A Pandemic Journal by John J. Parman

A Pandemic Journal

John J. Parman

Preface

An essay by Lydia Davis mentions Kafka's diaries and her use of her own to prompt her writing. Reading this, I realized that across the pandemic I've kept a journal that captures everyday experience and whatever else its incidents, such as they were, led me to record. I went back through them. What I've assembled is a reasonable and roughly chronological sampling. Where it varies, the entries are close in sequence. I edited some for flow and clarity, but I was mindful of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's point that it is the nature of diaries to reflect the moments of their entries' writing. (He praises William Shirer's BerlinDiaryfor avoiding the skew of retrospect.) Strictly speaking, the pandemic continues, so mine ends arbitrarily.

Travel is a dream that we put off as long as possible. Like flagging down a hearse to ride in cars we used to hail by app. We walk, masks ragged from overuse, hair like a garden's neglected topiaries. Cars are scarce. There are vans, young men with masks, packages brought, take-out fetched, women with dogs, women with kids. We step out onto the street, gallant as they eye us over masks of colored, patterned cloth, kids uncovered, and we who should have been in Naples are out with them, taking the air that is admittedly clearer than it's been for ages, houses on distant hills visible again. We wave on getting up, blush to remove our bedclothes without the smog, wonder how it will be when Mammon flips the switch, the birds' songs plundered by the rushing trains, trucks, motorbikes, sirens, society's calendar, corner tables, beauty's sottovoce

February 2020 It’s a (lunar) New Year, start of a new decade the 2020s. In that spirit, we need to set aside the minor disputes. Life is short, we’re reminded minute by minute. You can carry those grudges to the grave or you can set that burden down.

The Romans had Saturnalia, when everything was reversed. We need a day in which misunderstandings are absolved. A leap year’s 29 February would be a good candidate. More than mere absolution, this would be a feast day in which the estranged would remember the affection that once bound them, assuming. Not every misunderstanding can be absolved, but many that seem titanic don’t hold up when reconsidered. This happens anyway, of course, but a feast day set aside for it might aid the process. It warmed up again. I walked across campus to meet the editors of RoomOneThousand, the annual for which I’m an advisor. Afterward, I spoke briefly to a publisher I know who was the guest of the same class I joined last week. He was dressed nattily. I look like a retired French artisan. I wrote something just now about agoraphobia, which sometimes strikes me as a reasonable response. And now of course it has a virtual component. And how. Going to a concert at 5 p.m. One piece of luck is that our parish church is ideal for early music.

A friend texted that she’s hiding out in Taipei, but headed back soon to the mainland. She says the pandemic is overblown. My wife thinks to delay a planned trip to Europe. She noted in passing how many people here have died of the flu. The news lately is a steady diet of presidential politics, local crime, egregious whatever anywhere, local cases of anything vaguely fatal, celebrity deaths, films. stock spikes, and bombs. Is this new or am I just sick of it?

“Island fever” is what the NYTidentified as the hazard of working at home. Is it true? A friend, quarantined in Shanghai, posts daily. It’s getting to her, the isolation. She can walk out, but the shops are

Over lunch, a friend tells me he voted for Warren in the primary, but finds her off putting. His aged mother was for her, but now prefers Bloomberg. He can’t stand Sanders, “always shouting.” He compares Sanders’ core supporters to Trump’s, noting their hostility to anyone who doesn’t agree.

I went into town to meet with a former colleague, not previously met but recommended by others. Good person and an interesting conversation. The weather is cooperating with her visit sunny and warm as we sat on the pier. Market Street without cars is a big improvement, I noticed, walking back from the Ferry Building. My wife brought home a box of things stored at one of her properties. I found a folder of letters and miscellany from the distant past, including a comment on a geology paper from the professor, complaining that I glossed an article he read somewhere (on the Anchorage earthquake) and should have cited a USGS report and

closed and the streets deserted. She can order in, but everyday life is disrupted. That’s not true here; I’m marooned in my everyday. This thing I’m writing has me wondering if a consequence of experience is a sense of wonder at what people think is true.

Misunderstandings are the norm. Everything is voluntary, down to the smallest gestures. If a thread is picked up, that’s all that matters.

Reading that a friend is having an online dialogue with herself made me laugh. I do that, too.

A slow day, although day one of my “month of health.” I woke up at one point in the midst of a dream and went back to sleep to see what would happen next. The plot revolved around a board game that I slowly figured out and began to master. Hmmm, sounds like my current life. Meanwhile, it silted up and turned cooler. Will it rain or will it clear up and turn warm again? The Sierras have not much

Coffee with an old friend. An architect, he also proves to be a painter. I tell him about another friend, also an architect, also a painter. We discuss collecting and exhibiting. Hadn’t talked with him in 20 years, but we just picked up where we left off.

Rilke: "Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final." This in Henri Cole’s book OrphicParis. “Plunge!” Cole adds. It has its perils, but then so much that’s desirable is perilous, along with so much that’s ordinary. It’s often a leap from an everyday that isn’t working to a parallel universe of sorts that doesn’t work, either, but in a completely different way. If you make it back, it can be a relief to find the everyday still there, its ways of not working almost a source of happiness.

March 2020 After visiting the GP in early February, I let things slide. I have to do the blood tests she ordered, the exercise, healthier eating, etc. But in other respects, this month has been good finally into the work I feel I should be doing doing it consistently, making headway with it. The virus sits at the edge of this, a known unknown, as they say.

3 included a map from it. I’m sure I cited any sources I used, but the paper is glued together, so I can’t verify this. There were also letters from a woman who later died fairly young of brain cancer, from another, and from my parents. And a letter to my father from his WW2 colonel, thanking him effusively for his service to their unit.

snow pack, I read last night, which augurs badly for the summer. And no rain in the spring will make for an early fire season.

This month's women’s issue of ArchitecturalReviewopens with a call to ban the word "seminal" on the grounds that it wrongly implies that only men possess creative powers. The author, Lili Zarzycki, acknowledges that the word ranges beyond humans, but then barrels on in a polemical spirit. I like polemics, and if you’re going to write one, it’s best to go whole hog. The other problem with "seminal" is its overuse as a synonym for terms like "game changing." In my previous role with a huge design combine, the latter was ever on the gods’ lips. In both cases, actual instances warranting their use are few. My third son called and we compared virus notes. My oldest son won’t ride the trains. I’ve occasionally come back at rush hour from the city on the train wondering if I’ll get whatever the guy coughing all over me had, and now I try to avoid rush hour, but it’s not always possible. One viral day at a time. Sometimes the sonnet form is the only way. A dream that I think was influenced by reading about people in quarantine. Not sure. Pretty convoluted. Walked over to campus in the afternoon to hear a designer friend talk and then join him in reviewing spreads of the journal I’m advising. Turned cold. On the street yesterday, I heard three older women talking about their admired presidential candidate. They resemble her and she resembles them, I thought. Knots of resemblance crop up here. My grizzled neighbor has his counterpart. I had a Bloomberg sign a lottery ticket placed in the front garden and binned the day after the drawing. My neighbor asked if anyone criticized us for it. They’re too scared of my wife, I told her. It’s true she has a genius for reply. Yesterday, I heard a graphic designer describe a journal spread, two pages of text without illustrations, as a “lead desert.” Lead deserts with occasional photos are what I mostly produce.

I operate in internal exile, at a remove or a distance, wary of the way things get warped when they get in the hands of third parties. Open is oddly less fraught, going out to no one in particular. I make an exception for letters, although some go unremarked. Letters make their own exceptions. I’m grateful when this happens, always surprised. Time and space are of no real consequence except when getting from A to B. Our materiality is best experienced in bed, pausing time long enough to linger interstitially. A while since.

Late this afternoon, I heard from the WestMarinReviewthat a poem I submitted will run in its 10th issue. I had to find the poem to remember it. In conversation with a poetry editor, she noted that the poems in its 9th issue were all on specific themes, “not discursive like most of yours.” My poem reminds me of Bashõ it’s about

Friends came over for dinner a stew of mussels, fish, and shrimp. Both the sun and the moon shone through clouds at different points. I wrote some before our friends arrived. I read the paper. Men’s fashion as reported and I have parted ways. The models suggest a customer base in high school, boys trying to look older than they are. Later, of course, this will reverse.

The pneumonia associated with it takes four or five months to recover from. He asked if I was going to events, but they’ve all been canceled. I was going to have coffee with someone on Friday morning, but I wrote delaying it. I had coffee with two friends this morning. I’m unsure if these measures are needed or not. Markets plunge. I’m down a KIA, roughly, since the end of January. I used to use Toyota Corollas as the unit, but the lower end KIAs sort of own this space. Day one of trying to curb my instinct to grocery shop, etc. I canceled a coffee tomorrow, and a meeting in SF later today was canceled, along with a concert this weekend and a memorial next week. So, books, maybe some films via streaming?

My third son said that keeping your distance is the best defense against the virus, citing an epidemiologist he spoke with who also recommended washing your clothes if you go to a restaurant or take transit. And don’t wear your shoes in the house. (Needless to say, I

The viral thing has led UC Berkeley and Stanford to shift their classes online. Out grocery shopping earlier, I ran into a friend who told me she was heading home to conduct her spring semester class this way. Our shopping street was mobbed, but a friend posted a photo of SFO's international terminal, entirely empty. I can believe it. We’re going nowhere, just waiting to see what will happen. I just read a friend’s post about aiding beauty. I wrote a poem about hers. Don’t concern yourself, I would say. Earlier, I reread the poem the journal accepted. It’s really unadorned. My friend is not without ornament, but it’s all of a piece, written on the skin and pinned to a lip. Beauty is both far off and near, as near sometimes as near can be, but far enough away to catch one unaware. It comes naturally, in my view. Being innate, it comes along. Nothing more to add.

6 nothing in particular, but accurate about it. I was surprised by the choice. I have my own favorites, but clearly, what do I know?

My oldest son called, running through measures being taken in Italy to halt the coronavirus’s spread. Don’t go to the grocery store, he said. (I go daily.) Wipe down anything you buy there. Stay at least a meter from other people. (I just read it’s two meters, but whatever.)

In an essay, George Steiner notes how success can be accompanied by the slighting of others who aided it that this happens enough to be a truism, with a certain pleasure taken in the slighting. It can be the fate of also rans, ever in the shadow of genius. One book of my childhood was a collection of poems by A.A. Milne. One poem’s premise was that we are who we are, that we have an integrity that distinguishes us from every other. Part of the role of a parent is to see and bring it out, to instill a self confidence that rests finally on the indelible self we each are. I think this is also the role of anyone responsible for bringing others along, whether in a classroom or a workplace. The Taoist ideal that the sage does this in such a way that these others chalk success up to their own efforts reflects what the sage has to grasp in order to live up to it: that it’s true. It is in fact all their effort. The rest is hints and encouragement.

haven’t done these things, but I’ve started staying out of the fray, and I’ve been washing my hands.)

A friend laid out everything she’s completed or envisioned, the kind of reckoning Walter Benjamin might have made. For whatever reason, she telegraphed the sort of urgency that leaks through as his world edges toward its precipice. In this moment of viral threat, a miniature version of this phenomenon floats before me. My work is almost entirely short term. The only long term project I had, getting a journal’s archive online, was miraculously accomplished by others. Almost everything I produce is posted somewhere, publicly available. It’s unclear that anyone would want to read it, but the topic here is the possibility of its afterlife, not how likely it is to have an audience. It’s like buying a lottery ticket: the odds are slim, but if you don’t buy a ticket, then they’re zero.

Recently, a critic declined to write a notice in the newspaper of the death of an older peer. Reasons were given, but I wondered if winning a Pulitzer would have made the critic more generous.

“I take no responsibility” may be the soundbite that finally sinks its teeth into El Jefe’s butt. Picturing MAGA hats emblazoned with ITNR, bumper stickers. The polar opposite of Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here.” Turns out that “deep state” they all rail about is the civil service that’s there precisely for this, that considers science, medicine, and much else the only way to deal with it. Instead, we got tax cuts and the deliberate gutting of everything that mattered. Those chickens are flapping home to roost, and we’re getting hit with it, too. What a reckoning! It’s rainy and cold. I tempted fate and walked down to the grocery store, where I briefly lost my umbrella, but got it back. I bought disinfectant and wiped down boxes and containers going in the fridge. I changed my shoes for sandals. A friend in Shanghai who’s been posting about life in Viral City said to her US friends that things will get better, that we’re going through what she went through a month or six weeks ago. I hope so. My oldest son calls and expresses exasperation when I tell him his mother went to her office and then plans to stop off at the grocery store. Avoid them, stay home, he says. It’s a judgement call, I think, how much of normal life to try to continue.

Comparing notes received from Shanghai and Berlin with what the news outlets are putting out. My Shanghai friend, finally out of quarantine, describes a city getting back to normal and the shocks that resumed normal is causing her. But her point is that it’s back. My Berlin friend sends a photo of her kids having dinner in the bathtub. “I want them to have fun” to remember this as not entirely bleak. To the news outlets here and in the UK, it’s Armageddon.

I skipped an open house (for Donald Olsen's Berkeley house, above, photographed by landscape architect Gary Strang), although this was inconsistent with my going to the grocery store the day before. Early afternoon. It rained all night and it's chilly outside. The word is that the whole region will shut down, save grocery stores and pharmacies. My neighbors are headed for their country house. We're here for the duration. Lysol City. Could be worse. Late in the afternoon, I walked down to shop. The grocery store was a scene like “Last Train Out of Nanjing," sold out of milk and bananas, among other things. I got four pints of low fat. Tea (from Peet’s) and two bottles of Austrian white (from a wine shop) bookended this expedition. I saw a friend enter and leave the grocery store. She texted later that she had more luck at the butcher shop nearby. Whether these smaller stores will stay open remains to be seen.

A surprising note from a local writer who I met through a friend and then had coffee with again, but who can be antagonistic on Twitter.

He wrote offering to bring us groceries or other necessities, and asked how we were. I was really touched. Our oldest son also made that offer, I told him in reply, but I greatly appreciated his kindness.

WhyOnlyArtCanSaveUs, I wondered if the pandemic will finally convince people that a planetary emergency can only be dealt with if humanity takes concerted, collective action. The fact that one is comparatively slow lulls us into thinking we can put off confronting it a delusion that suits the petro lords just fine. It’s like cigarettes and cancer back in the 1960s: in plain sight, and we light another. The university sent out a notice that exposure to the coronavirus is widespread in the Bay Area, that test kits are in short supply, and that self quarantining is the main line of defense. So, here we are.

California Governor Newsom ordered everyone to stay home, although “essential businesses” can stay open and their staffs will presumably leave home to work there. Reading Santiago Zabala’s

Into spring, welcome despite exigencies. My daughter came back from the coast. “Back to work,” she wrote, although she’s been doing her own work. Is that leisure? Perhaps it is.

Our daughter came over and we had a paella, sort of, with shrimp and mussels, greens from our garden, Catalan vermutand Austrian white, locally baked bread, and conversation. Social distancing was honored in the breach. We exchanged books her copy of Musil's Agathefor mine of Mansfield's BlissandOtherStories. The air here is markedly better (as my daughter's photo of Claremont Canyon, below, shows). Is this how it would be if we could figure out a different operating system? I imagine so.

A neighbor told me the same story (similar timing) two days ago. Did they have COVID? My son is planning to get tested. I wrote a letter to a cousin who lives at the edge of Bergen in a house that looks out toward the North Sea. It’s not clear when I’ll start traveling again. It could take the summer to sort things out. The weather is a mix of sun and clouds, very clear when I got up. I walked down to mail something and felt the chill. People keep their distance from each other, and there weren’t that many people out walking. I dreamt that I had to summarize my father’s life in his presence, but couldn’t find my notes. I did it from memory, waking up in the midst of it. I should write this out, I thought. I wrote my niece, who was close to my father when she was growing up, asking for her sense of him. I saw less of him, although we visited, and I went with him and his sister to England and Norway in the 1980s. A dream in which I’m roaming a town vaguely like mine. A guy offers me a lift, but it turns out he’s pulling me on his electric bike. When he goes straight instead of turning, I let go. I walk to what was the post office, but there’s another guy there who’s chopped it up into two storefronts and the postal boxes are hanging loose as demolition proceeds. Later, I cut through a building and suddenly the exit doors of a big meeting room open and the narrow corridor is filled with older people older than me, that is who are pushing together. Several touch me and I worry about getting the virus. I find a kind of utility room that has a shower and try to wash my arms without getting my clothes wet. At that point, I wake from my first ever coronavirus dream.

