[December 1965]
To write on forthcoming 1966 trip with boys
STAY London -- Mike Fraser
Richard Pear
Aachen / Bruxelles --
Paris -- Mel Peebles / Beigbeider / Heretig / Wenek
Toulouse
Barcelona del Campo, Xifras
Madrid di Luna (NYC)
Seville
Tangiers
Algiers Sahnoune
Tunis Dix? Peebles' friend
Tripoli
Benghazi
Alexandria
Cairo AVC
Beirut AVB
Jerusalem (O)
Jerusalem (Israel) Balaban Basker
Iskanderun
Anatolia
Ankara ask Karpit
Istanbul Miserli
Salonika
Taranto
Catania Zia
Palermo di Mora
Rome Moravia, Morante, Ferrero
Firenze Anna Maria / Vicki
Marina di Massa Belli
Trento Braga
Vienna
Prague (head of Charles U. Political Science)
East Berlin
West Berlin Lochner, Shultz
Amsterdam
December 7, 1965 Tuesday, NYC, 11:15 PM
Over the weekend, Georgia Shattner and Julia Martinez typed fresh copies of my short novel, Twelve by Candle, and Georgia brought the typescript to me as I was about to leave for NYC. The idea came on Wednesday November 10, about 24 hours after the lights of NYC had gone off for twelve hours. I probably should not have gone ahead if it were not for the fact that I had planned to leave for Puerto Rico on Tuesday morning but canceled that plan since Jay Hall found that he could not join me there. The week before, Brother Ed and I had been speaking of my prospective trip and I had mentioned that perhaps I should write some poetry or fiction in my few days on the beach, and he had said "You should do so. Write a short novel built around your fishing village." The idea of writing was on my mind therefore. When the lights failed, I was sitting with Baldwin in his apartment discussing his interest in investing in the ABS and URS. We went out for a drink at Peppi's bar and walked around a little. I went home to 7 Washington Square, made and ate supper in solitude by candlelight, walked out for a few minutes after supper, was bored, went home, went to sleep early, and awakened at 5 AM. I saw the lights go on at 5:28 and some time later that day began to sketch episodes to the novel. On Thursday in NY I showed the several pages to Jill and Jessie, who had come home from the U. of Chicago for the weekend, and they thought the idea a happy one. So I set up the outline of chapters and completed the first draft on Tuesday November 23, two weeks later. I maintained a fairly normal schedule of business and social appointments during that time. The financial crisis of the ABS-URS was boiling throughout but I put it aside from one day to the next after doing what I could. Tuesday evening, a stranger, a pleasant woman, friend of Anita, helped until 2 AM to copy several handwritten chapters, and by 3 AM when I went to sleep, I was content that I had something of value. Stephanie was completely surprised when I showed the manuscript to her at lunch time, and she immediately read it through. By pure coincidence, that same evening, her father came to dinner and I gave him a copy of the novel to read. I had timed my engagement with him to be able to give him the material, and had driven myself to make the connection. I went ahead editing the manuscript and then a week later on December 1, Charles came again with his criticisms, both written and verbal. Stephanie had liked it. I had sent Eddie a copy and by telephone on Monday he had said he found it exciting and worthy of publication. Charles was more dubious and I was a bit put off by him, though I found some of his criticism helpful. I incorporated them, did more editing, and finally, after the weekend of typing, could hand a copy to Perry Knowlton of Curtis Brown Literary Agency. A copy went to Liz Bettman in Cincinnati. Sebastian is reading one, and the fourth is with Peter Bock, who expressed interest in it today while we were lunching together at the Delicatessen on 8th at MacDougall Street. As yet scarcely a person knows of the work -- no one at the university, no one at the ABS office. I am presently suffering under the illusion that it is a masterpiece. I wonder how long it will be before I am disillusioned?
I was up until 4 this morning, following upon an hour's nap from 8-9 last evening, reading Jan Myrdal's newly translated Report from a Chinese Village, De Vore's collection of studies of monkeys and apes, called Primate Behavior, the morning New York Times, and writing to Dick Ware of Relm Foundation a six-page letter suggesting a program of studies and teaching on legislatures and federalism and a letter to Jess in Chicago.
