ll be done with the collection of the six sisters’ letters in a week or two. (I’m down to four sisters. It’s quite noticeable that, no sooner did Nancy die, in 1973, than all sorts of skirmishes broke out between Decca (Jessica) on the others. The infamous scrapbook war, launched when Pamela “asked” Decca if she had “borrowed” a massive album from Chatsworth — Decca saw right away that she was being charged with theft — got fairly acrimonious. Amusingly… but enough of this.)

There will be no Morning Read this morning, because I have to go to the movies. I have to go to the movies today because I can’t go tomorrow. I can’t go tomorrow because I’m scheduled for a Remicade infusion early in the afternoon. “Then what have I?”

¶ Today’s Decameron story (III, ix), about Gillette de Narbonne and Bertrand de Roussillon, is an original — although not the original, which is in Sanskrit — of the plot of My Geisha, the bittersweet Shirley MacLaine comedy of 1962, with Yves Montand….¶ O wearying Book Five of the Aeneid! Today’s reading: the boxing match between Dares and Entellus, which would be bad enough; but then Aeneas interrupts the fight, apparently because Entellus, enraged by having fallen into his own missed “roundhouse right,” pummels Dares too gruesomely. An odd reason to break off a boxing match! I am only now old enough to tolerate the tedium of these stretches….¶ “Shells” and “Room” from A Dream of Mind: for me, very nearly impenetrable. Of all the Williams that I have read, these dream poems are the only ones not to engage me at all. Nice turn of phrase, though: “A dubious plasma”….¶ Clive James on Sir Lewis Namier (like Conrad, a Pole):

The war having been decided by the New World’s gargantuan production efforts, the United States should logically have become the centre of the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men such as Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience.

Still quite true; we have learned to speak better English in America….¶ Wonderful letter from Decca, written from Yale, where she was teaching a course in journalism, in the spring of 1976.

Am loving the students. The first few days were pure torture as I had to choose 18 students (max size of class) out of 200 applicants, goodness it was difficult. They’d all had to write on a card why they wanted to take the course. Mostly I rather followed instructions of higher-ups (deans etc) & chose illustrious-sounding people with Rhodes Scholarships. But one boy aged 17 wrote on his card “I believe I have the qualifications for a journalist as I am tall enough to look over walls & thin enough to hide behind trees,” so I could see I would worship him, & let him in. A girl wrote “There comes a time in every person’s life when he or she must burst into some new form of action.” She’s an athlete, so I let her in mainly because I long to see her burst into some new form of action.

Evidently, however, Decca’s policy of letting in the illustrious was not a complete success. (Do see Decca, two letters of January 1976 to her husband. Wonder who the snotty newspaper heir might have been!)….¶ Chapter XXII of Le rouge et le noir too long for one sitting. Without Mme de Rênal on hand, the novel is tough going….¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Mary Jo Foley, of All About Microsoft. Why am I reading this business book? To know the territory? Arguable but dubious plasma. More to the point: why did McNally Robinson stack it among all the legitimate general-interest nonfiction titles at the front of the shop?