Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan

This is my first reading of Mabel Dodge Luhan. I first heard of her long ago, but I don’t know from where. It might have been something as silly as Dennis Hopper buying her Taos house with the money from Easy Rider. (It’s a really nice house. One can see photo on the internet. Historical sight now.). She was a rich lady. This might have been the most important thing about her. Even in democratic bootstrap USA, this put her is a position of privilege. This is not so unusual. What is unusual is that she was the type of rich person interested in participating in bohemian culture. There is usually a supply of rich people interested in the arts, after all, if one doesn’t have to work one must do SOMETHING for amusement, to fill the time. The book has some reference to this with people including Lawrence suggesting that she do something, anything, like her own house chores rather than having servants do it. This for her own good. Because she is bored?

 This memoir is of her relationship with novelist D H Lawrence. It was not a particular intimate relationship. It seems, by her account, that this was because of the emotional walls he built. They were not lovers or anything. It is a little unclear if she wanted him for a lover or not, but apparently this did not occur.
(I read this book after reading nonfiction book that has a lot of details in it about syphilis in the late 19th and early 20th century. That book How the Brain Lost Its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness mentions some notable people who had syphillis and had to deal with the marginally effective to harmfull, treaments for it as well as the disturbing capasity for the disease to vanish in the body only to reapear more horribly later, maybe. The insane asylums of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were filled with people insane from syphilis. The book mentions her as a victim of the disease and it’s treatments without going into much detail. It says that she suppressed until later the memoir material that that struggle. Yet while reading in my mind, I knew that this was somewhere in the background on her text. Sexually transmitted disease in hard to eradicate since people have problem confronting sexuality directly.)

 
Her story is that she invited this famous English novelist to come live in New Mexico more or less as her guest. She is quite interested in the Indians. She wanted D H to be as well, to write a book about them so apparently the white Euro people would finally understand them. She wants him to be a sort of popularizer, in between interpreter, of the spiritual aspects of Indian culture. A rather tall order for an Englishman on his first trip to the USA. Did she think of this as a sort of commission? 

Frieda and DH Lawrence were a globetrotting couple when they showed up in Taos. Globetrotting then consisted of steamships, and railroads, these new 19th century travel technologies. This sped things up considerably beyond the capacities of sail powered ships and pre-railroad land travel. The Lawrences have traveled around the world before they arrive in Taos from the west. They had just gone to try to live in Australia where Lawrence produced the novel Kangaroo, which I have written about earlier. 
Mabel Dodge Luhan was married to an indian. She tells of how this occurred. She says he set up his tent outside her house and wouldn’t leave because he wanted her. And apparently he got her. So she has this kind of vague character of Tony, her husband, in the book, He the strong silent type so we never really know what he is thinking through all this. In a way, while acknowledging the cultural gap between the indigious, recently from basic hunter-gatherer, and the civilized white Euro types, she separates Tony enough from the others that he always seems remote and unknowable. We get her take on what Tony thinks of the Lawrences now and then and it’s usually that he doesn’t really like them around so much.

She goes into her motivation to draw them there. First with a kind of stock disturbing view that sounds like she is well trained by the patriarchy:  “Only a man can change a woman from a devourer into a creator.” Really? Isn’t this kind of the other way around?
“Perhaps I had dimily and intuitively expected Larenzo to be the Transformer for me and had summoned him for that purpose from across the continents. Well, he had come. He had vivified my life and possibly I had done as much for him. But apparently nothing significant had come of it beyond the momentary illuminations that flashed between us and that always ended in the fretful and frustrating hours of bewilderment.”
This strikes me as an odd sort of buyer’s remorse. The man was an obsessed writer and in a complicated marriage in a forgien land, and he was a poor kid from the coal country in England. Way out of any familiar elements. Her expectations of him feel extreme.

As a reader of some of the novels of Lawrence I don’t think I would look at him at all as much of a savior or answer man for anyone really, not even for himself. He questions a lot and wonders about a better path. Yes, it seems spiritual in some way, and wonders about a connection to ancient ways of human association. He doesn’t provide a path to it. I can understand that Luhan would associate that with the world of the native Americans. I think she was trying to give insight from the indians to Lawrence and get something from him in return, become her “Transformer”.
He writes to her about some confused emotions he apparently thought she had between her feelings for Tony and DH.
“You need have no split between Tony and me: never: if you stick to what is real in your feeling in each direction. Your real feeling in two directions won’t cause any disharmony.--But don’t try to transfer to Tony feelings that don’t belong to him: admit all the limitations, simply. And never again try to transfer to me: admit the limitations there too.”