Loss of smell and taste is apparently a leading indication of the coronavirus’s grip. Good to know. Meanwhile, Trump flirts with lifting various pandemic resisting orders and the lieutenant governor of Texas suggests old people sacrifice themselves so the Trump Circus can roll on. A few years back, I joked that euthanasia would be a thing not long after I retired, and here it is. My oldest son and his family were sick in the late fall. They were out of commission for a month, staying away from others. (My son’s wife had met with a team from abroad that reported soon after that they were sick.)

Word of the death from COVID of Michael Sorkin (above). When we started DesignBookReview,he joined early on as a contributor and talked it up in New York City. He was a wonderful writer, and a smart, humane, and knowledgeable commentator on cities. I only met him once, when he came to San Francisco to be on a panel. I went to the grocery store, which has considerably upped its coronavirus game, with physical barriers between the clerks and the customers, clear marking of the distance to maintain, etc. I tried having groceries delivered, but couldn’t schedule a drop off, so… Also, half the price, getting it myself, and the store wasn’t crowded. We had sole for dinner because my wife went to the fish market. She also went to the cheese market, but a man was pawing through the cheese and she thought better of it. A case of wine I ordered was to have arrived yesterday, but there’s no sign of it. I think everything is delayed and delayed. Neighbors meanwhile are making face masks, which seems very 1942. Victory Gardens next.

In the middle of the night, the tumultuous middle years of my marriage appeared to me as a cloud of space time. I wrote about it

I went for a walk. It was beautiful today and I encountered people, individuals and couples, but everyone kept their distance. One enthusiastic hello on the Tamalpais Stairs, but in a part of it where I could move to the side. The park at its base was deserted except for a mother and her young daughter, doing headstands against a tree. My daughter stopped off with some groceries. A case of white wine showed up a week late (but better than never). A novel and some short stories by Anna Kavan arrived, beating the Amazon embargo. (I’ve switched to ordering through bookstores that ship.)

Hypochondria drifts along with this thing. I wake up cheerful and then notice I have a slightly sore throat or something comparable, and speculation kicks in. Then finally I do something that gets my mind off of it and whatever it was leaves my consciousness. I read that if we experience a two-month hiatus from work, our work year will still add up to what’s considered normal in Germany. Something is wrong with this picture, since Germany clearly has a better social net and a more equitable quality of life than we do here.

My daughter texted that she and her brother insist on running our errands. Yesterday, my wife found a box of facemasks. I assume they don’t expire they’re the simplest kind. (I bought them for airplane travel, but never used them. I guess I gained immunity, but now all bets are off, plus I’m not flying, am I?)

I joined a meeting of the ARCADEeditorial and design committee, my first since September 2018. The pandemic led to it being hosted on Google. Works for me. The next issue is taking form, although life has overtaken the nominal theme, "Death." (Stay tuned.)

this morning, noting that it also resembled Tom Stoppard’s cycle of plays on Alexander Herzen, or a kind of Globe Theater, the players coming on and off.

April 2020 I wrote a short piece on how not to waste a pandemic.

Social media suggests that no one on the receiving end is prepared.

Writing on three fronts, like old times. It rained, stopped, rained again, and stopped. It’s fairly cold. I’ve barely been out of the house. An unexpected letter and then a follow up to it arrive from a friend in Melbourne. I learn that something I sent to her went astray to Florida rather than Victoria. Luckily, I have a replacement at hand. I spent the day working. It cleared up. If it warms up, I’ll take a walk tomorrow. These are my constricted days, but I don’t mind them.

A friend from Manhattan wrote asking me to share a GoFundMe post to support the restaurant she owns with her chef husband. I did and gave them money. Not easy for these small businesses with a total fall off in customers. I asked about take out and she said no one in the district it’s in the Lower Eastside is going out. There’s barely any street life. She also worries about their staff, who would be coming in from Brooklyn and the Bronx. A mess. Small business loans and grants are daunting to apply for, she said, but they have.

A notary came by with documents to sign. Some traditions linger, despite digital alternatives (that only go so far, apparently). A friend writes that she has her hands (and inbox) full, a course she’s teaching and its 80 students now online. A useful skill in the future, I reply. Thoughts pass back and forth down the road, across the bay. Bill Menking, dead of cancer, had wanted to revive DesignBook Review, the quarterly Laurie Snowden and I founded. He imagined something like Bookforum, wrapped into Architect’sNewspaper.

We gave DBRto California College of the Arts, so the person there who arranged to take it was in the picture. Bill used to call one or the other of us randomly from NYC, as if the idea had come back to him suddenly. He visited here and we had dinner. He talked about growing up in Stockton, which he clearly loved and missed. He never followed through with DBR, although his idea might have worked. He made a success of Architect'sNewspaper. It always had good book reviews, to its (and probably his) credit.

My oldest son and I speculated about the impact of COVID a conversation betweeen amateurs, but hey, it’s the topic!

A dream: I’m on a ship. It includes a sequence in which I tell a friend that I’m always glad to receive her letters. She then drops her formality and warms up. Later, I’m in a seminar led by my GP. I ask a question, looking at my notes, because another friend mentioned “129 field notes,” but I couldn’t remember exactly what he said. In my notebook I only had written “129.” She laughed and said that this was “a boy’s way of looking at things,” that number. It reminded me of Michael Sorkin’s long list of things that architects should know.

After much hemming and hawing, we drove out to the dacha, arriving to meet our oldest son and his family coming down the drive to see if we’d arrived. We walked with them along a road (of

My wife daringly shopped at a near empty produce market, and then my daughter appeared with reinforcements from Whole Foods. This passes for excitement in these parts. I spent the morning writing an appreciation of my late neighbor, Sally B. Woodbridge, once the Bay Region’s correspondent to ProgressiveArchitecture, the leading US architecture magazine. She coauthored SanFranciscoArchitecture, a guidebook that went through many editions; edited and was a contributor to BayArea Houses; and wrote monographs on Bernard Maybeck and John Galen Howard, two giants of early 20th century architecture here.

17 sorts) that runs below the dacha, then climbed the hill to get up to it. This proved not so easy, especially for me in my useless sneakers, but we made it, had lunch on the deck, then went walking again

My daughter brought groceries bought at Star Market across town. The bill was pretty high. When I still shopped, I bought fewer things, since I was walking back and forth, so perhaps I didn’t notice. It will be good when the pandemic has abated and I can shop again. Meanwhile, we’re required to wear masks when out walking, which isn’t a natural act for me. My glasses fog up and I doubt the mask is very effective. (I tried to pinch it to stop this, but then it rode up and grazed my eye.)

We drove back just after 5 p.m. There was barely any traffic.

A dream in which I reprimand someone for whining and he says he has an injury, which he thinks exempts him from criticism.

Trump’s threat to visas, permanent residencies, and citizenships in process betrays the history of a country built by immigrants including his own family that, with some shameful exceptions, has always welcomed them. He and this must be stopped. He’s trying to rule the USA like it’s Orban’s Hungary. Spent the afternoon in the barn, enjoying the weather. My wife came into the garden, looking like she’d wandered in from a Bonnard painting. (She liked this when I told her at dinner.) I’m weighing whether or not to apply to a week-long poetry thing that moved online, but with the same format write and read. I rarely read my work aloud and I write at my own pace. I may apply anyway, given who’s involved, but I’m torn.

A pandemic dream: a barbershop with no barbers and a copy shop in which the social distancing of a sparse crowd transformed instantly into a social distance disregarding mob, including a couple whose belligerent male half wouldn’t step back and then put his thumb in my mouth. “I don’t think he has it,” his wife said.

(Sally and her husband John Woodbridge lived in Howard’s 1912 family house.) I’m hoping that Architect’sNewspaperwill take it.

I finished another section of the oral history I'm editing. My cousin, its subject, wrote that it made him cry, reading it it was based on a conversation with his former partner and longtime friend, who died two years ago. Meanwhile, it’s overcast and cool again. I read that California’s climate is becoming more arid more like Australia. That means more wildfires, probably, and water shortages. Against the odds, a manuscript I found is coming together. The editing involves removing whole paragraphs related to heartache, to uncover bits of insight that were surfacing, even then. Events would prove one of the truisms of my life, that I always have to experience things twice to be convinced they won’t work. With good reason and much effort to make it otherwise. But I digress.

Longing is a theme now and again. Mine has burned off. Desire surfaces only at moments, occasionally with aftereffects, a small outbreak of madness. I see quite plainly in retrospect the fissures that trip life up. The phantoms are gone, and it’s them that induce our longing, plant the void we try and fail to fill. You have to fall through it to find the ground and move again without their haunting. Different actors come forward, even in dreams.

Remembered a poet who used to post incomplete haikus and invite others to add to or complete them. In ALittleBookonForm, Robert Hass describes an elaborate Japanese linked poem form meant to be talked into being by a party of drunken poets (and a sober one to take notes, I assume). Each contributor riffs on the last line of the previous contribution. I think it has 38 stanzas.

My wife woke up with a headache, feeling “rocky.” Is it the bee sting she got yesterday in the garden or something viral? Or something else? My daughter will get some Benadryl to test the first theory. (Update: she took some aspirin and is now much better.)

Sequester City will run through May and Newsom (our governor) just said he’s going to close the beaches and some parks, which strikes me as lunatic. (Australia has reopened its beaches.) May 2020 I took two hours to listen while my friend Clare Wigfall’s students read from their work. They were logging on from all over LA, NYC, Berlin. Different genres, all interesting. It added something, I felt, to see the writers read, not just hear them.

I finally read Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, which Robert Bresson’s ideas on filmmaking echo. I would substitute corporatism for property relations in WB’s assertions about war, but there’s more than enough here to make a case for Trump pushing us into something foolish. He’s already aiming to ditch the Postal Service so he can stop voting by mail. WB’s fascist aesthetics reflect his own era. Our fascists eschew the uniforms, but are fascist nonetheless.

So relieved my wife is okay! (I knock on wood.) FaceTime with my granddaughter. She grabbed her father’s phone and ran around their house. Her mother said that this made her sister nauseous, but it reminded me of experimental films I’ve seen, only smaller.

Reading Walter Benjamin’s “The Artist as Producer,” I remind myself of the failure of such projects as farm collectivization in Stalin’s Russia and then later in Mao’s Stalinist China. Benjamin’s sympathy for Russia (as he calls it) was leavened by his wariness of its party politics. See also Curzio Malaparte’s KremlinBall, which asserts that the Bolsheviks overthrew the aristocracy only to set up their own. This is also (loosely speaking) the territory of Bulgakov. Everything is crashing, I read, but it would be more accurate to say that the world is partly in stasis. This gums up the works, since everything is now connected to everything else and most people live just in time lives with no margin for error. Hand them two, three, or four months of stasis and they (and we) have a huge problem.

Hart Crane lifted Samuel Greenberg’s poems in the same way that Robert Lowell used Elizabeth Hardwick and Elizabeth Bishop’s letters. The women objected, but Greenberg was dead when Crane made his pastiche (or mosaic, as the introduction calls it) of his poems. His original manuscript surfaced, though, as they tend to do. Two nights ago, my wife told me a long anecdote about a woman she encountered whose husband was prosecuted by Chris Christie. To force her husband to plead guilty, Christie went after their daughters. Today, TheIntercepthad a long article on the Michael Flynn case that notes Mueller’s use of similar tactics, going after Flynn’s son. This case is like the intersection of two separate instances of political corruption. Who will sort it out? We are more than the sum of our attributes this is Robert Musil’s thesis, illustrated in his long novel, TheManWithoutQualities

My daughter came by, laid low by a sinus infection (or whatever it is, but her mother gets the same thing). I gave her the family remedy, along with the weekend papers, back issues of literary reviews, and my “provisional manuscript.” The plumbers came and fixed a block in the line, noting that an issue with where it joins the city’s means it will recur unless we fix it. One more thing. The last blockage was a year ago. The lead plumber also commented on baroque aspects of our plumbing, telling me that a fix is possible, but might make things worse. It all comes down to gravity. I mailed something to a friend. While waiting for another customer to emerge, a delivery man no facemask walked in, ignoring the one person at a time sign, to drop off a package. This triggered a bout of hypochondria later, but I’d experienced it before and moved quickly through it. But it will be my reality when things are lifted, if the coronavirus is still undetectably present.

PoemsfromtheGreenbergManuscriptsarrived.

Samuel Greenberg’s poems remind me of writers from the past who spelled as they liked. His subjects resemble theirs, also. I finally went for a walk. I read a friend’s essay. I started reading a catalogue of an exhibit of Le Corbusier’s paintings, curated by a

My wife’s middle sister phoned, looking for her, and then noted that she’s reading, “one poem a day,” a manuscript I gave her of poems written between late December and late April. She added that one sonnet only has 13 lines. A composer friend once remarked to me that Beethoven revolutionized the sonata form by ignoring its tradition. I pointed to this in my defense. It was true of Samuel Greenberg, also, but I didn’t mention him.

I share Robert Musil’s sense of the singular in life experiences that can’t be repeated and are a reason to live the life you’re handed. He argues that our minds are loosely tethered to the rational, with the irrational a leitmotif. This mirrors life with its sometimes baleful, sometimes gorgeous randomness, like a meteor we see coming at a great distance, impossible to avoid. Or, unwittingly, we are that meteor. Musil is the patron saint of this.

22 friend. I listened to piano duets Schubert and then my oldest son came by and we discussed aspects of the dacha. I was impressed that he’d made a plan, elevation, and section of the main aspect in question. A friend in London wrote that she thought of me and wondered how I was. How am I? I asked myself. Writing a lot, which is true. Le Corbusier painted in parallel with the gallery based world of art, wondering if he’d be forgotten but keeping apart from it, feeling it would harm his work to get caught up in it. As an architect, he had no choice but to compete for work, although much of it was public or institutional, won through competitions or, later, sheer merit. As an artist, he held himself aloof, but he lived in the world, so was subject to doubts. I think this happens to everyone. Those whose reputations soar sometimes outlive them or they’re eclipsed after their deaths. Reputations rise and fall. John Donne nearly disappeared for two centuries, only to be rediscovered. I take from all of this that “Just work” is the best plan. Set and reset your criteria and standards, evolve, even make occasional quantum leaps or not, but apply your mind and time to whatever interests you.

Randomness cannot sin, arising from nature. Sin is always against nature, seeking exemption, special favors, immunity. There’s none.

Two friends arrived from Imperial Beach cousins, French. We unfurled the umbrella in the garden and sat out there, conversing. Later, I read the Saturday papers. I liked one article, an account by a woman who fled to Carmel in the wake of a relationship and much else crashing. The rest was the usual horror current horror and anticipated horror. The beach she described stood in contrast.

The thrust of the critique was that the poem used enjambment sparingly and this caused it “not to breathe.” Another editor said of some of my poems that they’re “like stacks of sentences,” and this may have been what she meant. But others I write are enjambment all the way. The poem was occasioned by the pandemic, which is the theme of the competition, so one line had a meaning the critic didn’t see. The line may have set up the confusion, but I’m not sure.

Submitting a poem, I paid for a critique, sensing that failing to ask for one might condemn mine to the bin. We’ll see about that theory.

Sunday's Timesarrived. “It’s all coronavirus,” my wife commented.

