The trouble between Sue Weaver and me began just a few months after I met the Weavers. She said to me, "You know you don't have to go on reading and learning. You know enough already for the rest of your life." I was twenty-two years old when she said that to me, and I couldn't believe at first that that was what she had said and that she meant it. I made her repeat it, then I said, "Really, I don't agree at all." And Bill who was sitting nearby said to her,"He does not believe you." And so for the rest of her life I mistrusted and maybe in a way despised her.
But finally, in my fifties, I began in some measure to believe that I had learned a few things and could relax somewhat the iron rule of the relentless inner task-master. Sometime in the middle nineties of the last century, my friend Robert Farrar invited me to join him in watching a new version of Marlowe's Edward II, which I had never seen before. To my surprise and delight I found that I understood it perfectly at first hearing. And there were a couple of similarly surprising incidents in 1999 and the few years after that that I was at university. The first gratifying surprise was walking into a 300-level French poetry class, cold, not having spoken French for almost forty years, and finding that my constant reading in French over all those years had paid off: I understood everything, and had no trouble speaking it. Then there were several essays in French that my instructors wrote at the top of, "Vous ecrivez un francais presque parfait," and one, an analysis of La Symphonie Pastorale, that my instructor, a Cameroonian, wrote at the top of,"une belle analyse dans un style charmant, A+" And there was the time in a French fairy tale class, when the instructor, a Parisian, read a page from a letter of Diderot to his mistress Sophie Volland, and I understood every word. And there was the time when, having experienced the wonder of Giambattista Tiepolo's ceiling paintings in Venice, I travelled to Würzburg to see the finest ceiling painting in the world over the staircase/entry hall in the Prince-Bishop's Residenz, about which I knew nothing beforehand, but immediately I laid eyes on it I recognized to be an allegory of the Four Corners of the World; I could see "America" and "Europe (France, Spain, and Germany)" and "the Orient" as plainly as if they all had stickers on them.

Running into young (34 year old) Timothy at the Shelter today, he walked me over to the River of Life for breakfast, regaling me the while with lurid tales about something called the Bohemian Grove, which, when we had finished breakfast at the River, and gone on to the library and I had googled it, absolutely overwhelmed me with horror and vast pandemoniac vision--I had thought I understood something in penetrating the secret of Skull and Bones, but I now see that my understanding was but a glimmer of distant starlight flickering upon a Stygian ocean of inconceivably deliberate, preening, all-powerful Evil--villainy, terror, horror, violence, monstrous delight in the abuse of power, like nothing I had ever imagined possible, posing and posturing and shrilly cavorting in their very own grove of sacred millennia-old redwoods. I thank god that I knew nothing of it before. I fear that the knowledge of it may yet drive me mad.

Listening lately, in the cool, clean, airy quiet of my studio apartment to: the Albinoni Opus 3, 12 concerti a cinque; Haydn's "Erdodny" quartets, opus 76 (while reading the scores which I checked out at the same time); a relatively young Frenchman, Christophe Rousset's ravishing rendition of the harpsichord music of d'Anglebert--some of which, I blush to say, I have myself dared essay on the piano, and once or twice on the reconstructed Taskin at the University of Oregon. I blush because listening to Rousset makes me realize how imperfectly I understood them, how sloppily and stupidly I executed (le mot juste) them. Running into my musician friend John at dinner last night, I invited him over for tea and a listen to the salient treasures; sat him down with the score of L'Aurore, and had him read along with it; then "made" him listen to the d'Anglebert Tombeau de M. Chambonnie`res. His touching comment on the latter was, "I'm sure you play it much more beautifully." Love (friendhsip) is blind (deaf).

It's an obsessive/risky little game I play with myself

It just happened a few days ago: I had been reading, in the local freebie "Entertainment Guide," descriptions of movies currently playing on Oahu--all of them dreadful; from knuckle-dragging clit-flicks and dim-witted slasher-fantasies with one or no stars, to the universally drooled-upon "re-invention of the musical," Once, with a unanimous four stars. I'd been reading about the latter everywhere I turned for a week or two, with ever-deepening conviction that I would rather have root-canal surgery than sit through five minutes of something so dip-shitful ('set in Dublin, the heart-warming story of a bitter-sweet heterosexual relationship between a "busker" [I had to look that one up] and an immigrant....'). As it happened I was cleaning house, going through miscellaneous papers in my backpack and putting them in drawers--or throwing them in the garbage. In a side compartment of the backpack, along with various phone-numbers and pencilled adresses, was a sheaf of four free movie tickets that had been given me at the Central Union Church 'Christmas for the Homeless' dinner last December, good through December 2007. Without a second thought, I threw them all into the garbage. Such was my revulsion, contempt, and absolute determination to forget (a movie which, after all, I'd never seen; whose "music" [however loathsome I imagine it to be] I will probably never hear), that it didn't dawn on me till the next day, long after the garbage had been collected, that I'd thrown four good movie tickets irrevocably away--and I've been wondering ever since if I really meant to do that. I've read a lot more reviews of Once (all favorable, except just one that said about it what I suspect is the god-awful maudlin truth of it)--and I know that I'd rather throw away any number of free movie tickets than see it....And yet. And yet.