Included with the memoir are a number of letters Lawrence sent her. Some are part of the memoir itself, and several are dumped into the end. None of these at the end have any explanatory notes attached to them so it’s easy to be at a loss regarding some of things and people he refers to. These letters at the end of the book are all from after Frieda and DH left Taos for more traveling. (And seeing her children. Luhan does tell us that these two have a troubled relationship. Frieda had left a husband and three children to be with Lawrence who, according to this book, did not permit her to see the children. Yet in the letters from DH he talks about Frieda being off with her children and Frieda writes of this too. I don’t know the whole story. Luhan also mentions the hard time the Lawrences had with his fellow Brits and the government authorities during WWI because she was German. He writes about this extensively in Kangaroo.)

The end of the book letters are not really letters between close intimates. This whole book has the slight distaste of a woman trying to buy access to one of the great novelists of her day and that her plan just didn’t work out. After they leave Lawrence is more of less ill for the remainder of his life. He died very young, age 44. (I would like to think that he had a flash at the end of the eternal bonding with the basic at the very end as being maybe what he was searching for all along.) 
After they are gone from Taos Luhan sends him part of her memoirs that she intends to publish. He is supportive and gives her input repeating this in letters. He tells her to publish it herself in consecutive letters and strongly suggests that she ought to change all the names of others in the text. It seems that she is writing about her Greenwich Village artist bohemian socialist salon days when she had a relationship with famous journalist John Reed.
He shares his notions about writing with power and conviction:
“Heaven knows what it is to be honest in writing. One has to write from some point of view, to leave all other aspects, from all the remaining points of view, to be conjectured. One can’t write without feeling--and feeling is bias. The only thing to put down on paper is one’s own honest-to goodness feeling.”

In this end letter section it is clear that the searching wealthy Luhan has continued to search. From reading his letters it is clear that she is really into Gurdjeff and keep trying to get Lawrence to go sit with him or whatever one did with Gurdjeff. DH is resistant all the way. He doesn’t want Gurdjeff, and is tired of a certain type of searching, but she keeps on telling him to go. He never does, of course.
By 1928 he has written Lady Chatterley’s Lover and tells her he plans to publish it himself of an uncensored version and needs the money. He prints 1000 copies to sell for $10 each. This of course worked out well, and he died two years later.

A mere two years after his death she publishes this book. She claims in the beginning that she sent it to Frieda who was OK with it and said that DH was better at the end. I assume she meant different from the not that pleasant depiction of Luhan’s, but this is all rather vague.

Reading this with little other information is like hanging out with someone who complains about someone else unknown to the listener. It is impossible to discern the truth of the matter in other people’s complicated relationships.

This book quite interesting at the beginning, but it slowed since it wasn’t all that deep and felt a little too gossipy-celebrity in an old school literature culture sort of way.

Twice Real by Silvia Sanza

This short novel is set in NYC, (people, apartments, streets, work) and in the Catskill region as experienced by NYCers, (cute shops, trees, lakes, natural beauty). The time, 1990-91, is set by the first gulf war and the first President Bush. This sets a vague yet palpable atmosphere of outer danger, especially after a character is eliminated in a sudden newspaper headline kind of  way. 

This novel is not so much about plot. The heart of the novel is perhaps a look at desire and connection between individuals and the connections and desires those impulses lead to. The plot elements come in to illustrate the power and consequences of these emotions, the plot serving the characters rather than story for its own sake. Is this what makes a book literary fiction rather than, genre, crowd pleasing pop product?
But wait!

The novel centers on a handful of interrelated characters, plus a wildcard. There is a feeling of passage from youth, a time of personal movement into middle-age. Death is looming, but in outer danger, suicide,  and world events, the news, rather than the dull slow terror of old age and natural passage. The fear is centered in not so much personal physical decay, but the mid-life feeling that you are basically here for awhile if not taken out by accident or some other random outside of the self occurrence. Or some madness. 