Another line was felt to be obscure. A line was deemed descriptive. The stack comment is salient or reinforced. I want to look at other poems that do it, to see if what it does is justified. In this case, the poem feeling constricted may (unconsciously) be the point.

The critique, just read, was unhelpful, but in fairness to the critic, it’s difficult to comment on a single poem by an unknown writer.

My writing partner laments the noise around the topic of our essay, an extension of three others we’ve written on Berkeley, campus and community. The noise is the profusion of pandemic punditry.

My wife, reporting on a conversation with our oldest son, says we shouldn’t travel in the autumn.

Our houseguests came and left, headed north, daughter in tow. We had a dinner of shrimp and grits. It was nice to have had company. I wrote to a possible editorial client introducing someone else who could either take on all of the work they have in mind or involve me, but minimally advice on the project rather than actively shaping it. This is where the pandemic has left me glad to have an empty calendar and open time to write and read. It won’t last forever, the ability to use it fruitfully, as I see graphically sometimes with others. This morning, I spoke for an hour over Zoom with a classmate from undergraduate days. We hadn’t spoken since 1970, but had an exchange of emails about an article I wrote that referenced a project from our third year class. The afternoon I spent waiting for a delivery. It came late in the day. I was supposed to sign for it 15 bottles of wine in two boxes to prove my age, but I looked the part and the delivery man didn’t bother to get my signature. My classmate and I were able to pick up the thread without especially rehashing our shared past, although a few people came up. Later, my daughter and I spoke by phone as she drove to the coast. I described what I’m reading and its origins in Musil. This triggered a lot of thoughts, she texted later. The conversation reminded me of one we had when I was in Tokyo and she was in Paris, November 2017 talking on WhatsApp for an hour.

The fog rolled in, which affects me. The effects trigger unease: can I still smell and taste? (Yes.) Events replay and I realize I failed to wash my hands, etc. Minus the pandemic, I’d just blame the fog.

All around us, collectively speaking, ugly and sometime terrible things are happening. They spark responses, some hopeful and others baleful. News arrives now in cycles, often more as waves of fragments than coherent stories you can follow. Every weekday, I get a text message from a reporter in San Francisco who follows the local politics of that city. Because he follows stories doggedly, I can at least track them over time. In broader news, things surface and then disappear, or they transform into something else, only to be exploited by some politician for his own purposes, spinning or even denying the original event. Serious print newspapers do a better job of maintaining focus, but even they succumb to the inexorable “next cycle,” when attention drifts elsewhere. The riots in Minneapolis and Trump’s response to them are a replay of riots in Detroit and Newark in the era of Martin Luther King, Jr., when the official response was to crack heads, let the ghettos burn, and refuse any aid to rebuild. That’s a GOP response. The party of “Law and Order,” though founded by Lincoln, has been reflexively racist for decades.

A small painting (above) arrived, the gift of an old friend and the 19th of her works that I’ve collected, if my earlier count is accurate. She was also a classmate. I’ve known her since 1967. I bought a large painting of hers that I regard as a masterpiece. It’s sitting propped up against a wall downstairs, as I can’t get anyone in to hang it and am afraid to do it myself, based on a previous effort that made a mess of the wall. I have no talent at all for most pragmatic things.

Trump is acting like the Czar. Alameda County, in which I live, texted news of a curfew from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. I walked earlier. A friend texts from Manila and we discuss current events. This for me is contemporary life. This is evening one of a two evening curfew. Why it was declared isn’t clear to me, but the actions of government at all levels tend to be mysterious, driven by a reasoning process all its own, rarely accountable in the moment. At dinner, my wife said that Trump should be removed “as deranged.” As good a reason as any. Why wait for impeachment? He could be confined at

The 2020 presidential campaigns are off and running, events suggest. Look for Trump to pull out the stops on authoritarian posturing and intervention, aided by sympathetic police and state governments. Will Biden take him on? That’s the necessity.

Looking2020through

June old diaries in search of someone’s name, I found a fragment of a poem I wrote decades ago, a typed out copy of which I had lost. It’s not complete, but there’s more than I expected. I glossed this poem recently, thinking it was gone forever. The original has some lines and images I’d forgotten, but my gloss of it resolved a transition point that stopped me from taking it further. I read other entries. Diaries, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb observed, capture things as they unfold. There’s a bit of distance, of course, but not enough to override one’s immediate impressions. I read more of Hee Jin Kim’s first book on Dögen Eihei, including his contention that meditation makes it possible to observe things unfolding. I’ve never meditated as Dögen prescribes, but I have some sense of the state of mind he describes: thinking, not-thinking, and non thinking. Not thinking, he says, is like posing the question, “How’s thinking?” while non thinking is the support the mind gives the self who meditates. This seems true to my own thought process.

Rereading reflective prose from 2003 and from earlier in 2020, I see how my thinking has evolved. It's dispassionate, which isn’t true of my polemics. The poems are like sketches for paintings.

Mar-a-Lago unless he breaks out, like Napoleon, and has to be exiled to Guantanamo. She also canceled an appointment in the city tomorrow morning on grounds of uncertainty. I share her concern.

My concern about what we’re seeing is this: militarized police, including units of county sheriffs, visibly lean toward Trump and are in sympathy, if not in league with his paramilitary supporters. The association is still loose, but Trump is increasingly signaling to them directly. This points to the November election and the possibility that Trump will resist leaving office if defeated, contending the results were tainted. It feels too farfetched even to be possible, but events are showing it’s not so farfetched. The way to prevent it is to mobilize the opposition. That begins by pressing the political leadership opposed to Trump and his allies to unite as a broad coalition that pushes back against his lies and overreach, while simultaneously putting forward a program that this coalition will put in place starting January 2021. Only a united front numerically, vastly larger than Trump’s core supporters will crush Trump at the polls and make it impossible for him to attempt to resist his ouster. Part of cornering him is to ask him continually if he will stand by the result. This will either generate more weasel words or his ultimate agreement that it’s a real election he’s contesting.

The curfew is on through Friday and the city orders everyone to wear masks outside, whether anyone else is around or not, which I think is unjustified. I wrote the mayor to that effect.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the French archival historian, said of high school history that it was inevitably diluted to meet this or that political or religious agenda. The most useful posts I’m seeing capture the moment: police attacking reporters as filmed by them;

I slept in this morning because my dreams amounted to the society I’m missing. (Perhaps if I watched some of the things streaming now, this might not happen, but I haven’t.) The day unfolded slowly, but not unpleasantly. There’s still a curfew. It starts at 8 p.m. It’s not clear to me that it’s doing much good, but I have nothing to compare it with. It feels like because of the coronavirus lockdown, they now feel they can just do it. That’s not a good thing, to me.

The curfew was finally lifted, a day early. A video clip that went viral is shocking even the cop who shoved the old guy looks shocked. I guess he didn’t know that old people tend to fall if you shove them.

An expected event in the family happened today. I was told to keep it off social media. Let’s just say that I’m really happy and relieved.

28 and visual evidence of a murder committed and countenanced, and echoes of it as Trump’s paramilitary wing takes his tweets and conference calls as a big green light. The pushback from senior people in government, a proliferating chorus of voices, mixes with pushback on the streets to become a force Trump can neither dismiss nor repudiate. Trump's "future" is steeped in nostalgia for a history that is falsely portrayed. Many of his disaffected supporters should be making common cause with the Precariat, since Trump only serves the oligarchy, but they’re drunk with the lie his lie of their racial superiority, that comic book history they take as truth.

(Not even Erdogan could prevent an opponent's election as mayor of Istanbul.) The point is to prevent this, not to give up prematurely because yes, America is imperfect. It’s always been imperfect.

My niece and her husband in Eugene, Oregon, report that some eastern Oregon town, suffering the mass delusion that George Soros funded Antifa were planning to invade in a bus, lined the streets, armed to their rural teeth, but no bus appeared. It reminded me of TheBigNight all that build up and then a letdown. If someone makes a film of it, I want to play George Soros.

American exceptionalism was always a myth. Democracy and rule of law have never been fully honored here, because most politics are local. Yet on balance the country is more democratic than not, more adherent to its Constitution and Bill of Rights than not. Trump and his enablers aim to break this, perhaps by trying to rig the election.

The guy goes down and cracks his head, blood on the sidewalk. The cop who shoved him starts to help, but is stopped. The cops start to move on, but then one of them hassles the reporter who filmed it.

The family event has a name, but it cannot yet be announced.

The ParisReviewhas an interview with Robert Hass, based on conversations that took place at widely different times. It reminded me of one with Leonard Michaels that a neighbor (one of the two interviewers) surfaced. It’s a small literary world here in Berkeley.

If, God willing, my granddaughter Sarah (below) comes across this, the poem below was prompted by you, sweetheart. I loved you on first sight. It expresses a longing for immortality unlawful for our species. All we can do is croon a bit. Know you were crooned.

Paramedics came and carted a neighbor away. It was quite an entourage: half a dozen people, an ambulance, a modified fire truck, and a police car. Two other neighbors came over to help with the dog, etc. I got a haircut, finally. My oldest son had a barber come over, a university trained jazz drummer who studied in Maine, where he grew up, and also at a music school in Leeds, UK. He cuts hair because it pays better than teaching aspiring drummers.

Isaiah Berlin advocated pluralism, which argues that our autonomy matters, but so does our shared humanity. What we share unites us, but unity for its own sake, at the expense of those not sharing a specific view, is wrong. We can be pluralists yet condemn and resist the efforts of others who don’t share our values to impose them on us. We don’t have to accept fascism, for example, which when it prevails tends to suppress others based on its irrational beliefs.

A dream about giving a talk at MoMA in NYC, but it was more like a town. I made my way over to 53rd St., which meant taking this diagonal side street that I doubt exists anywhere in Manhattan.

A dream in which I end up in the house of a former colleague with him, his wife, and their kids. He’s sweeping a room with a broom that’s shot, so I go to look for a better one. Yeah, beats me.

A helicopter flying around meant a demonstration somewhere. It’s finally gone. My neighbor wrenched her ankle, I heard.

Dreams, like films, shift from scene to scene. Often, all I remember is a scene, detached from the plot, such as it was.

I made a measured drawing of the back garden around the barn, but something was off with one dimension, so I remeasured and amended it. I’ll put a sheet of tracing paper over it and make a clean copy a background on which to sketch ideas to extend the garden along the west side of the barn, which is about the same depth as the deck that overlooks the garden, but of course wider.

Let me note how happy I was to learn that kids used TikTok to game Trump and his stupid Tulsa rally.

To each assertion its placard, I think, and a moment like this has both in profusion. A friend sends me strands of talk, to which I listen then write a reply. I read the papers. My wife reads them in the morning and we sometimes talk about this or that article. We find the same things appalling or funny, despite our quite different views on many issues.

It cleared up. I celebrated by having a small glass of wine in the garden as the sun went down behind the barn, watching a hummingbird who was joined by another that quickly flew away. Was this a territorial dispute or checking in? Two cats meanwhile were either sizing each other up or preparing to mate or possibly both, with audible accompaniment. We have this in common.

I read a catalogue of trips the trips haven’t changed, but the planet has. My small bit of it has enlarged as I live in it more consciously. The town I grew up in figures in dreams, which makes sense another time when I was mostly in one place. I thought yesterday of bicycling to and from my elementary school. I can picture how the lilac bush bloomed, giving me an image of the barriers that arise in fairytales, invoked by magic and dispelled by magic.

I learned that grapes are growing along the north fence in the back garden. I’m terrible with plants! My daughter and I discuss planting a vineyard at the dacha, said to be an ideal climate. My son reports that the trades who visit the place invariably suggest marijuana.

July What’s2020happening in Hong Kong is a travesty. And now the CCP threatens Taiwan, whose voters recently rejected a pro CCP candidate resoundingly. Why are Australia and Japan the only ones in the region pushing back? ASEAN’s silence is deafening.

Trump meanwhile tries out a tale of alt left fascism on his dwindling minions, defending statues of Confederate heroes, NASCAR nooses (okay, no), etc. In parallel, he’s pitching a narrative that mailin ballots will float in from North Korea or somewhere, so the election should be disregarded and “Trump forever.”

I finished the back garden plan, then sketched a design over it.

I’m waiting for some cloth masks. Have been using some paper ones that feel inadequate. The IChingtells me to stay put, which is obviously good advice at the moment.

A friend in Berlin told me her writing course may work for me to join it. Awaiting details.

A couple, neighbors, came for dinner in the back garden. The pandemic has led the woman to let her hair go gray, which suits her.

We had a barbecue in our back garden with our oldest son and his family. My wife’s sister brought over a strawberry shortcake, which was wonderful. We had the last of the meat my third son sent us, and my wife made several vegetable dishes. At dusk, there being no fireworks, amateur versions began and for a while it sounded like a warzone, but it’s subsided. For once, there was no fog, so it’s too bad they skipped the fireworks. It's often completely fogged in. Five cloth facemasks arrived, which I washed today. My wife told me not to dry them in the dryer, but one escaped my notice. It seemed fine.

(*: The reprehensible Stephen Miller is back with yet another cruel and stupid regulation, forcing foreign students enrolled here whose courses have moved online to leave the country.)

Walking around, I saw a lot of renovation under way. What depresses me are the fall of HK, threats to Taiwan, and Trump's vindictive immigration policies. His actions seem less and less effective with voters, but they still see immigration as “someone else’s problem.” Indeed, it is a nightmare for them, in fact.

A friend, living in an old persons’ barracks, told me that one of the staff proved to have the virus, so the place is in an uproar (or whatever passes for that among his cohort). He sounded sanguine, but he’s tired of it. He normally would be in Paris in this season. Found a lost car key, which prompted my wife to say, “Your genius is wasted at home.”

I read more of E.M. Forster’s CommonplaceBook. He is in a sense a character in a story he’s writing unconsciously this may be what a commonplace book is by definition, at least if it’s written as a journal and not simply as a repository of fragments. I find things from the

A friend who’s a grad student at the University of Texas, Austin, posted an ICE news release* on Twitter. It’s terrible! The entire Cal State University system will be all online next academic year unless it changes course. UC Berkeley is I think a hybrid program, but this forces foreign students to endanger their lives to stay here.

Late this morning, spilling into the afternoon, I spoke with my friend and neighbor a wide ranging conversation prompted by her questions. She’s an historian. There’s both overlap and differences in our reading, but a shared sensibility that makes our conversations especially enjoyable. This was over Zoom, which I’ve come to appreciate. It’s as if our respective writing places were one room.

Viewed in retrospect, my actions can seem inexplicable, whereas specific memories can be holographic, never losing their original affect. This is a peculiarity of my memory, so powerfully sensual.

Read a review of a new camping van with a line about Berkeley as the only possible source of demand. I would have said West Marin. It’s all Tesla in Berkeley, displacing the Prius. I’m praying that BMW produces new oil pumps in August so I can replace the failing one in my ancient 320i. I’ve barely driven it since I got this diagnosis from the mechanic in February, lest the engine seize. I swore to the editor that I wouldn’t touch my article draft until I heard from him. And then I dreamt that I found problems with it.

34 past that vividly bring back a moment that may as well have taken place in the 1800s. I recognize everything, but specific memories are more real to me than the letters and other ephemera aptly named.

Let me note that Elvis’s only grandson killed himself. That can’t have been an easy role in life. It’s a mark of the times that having my teeth cleaned is a source of qualms. The cleaner was appropriately gowned and the clinic spotless, so, knock on wood.

I joined an online talk by a BAMPFA curator on the woodblock prints of Yoshitoshi, who I admire. One of them was from a series I saw in Melbourne in 2016. She told the stories the prints illustrated, reciting a poem in Japanese and then translating it.

35 A Buddha head bought by my parents in Paris in 1953. My niece’s photo, which I asked her to send me. He’s in her house now.

