Dipping a toe in Iris

Finished Mailer's 800-page book of letters last night. Moving on to some author's he recommended, Iris Murdoch among them. I remember that I almost went on an Iris Murdoch binge, might have even bought a bunch of her books used in Berkeley years ago, but never got to the first page. Any specific recommendations? Thought I might start with The Sea, The Sea!

Fever can be a muse...hush now, and receive!

5th day of sick. Sore throat and fever, tiredness and blank mind. Slowly getting better. But 2 days ago when the fever was at its highest and I was the most delirious, it happened again. Whole sections of a new book were revealed as if I were listening to a recording of how to do it. So I got up and luckily my cell phone, on the bedside table, has a recording app. So I talked into it, hopefully getting everything I had heard...though the sound of my own voice seemed to wipe out the delicate memory, so I had to talk fast and abbreviate. The only way I can explain it, since it's happened twice now, is that I the conscious day-to-day mind is so crammed full of details having nothing to do with what you are writing that the thoughts you need can't get through. When your mind becomes stupid and empty, as it does during a fever, what you were looking for just floats in.

Today I read that Mailer took mescaline for the first time when he was struggling for the ending to his book Deer Park which had a next-day deadline, and the last 5 sentences came to him through a glittering, golden something or other.

Women out for themselves...about time, you say?

It's Sunday. I've got a sore throat and a fever. In between naps, I read short opinion pieces in the NYT, as you have gathered. The article I respond to, "Hire Women Your Mom's Age," can be found here.

As I suspected, the woman who wrote this opinion piece lost her last "real job" in her fifties and joined the "gig economy." Younger women who might be in a position to hire a woman her age, are no more likely to hire her than a man might be. I read this somewhere. Partly because there is no concept of solidarity now. Everyone is out for themselves, busily sweeping other people's concerns outside their darkly drawn "boundaries." And partly because the women now who might be in a position of power sufficient to be hiring, are young enough to still be running as fast as they can away from "mother figures" who might have more experience to offer...and yet not old enough to see the big iron door in front of them, and hear it slam shut for those a few years ahead of themselves. They will be surprised to know that on the other side of the door, once they play hopscotch across the illusive, false promise of the 3-dot elipses, it's a free fall. You have to be ready to consider this sudden loss of footing. Some find it exhilarating. Others, terrifying.

"The assertion of motherhood as sacrifice comes with a perceived glorification. A woman is expected to sacrifice her time, ambition and sense of self to a higher purpose, one more worthy than her own individual identity. This leaves a vacuum in the place of her value, one that others rush to fill."

You may read the whole article from which this quote is excerpted here.

I was thinking along these lines today, well, not exactly but... That I stopped writing for 25-30 years. That every American male writer in the last 60 or 70 years has had a wife, or a succession of wives, that kept their lives running, proof-read, gave them daily feedback if they wanted it. I thought this a brave and thoughtful article, and will continue pondering upon it, as I turn towards the next book.

Letter writing, a lost art

As I read the letters of other writers, collections that spanned 30 to 60 years, I find myself deeply mourning the loss of the epistolary exercise. I wrote long letters to a small collection of people, and they wrote long letters back. As I have said, I used to collect them in individual shoeboxes. My mother was a letter writer, Oh God, was she a letter writer. When the Post Office virtually closed its doors and its reach, and everyone turned to email, that whole essential way of communicating disappeared. And it was much more than simply "keeping up" with people, it was a chance to work out one's thoughts selectively, to the very person who would be uniquely interested in that conversation, and would respond by expanding it.

Letters were a genre of writing, an entire essential form that has disappeared. Conversation as I knew it between people, no longer exists, except perhaps in the coffee house, among regulars.

I am thinking of a book.