There is a male-female couple of a not explicitly specified age gap. Large enough that his sister felt entitled to label it, “jail bait” or some other slur. He is a writer of perhaps little worldly success, yet not without some means, some purchasing power for things like trips to Europe and connections offering summers in the available empty country place. She has a job, so it is not all framed in the rich old guy - gold digger young thing, cliche.
So perhaps they have a gap of as much as 20 years.
The age gap is not so much of an issue as the variation of their longings, desires. She has a healthy eye for other men, looking anyway. No harm in that. Still she is not exactly contented. Not entirely sold on this relationship. And, that guy over there looks hot. 

He seems to be settling, older.
His desire, longing, is to bond with his 20ish nephew in an innocent dad like way. 

The wildcard is a character who attaches herself to the young woman in the age gap couple. She seems of another class, or at least sinking, brought down by her compulsive overeating and obesity, into a living as a freelance apartment cleaner. The lack of physical beauty and hardly-getting-by type of job would perhaps put her at a different economic status than her object for connection, the woman in the apparently privileged couple. Economic issues of separation are not explicitly the business of this novel, so her character can represent a self one could become with a little age, hard luck, and doubtful choices, all of which are easy to come by. This character could be seen as a harbinger of an undesirable future for the young woman she is attracted. Or the person who is sinking into quicksand and might just pull you in with her if you offer a hand. Contaminated by insanity, hard luck, poverty, or a combination of those. Insanity and poverty might be catching. It could be some strange telepathic viral thing, it’s transmission still unknown. 

The kind of literary poetic quality of the writing, with focus on the characters, allows one to forget plot for a pleasant spell getting aquatinted with the tapestry of these desires. We get to know Wildcard in this way and it ends up that she is chaotic enough to drag the others into plot weather they like it or not. 

There is a nicely staged climax by the summer lake when the individual desires clash and the literary novel reader awakens from that dream and finds themselves on noir alley. 

Satisfying read. 

I came by this novel in a rather odd social media connection way. I got curious and I’m glad I did. 

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

This is the first big selling novel produced by Evan Hunter. It came out in 1955 and reflects his own work as a teacher in such a school for a very brief time. 

It is a well done, plot and character heavy novel, that has some grounding in social concerns. Namely, Are these schools working at all? 

The novel has a lot of common association with the youth culture. The screenplay also by Hunter was directed by Richard Brooks in a movie that came out in 1955. Unfortunately the content of it all was overshadowed by pop music. Legend has it that Rock Around the Clock recorded by Bill Haley and his band was the first rock song used it a movie. The song became a big hit and it is said to have begun the rock and roll change over to this newer type of music being heavily marketed to young white kids. Mass communication and corporate power took care of the rest of it, niche marketing and a few other things less important produced the generation gap. It is interesting that a book that is so thoughtful ended up marketing the generation gap and made the juvenile delinquent appear cool and edgy. 

Of course this doesn’t happen front reading the book. The JD’s in the book are confused kids trying to live through a time in an institution that doesn’t work and practically forces them to act like jerks to get along with the other kids. But they sure look cool and act cool in the movie. Movies have trouble getting deeper than surface cool. The movies become a battle of the Cools, whoever's image comes off the better, is the most memorable, wins the movie. The Joker will outlast Batman. He is just Don’t-Give-a-shit-COOLER.

The notion of Rock Around The Clock, a really basic dumb lyric diddy, overshadowing impact of the novel’s story is discouraging. 

(I don’t recall if I ever saw the movie all the way through.I know it’s a good movie, a riveting melodrama.)

The plot of the book is basically a new young male teacher gets his first job out of college in a tough all boys vocational high school in The Bronx, NYC. It’s the old hero’s journey with him coming in all idealistic but having that questioned with the disillusioning reality of it. It is far far from easy and physically dangerous. 

He also has a, pregnant with their first, wife at home in their housing project apartment.
 

There is a very interesting scene in the book about youth culture that has its base in the marketing of music. Another new male teacher, Josh, befriends our Rick. Josh is a big pop music fan with a big record collection. He and Rick go out for a drink and Josh tells him excitedly about his plan to connect with the students by bringing in his cherished record collection. 

The class where he brings the records is vividly set out in the novel. He very reverently presents the big band stars from 10 years before. This is met with disrespect and ridicule. The novel is written before the conversion to vinyl LPs.The shellac records back then were stiff brittle and breakable fragile.  