I watched 105 minutes of films my father made, starting in 1949, with his 16mm camera. I'm among his subjects, starting at the age of two. That I can still name people and identify most of the places speaks to their impact on me. The world I circumnavigated in my childhood hardly exists, as I remembered again visiting Singapore in November 2019, but I recognized the basement of the market hall I visited with a friend there in what’s now “Chinatown” in that city. I was pleased that my father also felt it was worth documenting.

A detail (above, from the talk) of one of Yoshitoshi’s prints, of a courtesan deciding to become a Buddhist nun. Behind her, barely visible, are hungry ghosts. Her fashionable garb has images of Hell.

It’s strange that Gary Snyder, in his long afterword to his principal poem, the origins of which go way back, fails to mention Joanne Kyger, his wife and companion during his Zen studies in Japan. He certainly figures in her journals of this period. When I read them and mentioned them to my daughter, she said that in Snyder’s various accounts, if she appears at all, it’s a walk-on role, only her first name given. “I always wondered who she was,” she added. Kyger’s Japan andindiaJournals,19601964, are wonderful. I can’t imagine writing someone out of the picture, as if she never figured. Nor could she. My day started with a webinar with my college’s new dean and an architect from Barcelona. I haven’t met the dean, but we’ve exchanged views. Then I went for a walk. I've figured out how to wear a face mask so I can put it on quickly: hang it from my left ear. I must look odd, but it’s easier than taking it on and off. as it often gets tangled with my sunglasses. I read that you’re not supposed to put the mask in your pocket, as any viral bits can spread.

My father filmed a funeral procession for a high official, possibly the Vice Governor of Malaya, murdered by insurgents. Whoever it was, he got the full treatment. When I screened it for my kids when they were younger, using a rented film projector, they asked me, “How old are you?” It does look like "Masterpiece Theater."

Zoom City, which is to say, two separate conversations. Maybe Zoom Village? One was shop talk about a new article, the other reconnecting with an old friend whose work is pertinent to mine. We went uphill to the mid century modern house of friends last night, enjoying their deck and its panoramic view. The guy collects Alfa Romeos and we discussed the problem of getting parts for old cars. He described my BMW as a classic, which was kind of him. August 2020 A birthday supper for my wife, attended by our daughter and her friend. My wife’s middle sister brought us a plum crisp she made and cream to put on it. We had grapes, tomatoes, påté, sparkling Italian, French white, California white, and black tea.

The oil pump has finally been obtained. My ancient BMW goes in tomorrow for the transplant. I so long to drive out to the coast in it. Hopefully mostly sitting parked hasn’t done too much damage I did start it and occasionally drive it, but not very much (since mid February). COVID also limited my driving.

My longtime writing partner compared living at his senior housing tower with being on a freighter: “I walk the perimeter of the roof.” Mail delivery is sporadic. It won’t surprise me if local post offices shutter. (Bank branches may also disappear. I haven’t used an ATM in months, since I barely spend any cash.) Mail pickup and delivery are another matter, and the post offices serve those who ship small packages. If they close, it will be an epic mess come Christmas.

When I stepped out on the back deck with my macchiato, two young women leaned out of their window and greeted me.

I joined a memorial for Bill McClung (above). An editor at UC Press, he started University Press Books and founded its journal, UniversityPublishing, with Leonard Michaels, Christine Taylor, and Brenda Hillman. They ran pieces by luminaries like Roland Barthes. I was involved with Bill in a cultural foundation he started. Memorably stubborn, he kept the bookstore going for a decade too long. Still, an honorable man and something of a local culture hero. On the phone with a friend in Singapore. He congratulates me on Kamala Harris, a daughter of Berkeley. I’m glad Biden chose her.

Dinner with friends in the back garden, still warm as we ate.

I watched Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's post convention remarks. She has a genuineness that’s rare for a politician. She offered an unqualified endorsement of Biden’s candidacy, saying accurately that the point is to defeat fascism. It is. Much that she works for will be easier, especially if the Democrats retake the Senate. Trump's damage to the courts is already visible and will take longer to undo.

My wife and daughter arrived home, to my relief. The fire spread south of the dacha, toward Bolinas. I hope they’re able to stop it.

There are also fires in Napa and Sonoma counties, all caused by the lightning storm of a few days ago, despite rain that accompanied it.

Miraculously, the hot weather gave way early to cooler and even some rain, a blessing in August, prelude to fire prone late summer.

The California decision upholding huge magazines for assault weapons, part of every school invader’s arsenal, is an example.

My wife drove out to the dacha to join our daughter; my daughter texted: “Is there a fire?” She sent this photo of smoke rising from the other side of the ridge. "Both of you come back," I texted.

Hot and muggy feels like it might rain. Is that possible?

It cooled off and the air seems a bit better. They doused the fire at the coast with water from Tomales Bay. I hope it helped. More lightning storms are predicted, this time without rain. Most everything east of my house burned down in 1923. It stopped a block away. But where the dacha is has more frequent fires the last was in 1995. The 1993 Oakland Hills fire was the last big one near here.

The many fires have made the air fetid. My daughter texted that the area around the dacha has been ordered to evacuate. It’s built on the site of a house that burned down in another fire a generation ago.

Today was the first session of six, one per week, of a writing course led by Clare Wigfall, who teaches at Bard College Berlin. I’ve known her since she was four her parents are old friends. We read and discussed the opening of a novel by Don DeLillo, TheBody Artist. I’d never read him before. Clare said that she learned to write by reading. We did some free writing, beginning with the phrase “I love.” She encouraged us to write on paper, then asked, when she called time, how many words each person wrote. I wrote 114. Now cut it in half, she said. I did. Now cut in half again. I did. Now extend it. What I found, extending it, was that I wrote a tighter version of what I’d written, as if I needed that exercise to understand it and then make something of it. It could be an extension of the briefer opening, or I could dispense with the opening altogether. Across a table. This is where it begins, of course, and love changes as it questions where it wants to go. The urge to know is less important. Or perhaps the knowing is the familiar part while the rest proves to be depth you saw that first intrigued you. This was the result of Clare's exercise. “Across a table” is the fragment of my first pass I used to open the second. In fact, I did extend the piece, not simply recapitulate it, although it felt like a recapitulation just after I wrote it. In my notebook, the fragment of the first pass is clearly marked as the new starting point. Walter Benjamin, the patron saint of fragments, would approve. I read that Guerneville, a town on the Russian River where family friends have a summer house, has been evacuated out of fear that a fire in that part of Sonoma County will spread to it.

Awake to what sounded like an industrial site: my wife grinding things for breakfast. I ran errands, braving the pandemic streets. I thought earlier of an estranged friend. In our last encounter, she refused to engage. Sometimes I think I should contact her, but it feels like doing so would be an imposition. It’s hard to know. When she called, she would always announce herself as if I’d forgotten, as if unsure how I’d receive it, but I’m always glad to hear from her.

My neighbor sent a link to an interactive map that shows the extent of the fire near the dacha. It’s about a mile away, although the fire is mostly further south. Much will depend on the wind.

Session 2 of the writing course. We read and discussed a short story by Roxane Gay, then looked at postcards from an art project that asked people to describe a personal secret. Secrets was the class theme, used as a prompt to sketch a character or characters. My wife and oldest son drove out to the dacha, which she said is intact, with no signs of smoke the fire map notwithstanding. I hope this holds. It’s difficult to assess the situation from the news coverage.

The dacha and vicinity were taken off the “evacuation warning” list. Whew! Not that we’re out of the woods (the dacha is in the midst of them, ha ha). That will be the case when fire season ends whenever the rainy season begins sometime in October or November. Until it does, it gets dry as a bone and there are sometimes hot, arid winds blowing from the east, ideal to get a wildfire going.

Today is our anniversary and my wife bought mussels for the occasion. It’s cold and overcast, which is good for fighting wildfires. It’s supposed to heat up next week. The dacha is still intact.

September 2020 Session 3 of my writing class, dealing with the senses. We worked with prompts new for me. Not that my writing is unprompted, but it’s a different process. The gardeners came.

It was 90 today hot, but 10 degrees less so than yesterday. The fire menacing the dacha is 93 percent contained, I read, but the fire season rolls on. I hope the rains come earlier this year. A friend wrote from somewhere in Wyoming that it’s 53 degrees and snow is predicted. She’s there doing a residency, painting.

I wrote the post above, then found a note from a writer I followed online. She wrote in English and Korean. I used Google Translate for the latter. The gods give us these moments of reacquaintance.

One of my friend Patricia Sonnino's Wyoming paintings (above), the 22nd of hers I own. Her work keeps evolving and I follow along.

Frederik Carbon director of Sunnyside, a documentary on the dacha, its architect, and his neighbor sent me a link to the film,

In my writing class, we discussed the way stories are structured. Then we chose a writing prompt and worked in tandem with a classmate through several stages of its development. Those million burning acres came home to roost. Here it is at 8:40 a.m.

It's lighter now. The layer of smoke is high enough that it doesn’t smell smoky, but it’s blotted out the sun. The result is unnerving. I got a haircut from a barber who does house calls. He’s moving to Maine. It turns out that the sepia light of this strange day is perfect for my light-sensitive eyes, so I could see clearly without glasses. This may explain the persistence of my gene pool. Will the air clear? That’s the big question on the West Coast here, in Portland, and apparently in Seattle. The bigger question is if we’re condemned to have massive wildfires every summer and fall. My wife read aloud from a “Future of Everything” article in the WSJ on healthcare. In essence, the nanny state will pair up with our iWatches to make everyday life hell, I mean healthy. Nudge City. The air slowly clears more sun, less haze and ash.

44 which I watched. It’s an hour long a beautiful, moving film about two old and idiosyncratic guys, and the house the architect designed and fell short of realizing, running out of money and time. He’s aware of this and you watch him as he narrates his self awareness. The place itself gives depth to what he envisioned. There’s footage of its construction he built it after a fire swept through, torching a house that was on it (that he probably would have torn down).

The air clears up more sun, but no sign of blue skies. My writing partner screened the documentary I mentioned above and wrote back ecstatically. It’s a really good film, not least for the soundtrack, and beautifully filmed by the director’s wife, Katrien Vermeire. My writing class’s theme yesterday was “horror,” landing on fairy and folk tales as writing prompts. “Rumpelstiltskin” was the story I discussed with a writing partner. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. We were asked, following a clip of Kurt Vonnegut doing this, to map the story’s arc. “Rumpelstiltskin,” we decided, is a series of upward moving jagged lines as the miller’s daughter faces and overcomes a series of reversals. Only one other character is reliable. The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginzburg. I’d hoped she’d live on until Biden was sworn in, but I always overlook the Devil’s Pact these guys must have made. Trump published his list of potential replacements. Tom Cotton? Ted Cruz? Jesus.

A woman, Trump says, taking Cotton and Cruz off the table. Ivanka? More likely a crusader against abortion. Reagan made a neighbor, John Noonan, a federal judge based on his abortion views; he became a crusader against the death penalty, believing appropriately that the Constitution separates Church and state. It may all be overblown. What's being shouted reflects the edge conditions. Shouting “sells papers,” as they used to say. We live at several speeds the unfolding pace of the everyday, the slow motion of intimacy, terror, and boredom (an odd combo, to which I could add fishing and rumination), the repetitive drone of a lot of work life, and the time lapse of revisits, trying to fill gaps in.

In my conversation with the oncologist, he commended my good timing, retiring just before the pandemic. Carlos Casteneda’s Don Juan says that death is our companion. The pandemic accentuates this. Closer experience of the places we inhabit continually reveals new aspects as our sense of them deepens.

My ancient car has a new oil pump and it made a huge difference in its performance. I guess oil pump failure is like heart failure. So, worth waiting for five months for the mechanic to find one.

October 2020 Just had the shortest ever meeting (on Zoom) with the oncologist five minutes? The gist: “Do the test and check in next year. See ya.”

My oldest son and I drove out to the dacha. I focused on the interior (below), although it’s come a long way since May. He was out back chopping branches. At dinner (back home), my wife, who was out on the ridge yesterday, reviewed her own list of things to be done.

Minoru Takeyama died in September, I just learned an early and influential postmodernist whose twin nightclub “towers” were on the covers of Charles Jencks’ early books on postmodernism in architecture. It’s too bad that Jencks died first, as he would have been the ideal person to write his obituary. I met Takeyama when he was a Fulbright Scholar at Berkeley in 1975. We met episodically thereafter. With Roland Barthes, he saw cities as “empires of signs.”

It’s warming up. The power company threatens to cut power off, but not here an advantage of living near the university campus.

An article on the delayed Philip Guston show in TheNewYorker, the critic arguing that Guston painted a kind of atonement, an impulse that takes hold when there’s enough life behind you to examine, especially if it comes back to you at night. Guston made an art of this. Do we have to learn yet again to let artists speak directly? I drove to the dacha, but came back fairly quickly. It was bone dry. I found yet another source for groceries, an ongoing experiment. I’m still not shopping, believing that I fall in the at risk category. I made an exception for the Inverness Park Market the visit before last. I walked to a medical appointment, noting that the most clearly atrisk men on the street wore no masks. The women all wear them or have them close at hand. Until there’s a reliable vaccine, this is my life. My guess is that a vaccine will arrive in the first half of 2021.

Groceries arrived and I made tomatoes and eggs for dinner, using what I picked yesterday. My weekly call with my two writing partners led to a change in plan. Another friend wrote with news of a project we’re pursuing, so a call tomorrow and likely some work in response to it. I took all this in. The windstorm has come and gone.

My wife organized a video call with our younger granddaughter in her carriage. She seemed glad to see me. I picked tomatoes, watered the beans. Will the beans beat the onset of colder weather?

I drove out to Tomales with my oldest son to look at a hotel that’s for sale there. We drove back along the east side of Tomales Bay, a beautiful stretch of road. We stopped at the dacha to look at tree work. They removed trees that were too close to the house, made a wider fire perimeter, and cut down an oak to make more room for another that’s healthier. My old car is built for road trips like this.

Tomorrow may feature high winds. The city told residents in the hills to consider evacuating. Power outages and even water outages are predicted. We’ll see. I’m glad I had a change of scene yesterday.

As I wrote a friend last night, it's not that I lack things to do, but some days I have no real desire to do them. This reflects imbalance or is a sign of it, and I take steps to regain it a constant process.

Call at 10 a.m.; commented on a friend’s fellowship proposal; spoke with a friend in Montréal; listened to the director of California’s Housing and Community Development Agency. Neighbor invited me for a drink. Spoke with my wife, calling from Connecticut. Heard from my sister and her granddaughter (separately).

Meanwhile, the late afternoon sun cuts through the house.

At seven, my daughter and her friend arrived, followed by a mutual friend and neighbor. A dinner, made in stages, of oysters, salad, quinoa, shrimp, and tomatoes. I learned my daughter is now allergic to wine, which she says is likely a passing thing. She had a beer. We discussed books and films. It’s colder now and soon the time will shift and dusk will arrive an hour earlier, another sign of the winter.

A friend wrote about the difficulties that local construction is causing her. I gave up the barn while a small crew worked in my neighbor’s backyard owing to the noise of tools and a radio playing from morning until late afternoon. Now that the work is done, I’m slowly reclaiming the barn.

48 November 2020 The IChinggives me 61, 2 and 6, moving to 3. This is my sense of things. October ends. Life shows what works and what doesn’t.