I'm sneaking Douglas into my apartment for the night (guests, a maximum of two per month, are supposed to register with the apartment manager); he'll stay over, then we'll go to the North Shore tomorrow to swim with the dolphins and ogle the Marines, and back in the evening for another surreptitious stay-over. He's waiting for me to finish blogging--so I'll finish this Monday....

Up betimes, walked (marched, danced--Vivaldi on my portable CD player) here, the Hamilton Library, ten minutes before it opened; licit drugs (amphetamines) percolating through me, euphorizing, soothing, inspiring me, along with the lovely, cheerful music and the lovely, quiet, landscape of the upper Manoa Valley. When I've blogged here, done my 'mail, and looked into various intriguing matters on the internet, I'll head over to the Central Union Church, where, at 10:00, will begin the second of my now twice-weekly bridge sessions with my game and lively old millionairesses. Reading lately: More gay fiction (I do not say "gay and lesbian" fiction because lesbian fiction utterly and absolutely bores me to distraction, and as soon as I notice that the authoress is a woman, I skip it [with prejudice]); Diderot's short stories, with a delightul preface by one (female--it rarely matters in French literature) Ms. Didier; more compendious science fiction, in English of course (odd how the only French science fiction I've ever enjoyed was a French version of Ray Bradbury's sucky Martian Chronicles--It comes out plausibly elegant and not so sticky in French; acquiring virtues not its own from the mere fact of being written in French, in a manner not unlike the god-awful prose-poems of Baudelaire or the ghastly "American" effusions of Chateaubriand [not to mention the utter bilge and tripe of Francoise de Graffigny, merely bad in French, putrescent in English]).

Two weeks today in my new own apartamentino; I'm almost used to it; the horrors (the minute by minute assault on the senses and sensibilities) of the (IHS, Institute for Human Services) Criminal (Homeless) Shelter (where I stayed from a few days before last Christmas until the first of this month), on Sumner Street at Iwilei, are fading fast from my memory. These days when I get up at dawn (as is my wont anywhere I am) it's the birds in the trees outside my window that wake me. Then I have fragrant milk-tea (St. Dalfour's Ceylon, or Twining's Darjeeling) with lots of sugar, just like I like it, and, while I'm guzzling it, I listen to music (Haydn, Telemann, Albinoni, or Mozart usually) and read (lately, Men on Men [gay shortstories], and science fiction [so long as it's not written by women]). Then, if this (Hamilton) library is open, I walk up here (ci vuole venti minuti), get on the computer, and do my email, or, as in the present instance, blog; if it's not (open), I take the bus down to the main library, or (on Sundays) to the one in Kaimuki. After I've confided my thoughts to my correspondents or to my public online diary, I go visiting, or to the beach, or (as I shall do today) I meet with my millionairesses to play bridge.

Time flies. Went to talk to Diane in Graduate Admissions yesterday; she looked at my Magna cum Laude and my Phi Beta Kappa and said no problem (probably) getting into the Masters in French program for Spring 2008; she gave me the application form and told me to fill it out and hand it in by or before the first of next month, along with the fifty dollars registration fee....And so, in six months' time I'll be back in harness, and in eighteen months, hopefully, in Paris, France. Meantime, I'm happy as a clam, going where I want, doing what I want--Today, for a lark, I'm visiting Greg Donoho at his place over on the other side of the island. tomorrow I'm having Melchior for lunch at my place--he specified the menu: corned beef sandwiches and soda pop. He also says he's going to cure my arthritis and high blood pressure (I think with a skillful application of prayer and holy water); so he doesn't want anybody else around. Funny thing, odd as he is, I met him in company of another Truk native a couple of days ago, who (although obviously well educated) seems to have the same quasi-veneration for him (Melchior) that I have. Our conversation was like nothing so much as a page out of Kim....

I've slept the last two nights in my new, clean, comfortable, quiet, commodious studio apartment (with huge walk-in closet, spacious full bathroom)--still scarcely believing my good fortune. I pay $177.00 (30% of my monthly stipend) for what (were I not homeless and had I not a tragic mental disability) would cost me (otherwise) $600.00 more than that. Not that I'm not grateful for the noisy, stinking, filthy, cheek-by-jowl Criminal Shelter which has been my home since the 22nd of December--but oh the lovely silence! The solitude! The sweet clean air! I've mostly just been lying on my complete (box-springs, mattress, sheets, bedspread, pillows), clean bed, reading, drinking tea (which I prepare in my lovely new microwave), and listening to music, which, surrounded as I now am by silence, I can hear--no crackling, moronic "announcements" (threats and adjurations) over the loudspeakers every three minutes, no pounding rock "music," no hideously blaring television and DVD's, no raucous shrieks of rage and mindless hilarity. Oh God the lovely silence--how I've missed it.