It is in no way explicitly stated as to the meaning and point of this episode, but I have a high level of interest in the effects of art, culture, and mostly popular culture on our lives. I’m on the lookout for stuff like that and the record gap scene appealed to me from that perspective. 

The point of conflict with the teacher and the students is the students’ long standing alienation from a system that they can feel is not at all in their best interests. So any individual teacher vanishes behind the role of being another agent for the enemy system. The same thing works in reverse with the jaded tuned-out teachers seeing the students as all being “garbage” in a dumping ground school. This is all clearly pointed out in the novel.

In the record scene a new teacher still has hope of connecting with the students with something that he takes as indisputably wonderful, something he holds dear and loves. Something connected to when he was like them, only 10 years ago, young, and open. Here another problem beyond to one of the school system surfaces. Culture went from locally based to centralize and attached to the capitalist need for growth, the cultural is artificially split up in service to market profits. Telling a specific demographic, “You are special!, They are old, here is your special music, that crap is old and wasn’t as good as they thought it was to begin with because they were less sophisticated back then”. None of these people have control or even cognizance of this hijacking of whatever human culture once was, not that is was much better in whatever, “Back then”, but surely somewhat different before mass electronic media controlled by remote corporations dominated our common entertainment choices. They/we just go along as conditioned.
This is all illustrated in the record scene. Reading it today the absurdity is amplified by our view of the pop music of 60 and 70 years ago. It’s all old, old fashioned stuff on some level even if it’s “great”. The kids in the scene ridicule the big bands, Glenn Miller, etc while asking for Julius LaRosa. LaRosa was no radical performer, just the latest product in a long line. 

Also perhaps concerning shifting points of view the young female teacher is badly handled. It could have worked a little better if this could have been two characters. She is sexually assaulted, attacked by student in the hall top ripped open, breast exposed, rescued by our hero Rick. But couldn’t some teacher other than her come on to him in an unsubtle way later in the novel? We get how he has to deal with workplace sexual harassment, that is fine and interesting, but it should have been a different character than the one he rescues from being raped.. 

Aside from that this is the type of novel that anyone going into or involved with teaching at an institution, might want to read. It is very sad that sixty years later the same problems continue in the same type of institutions, more or less. It this kind of 19th century home/work/school idea ever going to work out again, if it ever did?

It very enjoyable and rich read in multiple ways.  There is a lot of plot and story that moves things along and issues to think about. Nicely done.

Happy New Year, Herbie & other stories by Evan Hunter

Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles, takes place in a summer camp for kids. The focus is on a 19 year NYC man who has a job as a camp counselor. There is a lockdown at the camp. They can’t leave and become deeply involved with playing marbles. The story is a commentary on humanity’s obsession on unimportant things like the accumulation of symbolic  wealth. It’s a comic story. Good. 

——-

The Tourists, is set in Jamaica with a NYC middle class couple on vacation. They encounter a shopkeeper. They are tourists and acquire knowledge as to who they are. Interesting story. 

——-

On the Sidewalk, Bleeding, is set in an alley in NYC. 

A stabbed young gang member contemplates his life as his life runs down the gutter. The story about getting caught as a symbol of something stupid and frivolous when other things are more important. 

——-

The Fallen Angel is a story set in a low budget circus. It is in the voice of the circus owner. The content is supernatural which is not the type of thing Hunter usually came up with. It’s kind of getting into Bradbury turf. Not the best of the lot. 

——-

Alive Again

This one is set in midtown NYC. 

Former lovers meet on the street and go for a drink. 

He wants to start back up again with their affair. She was married and still is. 

Good little story. Deeper than the circus thing above. 

——-

The Prisoner 

Here we have a cop story. Probably not one that would satisfy the McBain fans, but I don’t know. I never read Ed. 

In this a hard boiled, and corrupted, NYC detective gets a bit of a lesson from a young woman he brings in on a prostitution charge. 

Patriarchal and cop entitlement content. 

Pretty good story. 

——-

S.P.Q.R

This one feels to be from actual experience or an appearance of that because it involves two writers hired by a Hollywood producer to write a script based of Julius Caesar. This in in first person again, the voice of one of the writers whose only book was a novel Slum Boy (= Blackboard Jungle?) 

It’s an amusing story that pokes fun at Hollywood and it’s ideas of what would be popular while commenting on the hired hack side of the writing business. 