When something doesn’t, I regret it, but it may be unavoidable. Time may heal things asynchronously, another looking back to see it differently. Thinking this is like Stendhal’s marginal notes to self as he wrote a manuscript at a time when he and his writing were out of favor: “They’ll understand me better in 150 years.” If this does occur at some later point, it will put a karmic close to such chapters. A dream I had did something similar for a relationship that ended badly, providing the missing coda. These small dispensations may come from the gods, household or otherwise. At dinner last night, we discussed books we especially liked. Nabokov was mentioned: Lolita, Pnin, and SpeakMemory. Also Sei Shonagon’s ThePillowBook. And Melville: MobyDickand TheConfidenceMan, the first compared to Shakespeare and the second deemed the first postmodern novel. My daughter and I both mentioned Natalia Ginzburg, particularly her essay, “Winter in Abruzzo.” Beautiful writing as a defect came up in reference to Nabokov. I mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald as a writer whose prose can be beautiful. I was thinking of TheBlueFlowerand Innocence. Someone should film the latter, ideally in my lifetime. A copy of TheBafflerarrived. I subscribed to it by accident, mistaking it for TheBeliever, for which a friend wrote something. I realized my mistake but decided to let it go. The lead bemoans Biden as a candidate. The poems are political. A few years ago, reading Yeats, I noted how his political poems require a familiarity with events that happened decades ago. Perhaps “topical” is a better word than “political” for the way such poems date, despite their initial influence and resonance. The times are a prompt for many writers Expecting a poem to last is an odd ambition. Some poets manage it. They have an eye that looks and a mind that sets out what it sees, situated in a given place and culture yet apart from it.

Pandemic life makes it better to have more light earlier. As the day shifts, I realize how attuned I am to the patterns of light and dark.

Biden may squeak through. (God, I hope so! Too bad about the Senate.) State and local races are a mix.

I had a letter from an admired friend who lives near Seattle. She set her work aside to reply, she said. My daughter wrote me about her setting up a workspace in her house. I have two such spaces, each with its seasons and attributes. The barn is best for reading and for writing in my handwritten diary. I almost only write in it there, but I used to carry it with me on the train, writing poems in it sometimes. Now I’m never on the train, at least for the foreseeable future. The diary sits in the Marimekko bag I carried back and forth for years, my briefcase, also little used now except sometimes to cart books to the barn. On planes, it sits upright and I can pull it out from under a seat with my feet. There was a Marimekko store in San Francisco. When it closed, I bought all the bags in stock. This one has lasted 15 years. I still have three more, which I guess will outlive me. Glanced at election news and saw that voting is going smoothly, despite predictions of disruption. Took down our two signs.

The polls prove not very useful. Everything’s undecided, even locally, with a few exceptions, and the “results” are like tea leaves. My wife, God willing, will be back from the east coast tonight.

A dream in which a schoolmate whose oldest sister is a good friend appears as a dance instructor, younger than she is now, with a persona that’s both herself and the woman who led my recent writing class. As she works with me, others stand in a semi circle above. I ask why they’re there and gesture that they should go, but they stay. She assures me that I have good balance, but the onlookers say that I have vertigo. She intends to appeal, she says. My performance showed that my balance was intact, but then I was never good at floor work, only at the barre, and get vertigo on ladders and in certain other situations. My balance is okay; I tested it based on an article in NewScientist. But interesting that it was her. Glad to find her in my corner.

Election counting at the national level continues. A publicist wrote that "old, male, Caucasian" may work against me. No helping it.

A conversation with a recently married friend. Zoom brings her house into view, with its bass viol, electric basses, and electric piano. I didn’t know that she’s a musician I know her through her work on the performance and education end. The counting continues. It’s heartening that it’s tipping toward Biden and that Trump is losing political support, which leaves him with his inner circle. William Barr, previously so willing to do Trump’s errands, is now MIA.

Vote counting continues. My oldest son and grandson came for dinner. The unfinished nature of things affects me, I realize. Four days after the election, Biden and Harris are finally declared the winners. Trump goes golfing. I was on the phone with my third son, who told me in real time that they’d won and at the same moment I heard my neighbor blaring a boat horn, followed by yelling from elsewhere nearby. There’s now a party up the street, and informal honking motorcades pass in the distance. Although from the moment Biden and Harris pulled ahead in Pennsylvania and Georgia, leaving Trump with North Carolina as the only not yet counted state where he had a still visible plurality, it seemed likely they would win. But you never know, as the cliché has it, so I waited. The Trump juggernaut seems to be dwindling to its actual size as the power of his office slips away from him a tiny inner circle of loyalists, cashing in their remaining chips to get airtime. Every night this week, I prayed to God that Trump would go down in defeat. When I got the news, I was relieved and happy. Four more years of him would be exponentially more damaging than what he’s managed to do since he was first elected.

My blood pressure, in the 140s, is now in the 120s. Coincidence? Watching El Jefe and his courtiers fakenewsing their credulous supporters that they can pull off some kind of reversal and, if that fails, a coup. A schoolmate from my NJ days reposted something on FB suggesting “This is the plan,” but the Four Seasons news conference is indicative of the risible incompetence of Trump’s operatives. Not that he can’t do damage, and not that he won’t.

It’s unfortunate that Biden didn’t win by more, but he won by five million votes and his Electoral College win is equally solid. The spectacle of Trump pissing on it, with senior Republicans standing by and letting it happen, is dismaying. It appears aimed at pulling even more money out of Trump’s diehard fans, supposedly to aid his legal campaign but in fact to aid the RNC and him. Trump’s lawyers have made no real headway in the courts, so it’s time for Biden to go to court to demand that his victory be acknowledged and the transition begun officially. It would be helpful at this point to dispel the talk of a coup that Trump’s actions have sparked. In a funk. I blame the time change, the onset of colder weather, and Trump. It could be worse he could have won, but him pretending to have won is not much better. The sight of his bleating enablers is especially wearing. I ran an errand earlier and observed again that the sketchiest older men are the most likely not to be wearing masks.

Thinking about David Bowie, whose art collection was recently sold. He was a week older than me. “China Girl” is an anti colonial masterpiece. The colonies shedding the colonial powers is one leitmotif of my life. I was raised in a colony by colonials, sang their songs, and waved their flags. It’s discouraging to watch the CCP adopt its version of the British model as it seeks to project power. Not that any power did it well the project is doomed from the start, with an arc that varies in details but has a consistent plot. It’s raining. Gardeners bailed. Looked out to see someone’s unleashed dog crapping in the front garden. Voiced unhappiness. Zoom call. Provisions arrived. Emptied the dishwasher. Read the headlines. Corresponded about a notice I may write. A correspondent from an island off of Maine wrote that her week was, like mine, one big funk. She attributed it to the COVID resurgence and Trump’s bleating that he won. The bleating also got to me, although I know it’s bogus. Last night, I remembered my cousin, who died at 77 of melancholy. It can happen. Forestalling it takes an abiding faith in one’s own work and friendships.

The latest family controversy: to have Thanksgiving or not.

A year ago, I was in Singapore. A photo a writer friend there took appeared today on social media, but I was unable to share it. We had an enjoyable day. I’m glad I made the trip, seeing another writer friend in Melbourne on the way. The paper I gave there is about to be published, I learned last night, in a book about the conference.

My younger granddaughter and her mother. Appearing in my dreams is a city of my own creation, an amalgam of those I’ve experienced. I had a vivid dream last night that included, among other wonderous sights, a long, shimmering, gold colored building with a projected image of a woman singing, and a large truck with articles of clothing that a crowd of people were pulling out of openings in the velvet block of its body. (I’m not sure how to describe this. It’s as if the back of truck was a block of velvet with small openings from which the items of clothing protruded.)

New paintings (left and lower right; top right is by Leigh Wells).

An artist friend, Patricia Sonnino, my undergraduate classmate decades ago, brought over two new paintings, the products of a residency she did recently in Wyoming. I really like them.

This thing I’m writing, looking at 2050, is the height of presumption and also an exercise open to all comers. Who really is an expert? With my discursive nature, I may be the ideal speculator. And I’m unlikely to be present when the time capsule I’m constructing is held up to the scrutiny of those on the scene. “How could he get it so wrong?" We could hold this against 1990′s prognosticators, too. In 1990, commercial real estate was falling apart and developers were going bankrupt. Was anyone thinking about 2020? I doubt it.

A letter from a friend. She mentioned Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts, which I started. It opens brilliantly. As is often the case with me, I

Changes downstairs: Patricia Sonnino's masterpiece on the wall.

I drew flak for inadequately cleaning the steam nozzle tip of the replacement Pavoni, the longevity of which is the household’s latest project. Some irony here, as the previous machine took a beating.

Tamalpais Path has 183 steps. It connects Cordonices Park with Tamalpais Road as it loops around to rejoin Shasta Road. I often walk up them, then on to Shasta Road to turn right and descend. By the time I reach Shasta Road, I no longer sound like someone about to keel over, which is how I sound to myself at the top of those 183 steps and for some distance beyond them.

On a call with my writing partners, we talked about a big fire in downtown Berkeley this past weekend that destroyed the new apartment building designed by a mutual friend. He spent 10 years organizing its development, and it was nearly finished.

Rousing myself, I went for a walk. I passed the Rose Garden and, nearing its tennis courts, heard a man bemoaning their closure: “Someone complained.” Lots of house renovations, many elaborately secured. A sign noted a "dog that bites.” It’s probably a chihuahua.

55 put it down to absorb it. Time to go back to it. The significant other of yet another friend is or was occupying Nelson’s former office at an institution where she taught. When I read this, I thought that the walls must glow a little bit, although I’m unsure in what hue.

Ten years, in my own view, also marks the point at which the parties to an event aren’t who they were when it happened. This doesn’t point to rapprochement necessarily, although it could, but to reality.

I spent most of the day sending out more Christmas letters. I’m now out of stamps. I got a haircut courtesy of my oldest son, who hired a woman to cut his, my, and my grandson’s hair on his deck.

My daughter sent me two wonderful poems. Poesisgalore, and she has a feel for the uncanny for seeing it, as it’s often hidden in the everyday. In the latest ThreepennyReview, I read a truly funny yet moving account by Elizabeth Tennant of poets encountered. I sat with her some years back at a fundraising dinner for this quarterly.

I wrote a Christmas letter, wanting to do something tangible. December 2020 I wrote a new and I think better Christmas letter, putting a bunch in the mail to people who sent cards last year. Others will get them, too, but I kept the envelopes with their return addresses those that I could make out. In the next round, I’ll refer to other sources.

Five days ago, I reached an event’s 10 year mark. I remembered it today in two parts the mark itself and the event. That five days passed before I remembered speaks to distance and absence both. I thought just now how the event transposed an earlier one. Life has these aspects, denouements that betray much of what led up to them, but also reflect other aspects of them, the dilemmas they present or the choices they demand the apparent need to act. If I’d failed to act, what then? Sometimes the apparent need to act is really the need to choose, acknowledge that not acting can’t be sustained.

We had a family Zoom call, Berkeley to the West Midlands. We’ve divvied Thanksgiving up, but pies and turkeys will pass between us.

Lockdown plus fire alert. Bought stamps, mailed out another bunch of Christmas letters. Answered a letter from Zurich, where my correspondent said that COVID is being treated blithely and the spiking is consequently high. The local regulations here are overdone I wrote to my council member to complain.

El Jefe’s histrionics drag the cash in from his followers. I guess it’s of a piece with no masks, it’s all a plot, Wuhan Flu, etc. There’s less there than Scratchers unless you count psychic benefits.

My grandson sums up 2020.

I finally got back to the oral history I’m editing, adding an introduction written by one of its organizers and recasting a preface I wrote earlier. I mailed off yet another bunch of Christmas letters. Each time I think it’s the last, I remember someone I’ve overlooked. A Zoom call with a distant friend, then talking with a gardener about two separate issues involving trees. That kind of day, which consumed time without much product. My distant friend has a nice apartment. I hadn’t seen him in decades. He runs things for a patron who’s slowly losing his marbles. That can’t be easy.

Christmas Eve. We don’t have a tree this year, but there’s holly on the mantle. Someone nearby brought over a ripped open package with two books I ordered for my grandson. I guess the snatcher took a look and tossed it aside in disgust. I hope the word spreads that it’s literary junk not worth fencing. Hasn’t happened before.

Read different people’s thoughts about the post-pandemic in Barron’s. The women thought resilience was the way to go; the men touted bitcoins and digital RMBs, Decline of the West, etc.

I sent three recent poems to PoetryBirmingham. A friend in Singapore wrote that my Christmas letter arrived. I sent out another batch yesterday, pretty much at the end of my list.

An hour or so of conjoined rooms with a friend and neighbor, one of the small dispensations of pandemic life. I read her the three poems I sent PoetryBirmingham. I don’t often read my poems aloud, but when I read them to myself, a kind of voice attaches to them. My friend commented that, hearing the titles, they seemed to concern inbetweenness, and I thought immediately that this was true.

I added poems to my 2020 compendium. I’m thinking of sending three to a journal that takes them through the end of the year. My second son and I discussed this, among other topics, speaking over WhatsApp earlier. I said that while I should probably dive in to see what the journal runs, I never do this. He said he admired my strategy, and I replied, “Don’t you dare call it a strategy!” Then we both laughed. At 73, this is what passes for poetic license.

An unexpected note from a writer in LA, one of two sportswriters for the high school newspaper I edited. I was his first editor mentor, he wrote. (I was 18, he was 16.) His sister took me, a junior, to her senior prom, the most fun I ever had in high school. “Expect a call.”

My older granddaughter having Christmas in Charlottesville. Boxing Day. I wrote to a friend in Melbourne. She said the holiday there is like Black Friday after Thanksgiving here. I started my handwritten diary on Boxing Day 2017, and three years on, what I’ve got to show for it? In 2017, I retired and then went back to work two days a week, stopping in the summer of 2019. When the pandemic hit, a lot of productivity followed in terms of my own work. As I told my friend, I have a clearer idea of what I want to do next.

59 My daughter in law's photo from the West Midlands, UK. I had a note from a poet friend in LA. I’m working on a manuscript of prose pieces, which involves a lot of editing. I tend just to post them on completion. I also have a compendium of poems from 2020 to which I need to add a few more. It doesn’t really feel like New Year’s Eve, but then it barely felt like Christmas this year, either.

January 2021 Fifteen minutes after midnight, 1 January 2021 in Berkeley. At midnight, the noise of New Year’s sounded. Revelry was muted. Editing my prose extravaganza involves constant revision to address my loose thinking, my points lost in thickets of discursiveness. But if Wittgenstein left posterity his blue and brown notebooks, why am I in the least concerned about my own trail of approximations?

The emphases of the wrap up and Christmas letter differ the latter dwelt on things written, but they’re hard to illustrate.

Early this morning, waking from a dream, I saw before the cupboard an angel with an overflowing basket, its bounty offered me. It was there long enough for me to be fully awake before it left. This speaks to what I’ve harvested. Not every day an angel appears.

A few minutes into the new year’s second day. It felt anticlimactic, the first day, following a New Year’s Eve muted almost to the point of disappearance, although some carried on (and were heard). Our emotional lives probably have more in common than anything that nominally divides us, which is also why love crosses those boundaries often enough to be the stuff of plays and novels.

My niece Rachael Carnes' new five part series just started.

From Charlottesville, Portland, Kenosha, and so many other places, it ends up at the Capitol, friendly camaraderie between the Aryan drifters and the paramilitary, beloved of Ivanka (although deleted, like so much else). Not a coup or even an insurrection, but a rave with guns dog whistle and they’ll come. We’ve heard it for four years. And some Republicans express surprise to find someone pissed on their parade. But the seats are cleaned.

It’s comic how I write and post my year-end wrap-ups, then reread them and think of other things to add. In some sense, it’s helpful to sum up a year. “Made it here." I look back and think it wasn’t all bad.

I heard from an East Coast source that only N95 masks are proof against the COVID variant. Cloth masks and surgical masks alone won’t do it in crowded indoor settings. (A surgical mask under a cloth one may work.) The variant is more widespread than the authorities are saying, per the source.

The article in the Postreported on the “chatter,” including their sense that Trump approved of what they were doing, but couldn’t say so directly. Hence the importance of the White House rally why it amounts to incitement. Going after Trump is important, because the more pressure and scrutiny, the better, between now and 20 January. I hope the potential for harm in the Inauguration ceremony is recognized, especially with Pence there and Trump not. My guess is that a mountain is being made of a molehill, but it only takes one berserker to wreak havoc in certain instances, so erring on the side of caution seems advisable. Let the dust settle, then do something to mark the occasion. Meanwhile, counting the days.