Today I arose at 9, read a little in Joyce's Ulysses, paid calls at my office at the University (dictating 4 letters and clearing up my mails, talked to two students and Mrs. Smith, the Department Administrator), dropped in at the ABS-URS to exchange a few words with the staff, lunched with Peter Bock, enjoyed a visit from Maya Kalkarini who showed me photos of her dancing postures and asked me to write letters of reference, returned to the ABS via the shoemaker and watch repairman to confer with Sara Miller, had a drink with her and 2 of her friends at Mayhens on Broadway, came home, fixed a supper of last evening's leftover spaghetti with sauce, barley soup, wine and coffee, spoke at length to Jill on the telephone (hearing of Vicki's doings in Florence: she plans to visit Sicily and Tunis at Christmas time) and then read Percival Bailey's book Sigmund the Unserene, a diatribe against Freud, much of it justified. His main points seem to be that psychoanalysis is scarcely a "science" (but then, what is?), that Freud took ideas from many others including his friends (who has not?), that Freud was the deity of a religious movement (so are all especially successful famous men of science or other areas of life), Freud was ungrateful and selfish (a most common feature of the great man psychic terrain), and that Freud was in the Jewish Mystic tradition (OK, and as Bailey also says, was in the Enlightenment rational tradition, too). Add it all up and we still have the sum total, configuration, Gestalt, presence of S. Freud, homo extraordinary. Still Bailey's lectures are well-documented sources of knowledge concerning the weaknesses of Freud and the history of science.
The Ideal Curriculum
Science and Society
Communications
Environmental Analysis
Planning (Social Design)
Creativity
Note: Make no distinction between science -- natural and social, and humanities.
The method of case studies to be heavily used.
Qualifications of students
- clear writing
- hi-analogies score
- inclusive social outlook
- hi completion / closure potential
- case study (in field and on paper test)
Tonight at ten it seems to me that the day has been singularly unproductive. I am in pyjamas and in bed. I shall begin to read now but I shall fall asleep in a few minutes, I know.
What did I do today? At 6:15 AM I awakened and arose. I discovered the dog lying like Manet's nude on our new silken down couch and kicked her out for her morning patrol of the grounds. I half-heartedly prepared breakfast, knowing that no one would eat anything. I sorted a few papers and inserted a page of corrections in my Elements of Political Science, should it ever be reprinted. I drank coffee, shaved, moved my bowels, read several poems, dressed, exchanged a few words with the boys, who were leaving for school one by one, made an acid comment about two pairs of socks that had holes (Jill appropriated them swearing I should never see them again but that she would wear them for ice-skating). I typed a legal document of one page, purporting to be a record of a Metron Board of Directors' meeting (which had not been formally held). I smoked a cigarette, spoke a few words with beautiful black Annabella who is a maid by day and a practical nurse by night, lately, and is bone-weary. I read a few paragraphs in Zimmerman's The Poor and the Rich Nations (?), packed my despatch case, and squeezed into the cold Volkswagen for the trip to the station. Jill drove and paused at Firestone Library while I went in and signed cards for several books that Cathy wished to withdraw on my card. I said to Jill, "One father can take care of 12 children, but 12 children cannot take care of one father." She smiled and drove me to Princeton Junction to catch the 9:52.
Aboard I read more about the poor nations growing poorer and the rich richer, thinking, as I read how barren the author's formulae and macroscopic economic approach were. Economist is grossly overrated as a science, whether pure or applied. I dozed freely. At Penn Station I picked up a copy of the Times that someone had left behind (there having been none left at the Junction) and read that while the subway took me to the Metron-URS office. There I opened mail, sorted files, began to make some headway in the financial mess my amateur bookkeepers and assistants had created, spoke to Stephanie Newman, Sid Roth, Roberta Lewis, Suzanne Farkas, and Sara Miller on the phone. At two I lunched at the Wagon Wheel with Dante ($1.50 for a small square of fried cod (fresh-frozen), corn, mashed potatoes, a roll, coffee -- unappetizing all). I continued sorting files afterwards, visited the P. O. for a minute to get a form to acquire a Box, and at 5:30 left with Dante, for 7 Washington Square North. I said goodbye to him at 5 A and turned into my apartment. I mixed a martini and drank it, reading in scattered books and papers, and walked over to my University office where I opened a batch of mail -- most of it selling me books, submitting articles for me to read, or wondering whether I remembered some deadline I had been pledged to that was fast approaching. There were Christmas cards, requests for reprints, notices of various kinds of University, proceedings, and forms for recommending students for scholarships or teaching posts. Liz Bettman wrote me that she didn't much like my novel "Twelve by Candle," saying it politely but not concealing effectively what I [chose] to believe is an unexpected rancor. Particularly she used two clichés that I disliked, viz.: "You had fun writing it, ..." and "Certainly the subject is timely ..." She thought the novelette lacks continuity and is the third person to feel the Foxes' love scene is discontinuous. I shall probably have to act on that problem. Strange that I feel the plot to be so tight-knit and both she and Elias Glicksberg thought differently. Eddie, Stephanie, Peter Bock, and Rosaline Frelinghuysen -- and the others who have read it -- are all "lay people" and liked the book very well.
I mentioned this fact to Stephanie on the telephone a little while ago. I have yet to hear from the literary agent, Perry Knowlton.