——-

The Final Yes

This story of to-be-or-not with PTSD content is so far the most powerful of the collection. 

It is sort of the inverse of Melville’s “I prefer not to” in. Bartelby. The man in this story says yes and loses, or so he thinks, and this has become a sort of obsession that is destroying him. 

This one gave me goosebumps. 

Great. 

——-

The Innocent One 

With a setting amongst Hispanic bean field workers, this one is a bit more of a stretch into the unknown by the author. Not that he doesn’t have any working class experience

At any rate, the setting is for a quick story about suspicion and misunderstandings as one worker mentions the other’s wife in casual conversation setting off an afternoon of jealousy with no basis whatsoever in any evidence or accusations. 

——-

Pretty Eyes

Many of the Hunter stories and books I have read are about NYC people on vacation. 

This is one of those. A woman who is single is on vacation in Florida. 

She doesn’t think she is attractive and doesn’t believe the men who come on to her by telling her how attractive she is. This is a rather sad story about miscommunication after a series of lies. 

How can we know if someone is being truthful if we think they want something from us?

I liked this one

——-

Million Dollar Maybe 

This is an early comic story that has to do with a trip to the moon. Early, meaning copywriter 1953, like 16 years before people got to the moon. 

A magazine publisher finds he is trapped by a promotion a previous owner had published in 1926. 

Interesting story as preposterous as it is. 

——-

Happy New Year, Herbie. 

This is a story about class, regional differences and bullying. It is set on an island in the East River in NYC. Hunter spends an unusual amount of time with the details of this setting. After WWII students are housed on an island called South Brother. The young narrator and his wife are living there with other students. They have a young child although only 19 and 21. The woman is distressed that she is a mother younger than she really wanted to be derailing plans for a bohemian artist/study life in Paris after school. 

But the story, the longest in the book, shifts to a new couple who arrive. They are not like the others, older, he is 38 she 36 and from the Midwest with accents that are said to be grating to these NYCers. 

The tone shifts to the narrator seeing that a local young mover and shaker is bullying Herbie the new man who is learning to be a TV repairman. He is also open and kindly, but different which leaves him vulnerable to the bullying. The narrator sees the injustice and attempts to set it right 

Anti-bullying in a theme in the writings of Evan Hunter. It is what both Last Summer and Come Winter. The major theme of those novels.

Interesting and elaborate story that ultimately left me with a warm feeling. 

Side note on the material about the 19 year old mother in the story who would rather have waited. My mother was 19 was I was born. I don’t think that was a good thing for her, my father or me.

Those Lips, Those Eyes, Billie Joe, and Glynnis O'Connor

Those Lips, Those Eyes (1980)

This film is set in a regional theater somewhere in 1951.

It was written by David Shaber and directed by Michael Pressman. 

It is a kind of a routine boy becomes a man out in the world story. Tom Hulce plays a working class kid who has medical school hopes but becomes enamored with the local theater where he gets a job as a prop man. Excellent working class pop character created by Jerry Stiller.

Frank Langella plays the star of the show. He is a New York actor frustrated in being stuck on the road in the type of plays that sell on the road. But he tries to keep positive and is most of the time but certainly not always. Langella is very good in this and beings something to this familiar character type. 

Langella’s character takes the kid under his wing and conspires in helping him hookup with an dancer/actress in the company and this is where the movie took off for me. 

The love object is played by Glynnis O'Connor and the character written for her is quite interesting in that she keeps making moves on the boy, is eager in fact, but he keeps messing things up by romanticizing the whole thing way out of proportion to what the more sophisticated, from NYC, young woman has in mind. At the most she is looking for a run-of-the-show lover while he fantasizes about moving to NYC to be with her. 

Glynnis O'Connor is great in this. I was not aware of her before. She does a fine job bringing to life a few nice scenes she is given. In particular when she confesses doubt, frustration, and puzzlement about the meaning of it all, the work to get to a thankless role. The type of “success” one settles for not shoots for. 

Glynnis O'Connor age 25 when this was shot is also very physically attractive and uses her body and face to create this character that I didn’t want to take my eyes off. 

Therefore:

Ode to Billie Joe (1976)

This movie happened to be on TCM the very next day. I like to check out what is coming up before hand and was excited to see that Glynnis O'Connor is in this too. Of course I had to watch it.