I finished Ahouseofairby Penelope Fitzgerald and started her novel, The BeginningofSpring. The day unfolded as aftermath. The IChinggave me hexagram 6, “Conflict,” no moving lines. It seems apropos. I was struck by an article in the WashingtonPost noting that there was considerable warning of Wednesday’s events. No one took it seriously. Events in Portland and Kenosha, and here in Berkeley, too, made it clear that the violence was primarily imported alt right guys with big trucks and guns. Their numbers are small, but it doesn’t take very many of them to cause damage.

A mountain of troops, I see, and El Jefe gets impeached again. I watched AOC describe her ordeal. Congress as she describes it is a toxic work environment on steroids. I’m glad she’s okay. I drove out to the dacha with my oldest son to meet a contractor. Then we drove to a beach to look at the Pacific. It’s one beach over from another where elephant seals are mating. They come down from Alaska for this purpose. “Never get between an elephant seal bull and his mate,” I told my son, but there are apparently tourists hapless enough to try it, so that beach was closed.

Around 3:30 a.m., I dreamt that we were ill something like this and there was a knock on the door and my father, dressed as he was in the early 1980s, pushed it open and, entering, placed pills in my mouth, medicine he’d brought us, but one of the pills was a tiny hourglass a moment glass. I was going to ask my grandson to walk him back, but woke up. “Time is short,” I thought. “Live in the moment. Work as if mortal." I thought of the hexagram “Grace” and its observation, “success in small things.” Writing all this down, I thanked my father for stopping by, as he'd clearly come a long way.

Thinking about this dream, I realize that we contain a psychically younger self who conflates our actual aging self with the parents we

Anything I tweet about housing yesterday, an article about Singapore’s public housing program gets a pile on from Henry George enthusiasts, who see every housing problem as land use I was moved by parts of the inauguration ceremony. Biden gave a good speech and the poet Amanda Gorman’s poem and delivery (and clothes and demeanor) were remarkable. Later in the day, my neighbor, talking with me across our shared driveway, said that she felt such relief a lifted weight. Yes, I replied, I agree.

I watched a 56 minute interview with Interceptjournalist (and my friend) Mara Hvistendahl, discussing the problems of reporting from China, issues of IP theft, spy vs. spy, etc. Then an hour on Zoom with a friend in SF and 75 minutes with one in Montréal. I believe the dacha’s retaining wall was poured today. That kind of day, better because Biden, not Trump.

It’s blustery, to use my daughter’s word, a real Pacific storm. I once arrived in Manhattan on the eve of what the DailyNewscalled a “MONSTER STORM,” but it was just a winter occurrence here. Thank God I no longer have to commute through it. It rains at a slant, vast quantities of water blowing almost sideways if you pick the wrong street, some of which could pass for wind tunnels.

My daughter and I celebrated our birthdays early this evening with my wife’s chocolate cake. My oldest son and his family joined us.

If you want to feel your age, talk with an estate planner. “You can’t take it with you,” nor can you leave it in small, unmarked bills. Me one evening late in January, two weeks into my 75th year.

63 increasingly resemble. But our real parents also figure in dreams, carrying certain messages “from the past” to the present. After my father died, a psychic I know told me that he was increasingly oriented toward the next world late in life. I sense that the porosity of the two worlds becomes more pronounced as you grow older, that more of it bleeds through and is momentarily present like my briefly viewed angel. But the dead have always had a place in my dreams, like Auden telling me, “Give up your European self.”

My old friend Christopher Arnold, dead at 96 from COVID.

Rain again. Glad I got a walk in. I read the PointReyesLight’s weekly county deputy report: three cows on the road, sheep loose. There was a photo of a great white taking out a seal lot of blood.

February 2021 After my standing call with my two writing partners, I walked “uphill and down.” It had been a while since I tackled the 183 steps from Cordonices Park to the bend in Tamalpais Road. Huffing and puffing, but I made it. The whole circuit takes 30 minutes, roughly.

Read Perry Anderson on the EU, which is like the Papal States. Social housing legislation has been introduced by my assembly member, whose housing efforts have been neoliberal, in my view.

The pendulum clock downstairs, which is about three minutes slow in 24 hours, is a metaphor for this need to adjust. In normal times, the sheer amount of movement in an average day obscures the rhythm’s slippage, whereas the current stasis makes it impossible to ignore. I wind the clock every two days and there it is, slow again.

Signed papers, visiting a part of town I hadn’t been in for at least a year. Our oldest son's wife proposed a gathering at the dacha to celebrate its new wall. We met at the dacha in May to celebrate our son's birthday. My only trips away have been to there and vicinity.

My poem in number 10 of the WestMarinReview, just received.

A few indications that COVID vaccines will be available locally, but so far, I don’t have an appointment. At 3:30 p.m., I have to sign papers archaic in this age of digital signatures, but no avoiding it.

Where has a year of transacting so much in life virtually left us? What will continue? What will we abandon?

I submitted a poetry manuscript for the Bergman Prize. A call with my two writing partners, discussing how institutions might change along with our houses after the pandemic. We extended this to apply to centers for work and commerce. Will things return to what they were or take on a different character?

It’s curious how the rhythm of my days has to be regularly retuned.

In passing, my wife said that a family member expressed concern that the vaccines are inadequately tested. Should I hold off? I asked. No, no we’re old, she replied. Then I read in the newspaper of blood count collapses from the vaccine. It’s like reports of shark attacks. Our daughter surfs off Bolinas, around the bend from a white shark breeding ground. It terrifies me, but the odds are the odds. And blood count collapse may be an easier departure than drowning in COVID's hyper pneumonia. My daughter edited this and I looked in our first completed book.

Tomorrow, I get the first of the two COVID vaccines. Mine is through UC Berkeley; my wife booked hers through her doctor, but is trying to get one sooner. Will walk across campus to get mine.

A five day lockdown in Melbourne, I learned. Here, it’s hard to distinguish a lockdown from pandemic normal some double masked, others wearing one around their necks and remembering belatedly to pull it on, and others maskless and proud of the fact.

My wife got her first COVID vaccine at the racetrack, a drive thru arrangement. In theory, we’ll be immune by the end of March, rampant mutations notwithstanding.

At 10 yesterday morning, I walked across campus and stood in a long line waiting to receive the first of two COVID vaccines. My appointment was at 10:45, but I got the shot around 11:15 and then waited for 15 minutes outside to be sure there were no side effects.

To my surprise, I didn’t even feel the shot, and there have been no side effects so far. I walked home. My daughter called in the early evening and then brought half a pizza over that she bought at the Cheeseboard. A long time since we had pizza, and we ate it with gusto, along with a muscadet. My next vaccine is on 10 March.

Trump is acquitted again by his stacked deck jury. Raskin should have called those witnesses, just to rub faces in the shit emerging from Trump’s mouth on 6 January. Now the courts' part of this will gear up with a vengeance, along with his $400 million real estate debt. He’ll hit the road, fundraising “for 2024,” but may be increasingly hobbled by his troubles. Unfortunately, whoever steps in to push him aside could be worse than him. Apparently calling witnesses was problematic. Given a faitaccompli acquittal, the Democrats may not have seen the point. But there was clear evidence, if more were needed, that Trump was enjoying himself at Congress’s expense and heedless of the possibilities the fracas could unleash. That’s of a piece with his pro wrestling history of fake, theatrical disasters. He clearly views the election similarly.

Midday on Valentine’s Day, hoping to talk with my granddaughters. Sent three poems to PoetryBirmingham. An interesting email exchange with a Brooklyn based writer. Come June, it will have been five years since I last set foot in that borough.

Fetched my ancient car. I briefly joined a city meeting by Zoom this morning, learning that it would run on and on with no relationship between the agenda and the clock. My wife told me later, driving me to the mechanic, that this is how it is. “The meetings are hell.” She thinks it’s deliberate, to squelch debate.

The mechanic phoned. They found various problems, including underbody rust. I called the rust guy, who will have a look. I opted not to fix the wonky speedometer (I use the tachometer to gauge freeway speed, based on experience.) My preference would be to keep it running (a 1980 BMW 320i, not the sports model with fancy seats, but wonderful to drive on the winding roads of West Marin).

The call came through. The baby my younger granddaughter sported a topknot, a big smile, and lots of waving. Valentine greetings were exchanged. Vaccines were a topic we’ve had them, they haven’t. Shortages of the vaccines is the problem.

In a talk run through I joined today, I heard an attendee refer to the speaker’s asides as “meta.” I’ve been doing meta my entire life.

“The leading rust specialist in the Bay Area” (I paraphrase) looked around and underneath the car. I anticipate a hefty bill to abate the damage and repaint the car. The mechanic said that emissions rules have upped the price of painting. We’ll see.

Local culture hero Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose bookstore City Lights is one of the planet’s best, is dead at 101.

I went to Oakland to sign papers. My presence was unneeded. The office was cramped and warm, the women masked, but casually. There was an air ionizer, but it didn’t seem to be on. On the way down, I noted that Telegraph Avenue, once the fastest way to get where we were going, has been redone to favor bicyclists. I drove back by a different route. After dinner, I read Ashley Chambers’ The ExquisiteBuoyanciesstraight through, hearing it in my head. My friend Richard Ingersoll on 26 February at his house in Almeira, Spain. He felt that he was recovering, he wrote, and indeed he looks as if he is, but no, he died the next day. Life is this tenuous thing. (He was the founding and longtime editor of DesignBookReview, which my family published. We last saw him in January 2014.)

Sometimes I think about writing longer poems. I did so long ago, but concision is more typical now. There are some long poems I’ve read and liked, but I lean toward shorter ones, even fragments like Heraclitus, if he can be called a poet. I spoke this morning with an author, someone I know vaguely, who asked my advice about a manuscript. Then I watched a presentation by a classmate from graduate school, later a colleague, about her work going back to 2003 and a studio she led at Berkeley.

70 March 2021 When I told my wife that our friend Richard Ingersoll had died, she started crying. Her sister wrote me that she felt sad that she would never see him again. From his friend’s photo, Richard was in some sense whole. What we dread is the drawing out of life or its painful diminution, suffering so that death is finally a release or, more likely, a haze of oblivion, whether induced from outside or our body finding its own resources. Death has to be instinctual. We must in some way come equipped. Grief may be part of this equipment.

I was born between Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) and Richard Ingersoll (b. 1949). Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954) compared our cohort to a Buster Keaton film in which his character escapes death when the façade of a house falls on him because an open window spares him. Koolhaas didn’t completely escape WW2's carnage. On the contrary, it came to him. We are gradually our elders, although some elders are still with us. In a conversation, Koolhaas chided Richard for resisting modern life. That he used that word "modern" is emblematic of our cohort, for which it meant “contemporary.” I shared Richard’s distaste for contemporary life, joined at the hip with neoliberalism and happy to ring fence itself and wreck everything else. You can make a good living embracing it. I did so myself for 40 years. Six poems I sent, in two batches, to PoetryBirmingham, were rejected. The journal’s rejection letter is a model of kindness. Rereading my Bergman Prize manuscript, I found a typo, despite three passes at proofing it a period for a comma. Could be worse.

I heard Mary Jo Bang read from her latest book and then read some new poems part of UC Berkeley’s Lunchtime Poets series.

A friend sent the photo below of my friend Richard Ingersoll’s coffin, strewn with flowers, his partner Patrick Ducasse tending it. The strands attached to the flowers symbolize absent friends like me. Nothing like a coffin to bring home that someone’s dead.

Woke up without any lingering effects from COVID vaccine no. 2. My wife's getting her second vaccine, also hopefully, has had it. She told me that the local grocery store has installed automated checkouts, preparatory to laying off its checkers, many of whom have worked there for more than a decade. She’s not happy.

The idea that an artist’s statement should follow rules strikes me as risible. Do what you want: this is the freedom every artist possesses, to state or not whatever suits her. I don’t write much with a pen, but my art might be served by writing in blood while offering no explanation. The act is a statement all its own. Art does its own stating, and imagination can turn off gravity and switch or mix genders, for example easily done, like running the reel backward so every atrocity ends well, the little boy saved with his mother and her hidden baby, the men sent away, the war not started. Reverse the reel, oh Lord, I pray! Undo every untoward finality!

Dragging, although now not quite so much. I napped for an hour this morning, finally took an ibuprofen, which helped. The brain fog of the second vaccine is finally lifting like a tiny flu, maybe. A late afternoon nap worked wonders.

At 10 to 10 a.m., I walked across campus to Pauley Ballroom to get my second vaccination. A month ago, it took me 40 minutes to get in. Today, there was no line and I was out the door a minute before my appointment time. What about all those others, I wondered? I immediately took a nap once back home, but I think this was owing to rising early rather than a reaction to the vaccine. We’ll see.

A friend sent me two snippets of herself via Marco Polo, which I watched and to which I listened.

A long dream about “marketing espionage.” An old boss appeared, aged cinematically in the dream now like a dowager empress. The espionage theme played out with a cloaked informant, a reference to something I read last night about Walker Evans’ clandestine subway photos. It’s funny how dreams soak everything up.

I woke up thinking of an essay. The title as I wrote it down is “On Making Sense.” What went through my mind is the way the normal process by which we make sense of things is subverted now by ideological filters that view discussion as resistance and argument as apostasy. This is so widespread a phenomenon that I’ll have to narrow down my examples. A corollary, especially in California, is that what’s presented as progressive proves to be in the interest of big players, eager to run over the kinds of family, ethnic, or local ties that interfere with their plans to redevelop any valuable site they can get their hands on. And this is applauded by people who have no idea (or ignore) what’s behind these plans and their likely outcomes.

A memory from almost 17 years ago leads me to track down its source. The baby in question is a year older than my grandson. At noon, I talked with a friend and his wife. They live a few towns away, and we usually met for breakfast or for coffee, but haven’t done so for more than a year. The violence against Asians here distresses me. I was glad to see a social-media acquaintance engage a local food critic for a “conversation between POC.” Solidarity is a good thing. I blame the Asian bias on Trump. I blame him for all the biases he fanned so wantonly in an effort to create a base of white voters tied to him by their fears of “other.” I’m afraid of them.

My oldest son explained that the digital artwork that sold for millions came with a bitcoin like authentication, which makes me think that its real use is as a vehicle for bribery and money laundering more convenient than having to warehouse artwork or ship it around. My artwork, mostly digital, remains “priceless.”

I was amused by the tit for tat nature of an exchange between Biden and Putin. Biden called Putin a killer, but it would be more accurate to compare him to the Borgias. Biden is a killer, too, just as Putin pointed out, but Putin is a poisoner who pursues his political enemies. Biden’s killing has the cover of warfare. Tit for tat also dominated our Alaskan exchange with the CCP, but that seemed more like a ritual, necessary to both sides in order to get beyond it.

A friend who, among many other things, is a poet of remarkable talent, wondered aloud on Twitter if one of those other things has killed off her poetic spark. That spark can go dormant, because poetry has its seasons, but it will be back. Her poems are wondrous. I barely made a 10 a.m. call with a friend in SF, still wearing my socks, propped sideways and louche, I thought later, glancing at myself in the Zoom mirror. Pull yourself together, I thought.

I heard four poets. Ashley Chambers (below) read last, revealing a landscape or its physics and metaphysics. In places, she sang.

After listening to the four poets read, I looked at my manuscript, wondering if it was more than a selection. My poems are tethered to experience rather than imagination. Or perhaps my imagination makes something of experience. Making sense of it is their theme and situating myself within experience is why they get written.

Three Zoom calls. The second was a book event a friend read from his new novel. The woman who served as his foil was maddening. Her questions were fine, but each time she posed one, she spouted off effusively, with spoilers. I went for a walk between calls. Tomorrow I have an early 90 minute call, then the day is open.