I prepared my supper of spaghetti-shaped like wagon wheels, with a white clam and tuna sauce, red wine -- remnant of a bottle of '62 French Beaujolais, coffee and wheat crackers with marmalade. I read a few pages of Marguerite Duras' The Square, shifted a few more letters and papers about and here I am.
But I could write a million words about this same day. I realize for instance that I have not mentioned at least ten persons with whom I had minor dealings during the day. I appreciate that I have said nothing about the sharp, clear cold day and all of the changes the cold wreaks upon things and voices and ideas. I believe I should write a novel that is quite long but that covers, let us say, five minutes of time. Six hundred pages would not be enough to say what had to be said and even then it would be more important than the story of War and Peace. Thus James Joyce's Ulysses is one of the most densely packed books ever written.
December 1965
"And Still It Lusts"
This short novel set against the background of a massive power black-out of New York City relates the odyssey through the darkness of a typical American Professor named Thomas. The hero is a doubting, curious man in search of a mission. He thinks to find a role in the extraordinary events of a night of surprise and strangeness, but fails in the end, defeated by himself, after a series of attempts that are by no means earth-shaking but are all that he can offer.
Says the Bible, "The world is passing away, and still it lusts." Thomas moves through the surrealist hours of the long night observing and dipping into the smorgasbord of experiences that the city offers -- the bohemians, the beats, the intellectuals, the commuters, the lovers, the old folks, et al. The familiar surroundings stand out sharply, offering new perspectives.
The style is bone-dry and simple, at times deliberately stilted. It is bookish and irreverent at the same time. Curt, hard and comic, often sheerly poetic, writing plunges the work at critical moments into desperate farce. The literary ancestry branches out to Voltaire, Kafka, Céline, Gide, Waugh, and Genêt, but a unique integrated form emerges with a strikingly intelligible message. Fantasy and nightmare, love pure and misapplied, contribute to the development of the hero's essentially intellectual experience, making the point that the rational is non-rational, that a rational act can disintegrate in its own lack of insight. Thomas is too intelligent to find his own soul save in moments of drunkenness, hallucination and dream. In the end he surrenders, and goes back to the beginning.
1965
V-9
Life is full of poor bargains, but the worse bargain is a forced one. There is a demerit in every government activity, in that at the point of its initiation, if not at the point of final transaction covered by it, one party, the civil party usually, is affected by compulsion.
1969
REPUBLIC AND REVOLUTION
1. A Rumbling in the Bowels of the Earth (Expectations of riots and war, of U. S., of Russia, of China, England, France, Italy, Germany, Japan, India, the churning Catholic Church watched by ragged, pleased Protestants.)
2. The Epidemic Need -- domestic - foreign
3. The Cry for Mission
4. The Best Society / Aims of Human Existence
5. What kind of Revolution is Possible?
6. The New Left: Revolution of Enthusiasm
7. Revolution of the Machine
8. Revolution of Socialism (peaceful rational bureaucracy): Fabians, welfare States
9. Communism: Lenin, Stalin, Mao
10. Revolution of "peoples": Guevara, Debray
11. Must present road be followed to its end (bureaucracy, centralism before another way can be tried?
12. Puritanism
13. The Producers
14. Chaos of Structure
15. Chaos of Mind
16. The Sham Activism (Sham of self and sham of others)
17. The four Myths: Profit, Property, Success, Privilege
18. The Lives of the Rich (Mr. Philanthropist, Wastrel, Culture Manager)
19. The Un-Right of Un-Property. Property in modern society is a bundle of rights and the shaping of the bundle is a game.
20. Autonomy (freedom) as Maximum Goal (vs. compulsion)
21. What do the American poor have that makes them rich antagonists of the world poor?
22. The Law of Moving Crowds
ca. 1965
Books of my Father's early years
I found these in Licodia as the only remnant of his ever having been there.
Before he went to America "All Aboard for Asia and Africa" (1893)
His early English reading: Frank Merriwell's Athletes
Analytical Speller by Edward Warren (1867)
La Rive & Fleury, Grammaire Française
Wilbur F. Gordy, A History of the US
"Buzzacott's Complete American and Canadian Sportsman's
Encyclopedia of Valuable Instruction (1906, on Camping)
1965
It is not emotional neutrality that we want in social science and the lack of which causes great grief; it is emotional stability, i. e. control of the emotional set of the scientist by himself and by the conditions of his science and society!
1965
Family Letter Files
Hours $
5 250 1000 letters, etc. for enlarged photo duplication 8 ½ x 11
5 350 1000 letters for typing
1 60 Putting 2000 letters in chronological order
2 20 Binding 2000 letters in 8 ½ x 11 holders of 300 each
300 200 Selecting Letters of a Soldier's Wife. Contents:
Parting
Missing you
Having Baby
Growing up Cathy
Your family
The weather is ...
War is ....