That turned out to be an excellent idea because it is a very interesting movie. I wasn’t expecting much. I mean, it was directed by Jethro Bodine. No, really! Max Baer Jr from The Beverly Hillbillies directed it. There is some logic to that I guess.
I can see a cigar chomping Hollywood executive,
“Hillbilly movie? Get Jethro!”
Well, fine but he also hired a real screenwriter, Herman Raucher, and apparently Bobble Gentry was actually involved in the process.
Spoiler Alert!

Anyway we find out what they threw of the damn bridge, FINALLY! I’ve been wondering for like 45 years. But this thing is far from done because the there is a big surprise of a bisexual element in the story. 

I thought this was really interesting and made is a rather good movie over all. 

Glynnis O'Connor is really the star of the movie. And here again she is very good. She was just 20 when this was shot. I much more innocent character. Around the same time 1950, but a country girl without electricity and indoor plumbing. This is a girl becoming a woman character, not like the woman in Those Lips.

So the question in my mind is why have I never heard of her before this? She has kept working, a lot of TV of the sort I never watch. Yet she is not one of the stars we all know. By the evidence of these two movies she should have been a Jennifer Jason Leigh, or Julia Roberts level star. 

But like the speech so so believably delivers in Those Lips, Those Eyes, you do a lot of great work and bust yourself to stay in the game and the payoff isn’t much

A lot of the time anyway. 

I’m not finished digging through the Glynnis O'Connor catalogue. She delivers what I want acting to be.

Bugs: a novel by Theodore Roszak

The story’s beginning is beautifully imagined. It is the misunderstanding of a young girl who is afraid of bugs that sets the whole thing in motion toward global disaster.

Bugs is a novel about the computer age by Theodore Roszak and published in 1981 which is nearly 40 years ago. As we all know, computer technology has exploded since then. Naturally the reader must make allowances, but I had no trouble at all fitting the story and events into something that relates to the current computerized world we live in and the scene in general.
 

The novels of Roszak could be seen as a kind of a spin-off of his main work as an academic in the field of ecopsychology. This could also be the opposite, the academic stuff might have been the day job of a novelist. At any rate this novel’s main overriding theme, and genesis, is an inquiry into the use of high-tech tools by humans and what can go on, which is mostly go wrong, because these tools have an inherent mathematical view of reality that is opposed to the overriding traditional reality of earth and all contained in it which is mysterious and ultimately unknowable or containable.

 This is the basic theme of two of his other novels. They deal with different technologies and the basic questions of the human, mostly male, desire for knowledge to be used for power and domination over the rest of the natural world which humans are only a part of. So the novel and his work is relevant to now because the story, the battle, is still going on. The issues he is on about can be directly linked to the primary issues of our time such as industrially manufactured climate change, and the culture of patriarchy.

With Bugs, noted on the cover as his first novel, the approach is something that feels like a sci-fi thriller, something that would be a cool adaptation to film. If this was the impulse, it was successful, it’s an exciting suspenseful breezy read, that is serious at its core with cautions of real and previously unknown dangers.
 

His later novel, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein, is a more serious and to me the better, deeper, novel. These two works also shame a polar conflict dynamic between Male-Science-Technology-Dominionism-Power and Female-Naturist-Wiccan-Magical-Unity, in direct opposition in both novels. The origin of the conflict being an aggressiveness from the “Male” side, a reach too far to a wrong type knowledge while walking away from a long standing human more feminine culture and ignoring its more subtle but deeper in nature, more fundamentally nourishing, old technology rituals and riches. 

In the Frankenstein book it was Victor’s need to create and dominate life while denying unity with Elizabeth and Nature, and the chance to be trained as another type of magician. 

Bugs is set in a national computer center, The Brain, with the male functionary director losing control of the now deadly technology, seeking assistance from a cult of artists and academics that is reviving ancient Wiccan spells and dancing naked in the moonlight.
 

I am happy to have discovered this fine mind wandering the stacks in a Long Island last year. His work has had a lasting effect on me and my view of myself, as the world and in the world. The male/female, nature vs machine, material, being of most use to me currently.

I borrowed Bugs from the Brooklyn Public Library. I was in the main branch. It wasn’t on the accessible fiction shelves but they had it for me out of storage ten minutes after I asked for it. Not many others reading these odd old books that I enjoy so much.