Dinner with friends in the Oakland hills. They gave my wife Platdu Jour, a cookbook. We discussed who got and who won’t get vaccinated. We have, hence the dinner, indoors and maskless. I drove back by instinct, eventually reaching the main road.

At five, I met my oldest son and my cousin to discuss the ridge house. A case of wine was delivered. A copy of PoetryBirmingham LiteraryJournalcame in the mail and I’m reading it closely. One of the editors inserted a note thanking me for subscribing from such a distance. Well worth reading, based on “so far.”

Ashley Chambers reading “The Exquisite Buoyancies” at the Bellingham Free Library. The Instagram feed was a little choppy. I started inventorying my digital photo-collages. There are many. I also worked on a small book of poems, now titled “Dance Card.”

A second dream in which I find myself condemned to death without a reprieve, although I ask for one. Like the first dream, death feels like an unwarranted sentence for what has nominally led to it. Waking, I thought that the idea of original sin may come down to our instinct to reproduce and the fact of death, although we’re born innocent. (Yet we arrive with our fundamental natures in hand, I would say, based on observing my children as newborns.)

Easter dinner tomorrow for family a bigger crowd than at Christmas. (Did we celebrate it last year? I can’t remember.) My daughter came by at midday. We’d been texting back and forth.

76 April 2021

It was wonderful to have a real family dinner on Easter. A neighbor, a Fulbright scholar from Lisbon, joined us. Her field is forestry and

I watched a conversation between two specialists on public space, taking notes, then watched a lecture by an architect from Chicago. I agreed to help salvage an online journal on which I worked two decades ago. Another editor tracked down part of the contents and I offered to put the issues back together and find a way to get them back. I went for a walk and ran into a friend and neighbor, who gave me the catalogue of an exhibit he co curated a remarkable project. Took my ancient car to the rust guy to give it a new floor. Saw a poet read his work. He noted the exact form of each poem, but the differences, when I heard them, eluded me. Continued to inventory my photo collages; in 2013, I made a lot of them. (One is below.)

she’s doing an experiment with pathogens on alders and another tree whose name I didn’t catch. Both trees grow here and also in Portugal. Her significant other is from Macao, and an animated conversation ensued about that city between her and my daughter in law, who often visited it when she lived in Hong Kong. My daughter is rebuilding her gallery and cultural space in San Francisco. Her photo (below) reminds me of Pound’s second canto, as the gallery's previous incarnation was kidnapped by pirates.

A letter from my sister led me to consider my father’s career. We made big changes at 50, disillusioned with what we were doing. We figured out how to apply what we knew in new and more rewarding contexts. We were stymied by the political nature of work. He was careless about his health, and that negative example made me more careful or perhaps more aware that carelessness has a price.

I spent the day putting together a six-by-nine-inch version of my Bergman Prize manuscript. The rust guy found more holes on the underside of my car, but the work is progressing. Not surprised. It spent its early years at Tahoe that was my mechanic's speculation.

We had our first dinner party with friends seven people around the table, the first such gathering in 13 or 14 months. My wife made a pork roast, which took its sweet time cooking, but was wonderful.

My daughter and our mutual friend and neighbor brought dinner over last night shrimp, artichokes, and fennel plus a salad, washed down with Soave classico. We ate in the back garden. It was warm yesterday, into the early evening, and we made it to dusk before it got too chilly. The setting is quite idyllic, we all noted.

A distant friend recounted a terrifying walk home, dogged by a predatory man. She saw him off, but terror is terror.

Why "knickers in a twist" when men are so much more vulnerable?

My wife is away, so I watered her plants with watering cans, as there's no hose in her garden across the street and the back garden’s hose won’t reach a bed she planted behind the barn. Having grown up on PeterRabbit, I have an affection for watering cans.

Two of the friends have stopped drinking, and the others drank moderately, I observed, compared to the past. My daughter and I decided to add publishing to the offerings of our editorial studio.

I was very glad to learn that a friend in Austin now has a Ph.D. in anthropology and just published a journal article, two important steps in what I foresee will be a consequential academic career.

My riff on Art Gensler’s “theory of the firm” posted this morning. New neighbors across the street, a couple with two young children. I’ve met the husband and early this evening, I waved to the kids, who waved back. The parents bought a house built in 1898. I was relieved it wasn’t bought by a flipper. This family will live in the house and renovate it over time. We did the same in our house, built in 1902, raising our four kids under its roof. We lived through a seismic upgrade that put the house on jacks. Watching that process was hair raising. The guy running the job didn’t speak Spanish; his crew didn’t speak English. He communicated by whistling.

Waking early, I found an email from a journalist in NYC. We had an exchange. Then I had a text from a journalist in SF. We spoke on the phone. Art Gensler was the topic. In my second conversation, we discussed a recent interview with Norman Foster. Both had an enthusiasm about life that you don’t often see in older men.

Art Gensler, the founder of the company that last employed me, died last night. He was the smartest architect I ever knew, building a firm that grew from three people to seven thousand. He hired me and we worked together on editorial projects for a decade, then others emerged to lead the firm and I worked with them. He was the employer I most respected and that respect was reciprocated as trust in what I did and a willingness to give me more of it to do.

79 May 2021

I’m thinking of writing something on the theme, “One Continuous Mistake,” a Zen saying that Gail Sher compared to writing, but which can also be applied to life, leading me to consider what might be called a redemptive theory of life. We’ll see if I embark on this.

Dreamt my former firm saw off an internal, Q Anon like attack, then dreamt I owned an old house whose top story had a glass floor painted to look like wood. Not good in an earthquake, I thought.

WhoPlayedwithFire.

At six, two friends came over. We talked in the back garden until it got dark and cool. My repainted car was ready and I picked it up today.

June Something2021 like society has returned we hosted family dinners Friday and Sunday. I spoke by Zoom with a friend this morning, and we agreed our next meeting will be at a café. I had lunch today with my former colleagues. The hosts live “through the tunnel,” which is to say on the other side of the hills that separate the inner ring around San Francisco Bay from the inland that stretches across the Central Valley to the Sierras. Their house is a villa, really, designed for entertaining. This was the first lunch I’ve attended outside of immediate family and a few friends who live nearby since the pandemic flared up in March 2020.

The day began with a nightmare derived from the film TheGirl

In discussing her recent work, the Russian poet Maria Stepanova said that her poem “Spolia” expresses her love for Russia despite all that is, when so many others have given up. In the 1980s, I saw an exhibit of Russian avant garde art at LACMA, feeling that the work before the October Revolution was more interesting than after, when the artists struggled to make their art politically useful.

At the dacha with Hal and Chuck Davis, trying to figure out the unfinished third phase of Daniel Liebermann's design for it.

If Putin is a czar, more or less, will his benighted regime result in great art? I don’t have an answer, but pose the question.

My daughter and my oldest son came for dinner. I wrote to friends in Bangkok and Melbourne. I worked on editing the third of my four small books. I went to the farmers' market, buying apricots, strawberries, and blueberries. We had the strawberries for dessert.

My second year design professor, Leslie Laskey, died a few days short of 100. He was in his studio painting earlier this spring.

I received an immediate reply from a friend, a sensory artist, who moved recently in Bangkok. I texted to ask where she was. We met when her father started a conversation with me at SFMOMA. She was an art student at Berkeley at the time. We've kept in touch despite her moving to LA, twice meeting when she visited here.

I went through folders in the barn to unearth things written. This is always interesting; the barn is something of an archive.

I was struck by this photo of partying celebrants in Beijing’s great square in June 1989. What a contrast to today's puritanical empire in the Victorian mode, all dreadnoughts and neo imperialism.

My friend Thomas Gordon Smith died. I first met him at Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley, where he studied with Joseph Esherick. He sat next to a friend in that studio and she introduced us. He rescued the architecture school at Notre Dame, reviving it with classicism. His Richmond Hill House is my favorite postmodernist work. I'm writing an introduction to his drawing archive for his wife Marika. “No cryogenics!” I told my wife after reading an account of it in the style section of the Sunday NYT. (Why there? Is it stylish now?)

We had dinner with our daughter at Corso, a restaurant that folded in the pandemic but was revived and miraculously is pretty much as it was. But I’d forgotten to order a salad instead a vegetarian entrée.

When her mother died, I observed the husk of that 99 year old body. To awake still encased in it would be the cruelest fate. Anyway, Swedenborg assures us that we step into the Hereafter’s vestibule intact, so much so that in some cases angels have to persuade us that we’re in their world, not our own. Where we go next, he says, depends on our desires. The angels do their best to persuade us to desire goodness, but it doesn’t always take. Those with base desires find the light of heaven unbearable. They’re unable to dissemble except to those suffering from the same delusions as a dispensation, they appear quite normal to each other.

A likely cause of death at a certain point is sheer dismay as everything slips away. The adjective “antediluvian” occurred to me earlier I seem even to myself to have lived before the Flood or Deluge, whatever it is that dogs us. The sight of the CCP Emperor decked out as Mao could anything be more depressing? Even the King of Pyongyang is more of a truthteller. At home, we went from “cupboards are bare” to “produce in abundance.” This oscillation is typical, as the crowds vary at the markets and we still try to avoid the press, since God only knows what’s about, in reality. Still, we had our dinner out, a wonderful occasion. Maybe Chez Panisse again in the autumn? Went to a picnic, held indoors, at the studio of the fine-art book printer Peter Koch, impresario of the CODEX fine art book biennales, on 4 July. My daughter has been working on a new book of poems at his studio. The photo is by Christopher Stinehour. Peter is third from the left, in profile and in black, wearing glasses.

84 July 2021

There’s a huge fog bank. It's also fogged in on the ridge. I’ve started going to the farmers' market on Thursdays, an activity I’d dropped.

The book a work of many hands. Jan Zwicky is the poet, if memory serves. This photo is also by Christopher Stinehour. My friend Rocky Hanish, visiting from Phoenix, took this photo. He brought me a framed picture he made, now on the bookshelf.

I read more of SnowCountry, then started Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Hideyoshi. I once took a Japanese history course, but it was a survey, drawing on Sansom’s shorter book. This is a deep dive.

An exceptionally noisy plane lumbered past. The Nextdoor feed I glanced at the headlines said it was the latest warplane. Bark worse than its bite? It will definitely be heard. I seem to be modern and postmodern at once. This may reflect the fact that I’m the child of moderns and encountered postmodernism as an emerging phenomenon. I don’t think postmodernism is really new. It looks back to Vico and Dada. The moderns seem most liberated in literature, early on, and my sympathy for it is literary.

An interesting review of a book on Simone Weil in the LRB. “Pray your daughter isn’t a saint,” her mother said. My sister sent a manuscript that she wants to turn into a book.

I read a review of the Cézanne show at MoMA, which sparked some ideas around close observation. My daughter came by and we talked at some length. I went through my four small books, sort of taking them in. They’re not quite done, but they speak to my love of producing books, especially when I can control the process.

It seems to me that postmodernism, in its hostility to grand narratives, exults in many smaller ones, and as these accumulate, they become malignant or, if benign, stillborn. This isn’t inevitable, of course, and grand narratives often deserve the reservations set out in the smaller ones. Perhaps this is really just a dialectal process?

I found an old notebook, started just before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006. (The diagnosis appears, written down not long after I received it.) The notebook records something I wanted to write back then about the mortal sins. There are notes on a projected novella that ended up as a two part story, completed last year, then recently edited yet again. I’m thinking of writing on the Decalogue, Buddhist precepts, and 12 Steps: “Instruction Manuals.”

Dinner tonight with family friends. I started Simone Weil’s polemic against political parties. A friend posted an explanation of Weil's personal theology, focused on the person of Jesus. By coincidence, I wrote a similar post a few days ago, marveling at how the Church could depart so dramatically from its founder, like some Buddhist sects, also. Reformers emerge episodically. She may have been one.

87 My daughter's photo of my friends Rocky Hanish and Peiting Li at her soon to open Pallas bookstore and gallery in San Francisco.

Reading chapters of several books reminded me how hard it is to find any particular one in my library. (HeavenlyMansionsby John Summerson, where is it?) Summerson's TheClassicalLanguageof Architectureis one of several books the late Richard Ingersoll asked me to keep for him when he left to teach at Rice University. Well, he’s not coming back for them, I regretfully conclude.

August 2021 I finally met Ashley Chambers, the poet, writer, filmmaker, and actress with whom I’ve corresponded over several years. She had a harrowing drive through two wildfires a side trip to Lake Tahoe, misled by her phone. She came over and we talked in the barn. My wife and our daughter at my wife's birthday party.

Parking on my block is now so tight that people jump into your space when you leave. That’s new. It’s like parts of San Francisco. I went out to the dacha to measure the base of an unfinished part of it, a complex thing elliptical, but with a lot of circular appendages and some level changes. Its four supporting columns for the roof beams are offset within the ellipse and in relation to the roof’s main support. A letter from a friend in Portland who writes episodically; her letters are wonderful whenever they arrive.

Also working with my daughter on posters for her gallery. Ashley Chambers made collages of two of her sketches, and I made posters of them as well as the sketches, using the format of a gallery poster I brought back from Paris in 1977. On Friday, there’s a dinner with the orchestrators of the oral history I’m editing at the house of its subject. He and I had dinner earlier with my oldest son and my daughter, to discuss the ridge house. A field trip will follow.

I’m editing two texts for a family member handwritten, which takes some deciphering. (I’m typing them out so I can edit them.)

A new walking route, more aerobic than the last one.

My daughter, our oldest son, his wife, and our grandson on the first evening of our daughter's bookstore and gallery's opening. It has a raw floor, a high, exposed ceiling with remnants of a hung ceiling’s supporting structure, and millwork made from lumber stacked up at the dacha. Some of the artifacts came from there, including a remarkable fragment of a gutter, weathered and slightly bowed. This was my first visit to San Francisco since February 2020. Awaiting the impending visit of my third son, his cousin, and their families four parents, six kids ages six and under. My wife brought toys over from the garage across the street. The house isn’t really set up for a crawling one year old, so I anticipate adjustments.

(COVID slipped in, affecting the Millennial women. "The worst flu" was one description; two lost their senses of smell and taste. They all recovered. Neither the kids nor the elders got it. The kids all arrived with colds, which made it harder to sort COVID out.)

At 1 p.m., I spoke by Zoom with my former undergraduate classmate in Montréal. At one point, he expressed doubt that we’d ever meet face to face. He may be right. Then Marika, the widow of Thomas Gordon Smith, came by, visiting from South Bend. They were both originally from here. We sat and talked in the barn.

Readjusting to everyday life without visiting adult children and their kids. The song, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,” beloved of my younger granddaughter, is slowly leaving my head.

I read a chapter of a book by Kevin Lynch, then one by Umberto Eco, and finally more of the opening chapter, “Economy,” of Walden, which I’d started long ago. Lynch was for a paper.

Along with subatomic particles, quantum theory describes how we are to each other ungraspable and innately unreliable despite our desire to be open and stalwart (for example). That we are also this way to ourselves rounds out our tragicomic nature.

I have a sore throat. It spiked last night, so I dropped into One Medical, learning that unlike its testing regime it’s not drop in for consultations. I have an appointment tomorrow morning. I messaged my doctor in SF, who said I should also get a COVID test, so I booked it. That was surprisingly easy to do it, using a state website, and the appointment is sooner than expected. Meanwhile, I'm drinking lemon ginger tea like it’s going out of style.

My sore throat is nearly gone. Today is “market day” walking down to the farmers' market has become part of weekly life. It’s warm and sunny. A writer friend in Singapore has a new daughter.

We invoke the past to take yet another look annotating it, trying to reshape or repurpose it. It's a manuscript to which we return and on which we layer appended thoughts, some of them images only.

My sore throat is better. I went to the clinic, where I was told it’s probably not strep. They also did a COVID test, so I don’t have to drive to west Berkeley to get one. Results “in a few days,” but they don’t think I have it. Stopped at a local vitamin emporium to buy more Vitamin C, zinc tabs, and a homeopathic cold remedy. Most people are wearing masks now, walking about.