Housekeeping
The Dog
My job.
Editing Letters of a Soldier's Wife
Finishing (retyping)
_____ _____
313 $ 880
1965
Note to the interested: Find your own solutions
1. [Unavail. & writiew] of Books
2. Absence on leave of professors
3. Exams by people who haven't taught you
4. Badly written examination
5. No direction and absence of personal supervision
6. No community of students
7. One-half the courses are generally useless
8. Too many course offerings. List of suggested courses in other fields.
9. Not enough research and apprentice experience.
Statistics in Math. Dept.
Scope of Political Science Political Anthropology
Method Political Psychology
Popular Philosophy Political Soc.
Political Economy
Political Geography
Power Political Historiography
Logic ) Jr. College
Statistics ) " "
Economy
Culture
200 Books Ph.D. in Politics
1965
The 99 Great Books in Political Science --
(Why do I say '99'? to make apparent the nonsense in assigning a number to the transcendental, throbbing, even paradoxical process of apprehension of the input and outputs of mind. Why do I list anything? To creep closer to the process with the least despair and without bruised knees.)
1965
To study -- Smiles in all kinds of scientific and non-fiction to see what kinds of images are going through peoples minds while they write and also while people go about their affairs.
E. g. p. 83 (Femio?) in Peabody and Polsby New Per on House of Representation in re appropriation committee.
1965 ?
Congress Book
The Fatal Error of the Founding Fathers
Provision allowing the President to succeed himself - refers to Goldwater defeat.
Presidential Mortality
"All men are mortal; the President is a man; therefore the President is mortal." The famous classical syllogism, taught in all elementary classes in logic and philosophy, is easily comprehended by man; but it is barred from the heart. So far as concerns fathers and related idols, such as rulers, the shock of real-life mortality often causes a psychopathological response. Many persons nurse an illusion that comes from a deep identification and wish, and remains unconscious in order not to be subject to the rules of logic.
Psychiatrists know of this phenomenon. Its effects in politics are many. Principal among the effects is the eccentric behavior of people, following the death of a leading figure in their lives. They may revere him or hate him. But they cannot take his death for granted.
American Presidents have about an 80% chance of surviving their term of office. Disease and murder take a toll. They have perhaps a fifty percent chance of grave illness, such as that of Dwight D. Eisenhower, or an attempt to assassination, as happened with Theodore Roosevelt. Under the circumstances one would expect the public to be adjusted to the idea of a President's death (particularly since he is nearly personally unknown to them and has in half the cases perhaps been rejected by them at the polls when he was being elected).
Not at all. As time has gone on, the body of illusions surrounding the presidency has grown to grotesque proportions. So have the institutional means of supporting this illusion, such as television. Every person will have experienced or witnessed others undergoing the revolting sensations that followed the assassination of President Kennedy. The list of eccentric behaviors, all with a common central shaft, that followed the event is long. In elections a year later, the dead President was perhaps the largest single factor.
Rather than present the list, the effects upon one person, who happened soon thereafter to be a presidential candidate, might be noted. Nor need we go into a full explanation of the defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential elections. Let us rather consider his standing among Republicans. It is significant that on the eve of John Kennedy's assassination, Barry Goldwater stood at the peak of his popularity among Americans of the Republican Party. A few weeks later, he was at the bottom of his popularity. What brought the drastic slump of Goldwater? Certainly the man conducted himself in the face of the event with the greatest honorableness and considerateness. Rationally (if political feelings were a matter of votes and elections) his Party followers should have been filled with a new morale and dedication.
A massive guilt reaction set in among Republicans and other Americans. This disturbing and unsettling feeling of shame and guilt sought quickly a target for projection. A right-wing conspiracy was not immediately forthcoming; nor was a communist conspiracy. Oswald in himself was so pathetic a figure that hatred of him could not carry out all the tremendous weight of guilt around the nation. The target had to be big and only Barry Goldwater provided the criteria needed.
It is important to emphasize that the heavy feeling of guilt lay upon those who disliked President Kennedy as much as or more than those who were indifferent. The split that followed in the Republican party can be attributed in part to largely unconscious desires of many to dissociate themselves from a man who had been, harmonious with their own beliefs and sentiments, the chief symbol of opposition to the President. The leadership, "the Eastern internationalist financial"network, then found, surprisingly in many cases, a new acceptance for anti-Goldwater (or at least non-Goldwater) sentiment in corporate leadership and press leadership throughout the land.
1965
Religion Proofs
The world of the second law of thermodynamics -- the dying world -- is the product of a dying mind. When the mind ceases to die and begins to live, the 2nd law of thermodynamics will be replaced by an equally valid and scientifically accepted law of creative evolution or creative condensation or creative intensification of specialized activity.
(This ultimately ended in the theory of Theotrope thirteen years later.)