My daughter in law provided a remedy for a sore throat: Drink lemon juice squeezed from fresh lemons. Half an hour later, take 10 mg of zinc, four 500 mg tabs of vitamin C, and 20 drops of echinacea dissolved in tea. (I used a jasmine green tea.) Repeat the zinc and vitamin C twice a day, with or without lemon juice depending on how your throat feels. Repeat the tea with echinacea three times a day. (If your throat is particularly bad, get checked for strep.) This knocked it down in 24 hours and worked a cure in 48. I learned from my cousin that his brother’s wife died of COVID. Decades since I last saw him, but his wife was on social media and I had a sense of them both from that. It's still going around, clearly. A poet told me she always writes first thing in the morning so the exigencies of the day don’t get in her way. I almost never write poems in the morning. I’m with Joanne Kyger in this respect.

I found a big collection of poems in English, Chaucer (more or less) forward, and read some of Robert Frost. I memorized a Frost poem as a kid, but it wasn’t among those I read. I started reading backward poets who are roughly my contemporaries but then I jumped over them and others, curious about Frost, whose lines are famous but not previously read by me in their full context.

Photo booth sequence, summer of ‘74. September 2021 Coffee with a friend and neighbor this morning, recently back from Paris. Then a call with my writing partners at 1 p.m. An article I drafted on Saturday had a better reception than I expected. At 3 p.m., I got a much needed (and much delayed) haircut. A request to review the index of a book for which I’ve been an advisor. Will look. Texas invades the bodies of fecund women. Trump's quintet on the Supreme Court greenlights it while it's before lower courts. “Settled law” is how the second of his appointees described what Texas has decided to dismantle. Now it's taking a torch to voting rights.

My second son’s birthday. He lives in the West Midlands, where he settled after doing his graduate work in Birmingham. He has an interesting career that increasingly works social issues in. He does stand up comedy. He’s much taller than me and has a stentorian voice. I had a sore throat a few weeks ago. My voice fell an octave and one of his brothers said, “You sound just like him.”

A long article in the FTsaying, in essence, that leisure should attend to the present moment and let the consequences of that attention follow in their own time. It also argued for accepting the limits of the time at our disposal. A life of 80 years, it said, is about 4,000 weeks long. I’ve blown through a lot of them.

Watching our 16 year old grandson blow out his birthday candles, the first of two birthdays this month among our grandchildren.

"The world doesn’t exist to amplify or exemplify our own preexisting tastes, values, or predilections. It simply exists." This quote from Maggie Nelson is a note to self. When a remembered place is only encountered episodically, its changes are magnified. People die and we accept it, but places seem like they should fall in a different category, despite ample evidence to the contrary closer to home. Plans are made to return to the ridge. Saturday is the week's best newspaper day. The FT’s magazine is much better now that Jo Ellison is editing it. Color and pizzaz are the order of the day. The Chinese Communist Party is attacking “male flamboyance.” which has a long history in men’s fashion, plus Orlando, for God’s sake. The CCP acts and talks like some dreadful Mother Superior. A dinner for family friends, my wife’s middle sister, and her husband. My wife made duck and her sister brought a cake made with pears bought yesterday at the farmers' market. I served a Beaujolais rosé. It was really good and great to see people. My wife went to the de Young Museum and the Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco. I haven’t been to the de Young in ages.

I woke up thinking that Charles de Gaulle is Boris Johnson’s inspiration and he’s a better touchstone for Macron than Napoléon Bonaparte. China and Russia are playing a 19th century game, so you have to look back to it to see what might be relevant.

When I moved here decades ago, it rained from October through March. Then there was a drought in 1977, and we’ve had them episodically ever since. The last really big one lasted for four years, doing huge damage. If this is how it is, then our ecology will shift. The family’s dacha and its environs exemplify what this looks like. A day punctuated by two conversations, one distant and virtual, and the other local and face to face. Both featured a sukkah. In the second, we sat inside one; in the first, my friend showed me its interior, focusing on a roof with a sort of Christmas tree motif. He noted how the holidays converge in this period. My wife’s younger sister phoned, just returned from France. “I want to talk with my sisters,” she said. I’d seen one of her sisters walk by earlier. I fetched the other. Our conversations consist of a few minutes of repartee, and then I fetch my wife, who later recounts the news received.

I wrote this short geopolitical thing, "Force de Frappe." Charles de Gaulle came to mind owing to the recent Australia UK US tie up.

I wrote a birthday poem in the Ted Hughes sense. Somewhat in advance, greetings for the annual marker to the one so marked.

Our older granddaughter turned four a week after our grandson turned 16. (Her sister had her first birthday in June.)

On Zoom this morning with a friend in Manhattan and, briefly, his wife. Then on the phone with my second son in Dudley in the West Midlands. Late in the day, I reopened an essay I started, thinking I would abandon it, but I ended up extending it. I wrote a friend in Singapore, and received a letter from a friend in Zurich. A friend and neighbor here who’s moving to Los Angeles wrote a general plea to help her find a place in that city, which I forwarded to half a dozen people I know well there. Two have replied so far. Nothing goes unobserved, but I tend to touch on it as I anticipate it and then look back as it slides by. I’m always looking back, as there is much to consider. Anticipation is an unexpected letter or a call out of the blue, healing a breach the way the earth does, too.

My friend Rocky Hanish's book arrived and I read through it. A post I wrote with two others drew 500 readers the editor told me. October 2021 I went out to the dacha with my cousin and my oldest son to check some measurements and then have lunch on the deck. Some Bishop Pines had fallen over, blocking the drive where my wife parks her car. She wasn’t happy to hear this. The last part of the drive is steep and arduous, but there are no trees at the top. A dilemma. A letter from a friend thanking me for one I sent to her. It's pinned on the wall above her desk, she wrote. From a correspondent, that’s all you can ask. My oldest son asked about our family's history. I found two family trees compiled by Norwegian cousins, tracing things back 13 generations to an ancestor who lived in Heidelberg. I looked out a window and saw a crescent moon slipping below the horizon, south of where it was not long ago. The planet’s tilting and soon it will be winter. I had coffee with a friend who’s moving to L.A. Better weather there, I told her warmer in the winter.

I read an article comparing the US rivalry with China to the UK’s rivalry with the US in the Edwardian period. It argued that this is a better analogy than the Cold War. My oldest son and I will drive out to the dacha tomorrow to meet a woman who’s been looking at the landscaping. She designed our garden. The dacha has extensive, terraced grounds, planted in the past but never finished.

Annual oncologist call. My test score’s unchanged (and on the low, low end). Did some other lab tests also good, per my GP.

My great grandparents’ silver anniversary. My grandfather, 17, is second from the left in the top row. Taken in 1893. These facts and the photo were sent from Bergen by my cousin, Gunnar Parmann, I much admire China's creative energy, but its ruling party is a hotbed of prejudice, belligerence, and homophobia like our recently departed El Jefe, but the CCP makes him look like the incompetent idiot he is. The CCP’s model is a mashup of Stalin and Victorian imperialism. Hassling gays, tearing up its agreements with HK, suppressing minorities, pretending the South China Sea is its territory, forcing itself on Taiwan: the CCP is repugnant. I’ve resumed going to the produce market every few days to stock up on fruit and other things. It's a cross-section of local humanity. The prices are better than the farmers' market that’s held near my house, but I still walk down there once a week to see what’s in season.

Someone I follow’s tweets report from a poetic landscape.

I tried my luck with diplomacy, but no dice. I worked another angle to end this standoff down the street. A lot of insults hurled at me and two others, one with a heart condition. An insult aimed at me referred to an incident from 1996, but she stretched its duration from two days to two years stretched it like Pinocchio. My daughter texted after staying at the dacha that the night was wild and cold. It sits at the edge of a ridge about half a mile from the ocean, so it's not surprising that the wind kicks up. We need as much rain as we can get the reservoir closest to the ridge is way down, and others in the region are nearly empty.

Interesting conversation at the dacha with the garden designer on what’s native and what isn’t, what makes it through the long, arid months and what comes back when the rains begin. I drove my ancient car, happy to hit the winding roads for which it was built.

At 7:30 this morning, an unidentified neighbor was robbed by a trio, one armed with a sawed off shotgun, on a side street little more than a block away. Two of them were caught and a third is at large, but it’s typical of this sort of crime that people drive in, lay in wait, strike, and drive away. What’s unusual is the hour more often, it’s in the early evening, when people are walking home from the university or from the train. This is urban life, of course. We’re the prey.

The alehouse that my second son and his wife are restoring behind their 1840s era house in Dudley, in the orbit of Birmingham, UK. I wrote to a distant friend, recounting how I left a Ph.D. program after giving it one more year. That year was interesting I had a fellowship, and my wife and I spent four months in Europe with a two-year-old. I wasn’t equipped to do a Ph.D. I would take up a topic, write about it, and want to move on to something else. When I stopped working fulltime, one of the topics was topical again, so I wrote about it. It reminded me that I would never have had the patience to write a dissertation. My friend’s program, made worse by lockdown, seems to overemphasize team projects at the expense of research and application. Some teamwork is valid and valuable, but not as a steady diet. Little wonder she finds it exasperating. A slow day. “Atmospheric pressure,” I tell myself. I have perhaps six books in motion, but then nothing gets read and parts of the day are a blank. Blaming this on the weather is silly yet accurate it really does affect me, particularly the approach of winter. In the past, the pull of imposed work compensated by overriding all else.

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101

Lull between storms. My daughter came by briefly. Working on her gallery really suits her. I had a letter from a friend in Shanghai, wonderful to receive. A friend in Singapore turned 31 and I wished her happy birthday four times in different media. Another friend, now living in LA, posted photos that suggest she likes it. Her apartment looks nice, too.

Frederick Seidel’s comment about the way a poem takes your intention and goes sideways (in so many words) is accurate.

The US Geodetic Survey just published a lengthy report on the Hayward Fault, which runs north south about two blocks uphill from us. We’ve reinforced the house, but need to lay in equipment and supplies and anchor the bookcases so they don’t topple.

A summer’s worth of others’ photos made me wonder if I’ve lost the capacity to enjoy places without a more specific tie. Some cities are exceptions if I know them and can seek things out. Otherwise, it’s particular people I miss. Life is mostly acquaintances. Love breaks through, then it breaks down and the lovers, estranged, become strangers or acquaintances. There are exceptions some are friends. It’s surprising who proves to be. And life too has its surprises.

I looked out a window and saw the rain moving in sheets, pushed by the wind, so it’s a squall.

It started to rain, but not heavily. The gardener wrote, telling me to turn off the irrigation, which I did.

At 2:30 p.m., I met a friend from San Francisco and toured two adjoining buildings in downtown Berkeley: affordable multi family housing and a homeless navigation center. The latter includes a shelter that will kick the homeless out every morning, with no ability to store their belongings, forced to wangle their way back in to stay longer. This dreadful pattern is one reason being homeless is so hard on people, especially in the winter. They could better use that time to regroup physically and mentally, and perhaps improve their situations. The rest of the project aims at this, so the difference is telling. There’s also a roof terrace with wonderful views that can’t be used as such because they don’t have the money to finish it out. It’s cruel to have something so obviously attractive that you can look out at but can’t access. They should crowdsource upgrading it and the city should insist that they shelter people humanely.

Reading in the evening is a walk through the randomness of what the day brought: newspapers, circulars, journals. An aged critic praises Trump and denies that anything happened. A venomous French collaborator’s manuscripts are found and his family sues the one who kept them. The publishers circle. Poems and prizes for poems float by. Entrepreneurs are celebrated, each a version of the previous cohort. The kitchen blinds are lowered, but the sideways view is intact, so, semi-transparency. I wrote a longer poem than usual. Its sources include a photo of Matisse at his desk. I bought new curtains for a window in an upstairs room. The old ones had holes. I found my plan for the garden remnant behind the barn, which I sent to the garden designer. It’s crude, but it explains my intent. My neighbor gave me two copies of a memoir. One is a “first US edition,” but the paperback is easier to read. She’s culling books while I’m wondering how to add shelves.

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Out back, a loud party continues, the music a repetitious overlay.

A dinner party with two artist friends (a couple) and their gallerist and his wife. It was first discussed late in 2019 when I visited the gallery, so, considerably delayed. But here we were. The gallerist brought a water color by one of the artists that I bought from a group show that I didn’t see. (I bought it after seeing it online.)

The WSJnoted that office work is distracting. Breaking news. The election results suggest that the GOP is starting to break loose from Trump’s grip and move back to the center but a different center. Biden is closer to the old one than the new one, but still arguably a centrist in a party that’s split again after being briefly united. If Trump runs in 2024, he will probably reunite them. If he doesn’t run, it will be a contest in the primaries between known fascists like Tom Cotton and a new generation of GOP centrists.

The final version of my sister's book arrived my summer project. November 2021 Halloween came and went: a few small children and their parents. My wife reported hordes of them on the other side of town.

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Quarantine is an instance of time measured, I thought. “No sex for 10 days I want a clean reading,” an oncologist said re: the marker test for prostate cancer that I do every year. This was 11 years and some months ago. “You’ll recover in a few weeks,” he added, which was only partly true. I recovered from the treatment in stages. It took about five years, not unlike recovering from love gone south.

Yesterday's meetings. The first went well. The second, with an old friend, was more social, although he’s a planner and we talked shop. He brought a jar of pesto his wife made with basil from their garden. It’s really good. This morning, I had a 90 minute call with a friend in Manhattan. At noon, I went to the open studio events of two artist friends, running into a third who told me that he and a fourth artist friend are having a show in Oakland along with yet another “architect who’s also an artist,” the show’s theme. I bought a small piece from one of the artists, but left it for her to display. Then I went grocery shopping. I was aced out of a parking place unfairly, in my view but at the market, a woman with a cartload of food let me get in front of her in the queue. I thanked her, noting that this was recompense for someone else’s bad karma.

The Sunday NYThad a quiz to determine one's political leanings. It tried to gloss the political differences within the two main parties, but it missed the nuances, which exist probably because we only have two main parties. I signed up for a course on Czeslaw Milosz led by Robert Hass. It starts in January. I bought wine for Thanksgiving. It’s a measure of the pandemic’s after effects that I had it delivered. Speaking of which, I need to get a booster shot. I need one for tetanus, also.

104 The latter could do better against split Democrats. Biden will be in his mid 80s. I don’t see Harris being strong enough to claim the nomination, so it may be Biden again by default. Absent an openly fascist opponent, I'm not sure he’ll prevail. In 2028, Democratic Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez will be in the running. That will be interesting. Trump (and Cotton, too, hopefully) should be history, the GOP re emerging as a center right party.

My wife and oldest son brought back some things she bought at a sale at a nearby house, its owner moving across the street from us. I went up there, but the sale stopped at four. There was a security guard out front, a sign of the times, perhaps. I went back to the estate sale, held at a grand house which my daughter used to visit as a child. It has an elevator I tracked it down to be sure I remembered it accurately. Estate sales are a reminder of the folly of acquisition and also a memento mori. I spent the day preparing the barn for a bookcase that my oldest son and I moved this afternoon. The bookcase, an old IKEA one, is remarkably heavy, but we got it downstairs the hardest part and then down the driveway. My son made it fit between a door sill and a non functioning electric heater, so it’s flush against what he noted was “the last book free wall here.” He has a point: I have six lifetime’s worth of books, roughly, and I don’t have that kind of time.

I’m intrigued by the dual diaries of Patricia Highsmith, one a writer’s notebook, the other looking back at the scorched earth. The editor has mixed and matched. I also read a review of a book on women artists contemporary with Vanessa Bell (who’s among them) and another of a book on women’s self portraits. I heard a lecture by a friend from Brooklyn, given at Princeton and live streamed. It was very good. This evening, I asked my neighbor if their mail had come. It’s Veterans Day, she said. I saw it mentioned, but thought that such holidays were on Mondays. This conviction overruled the reality that yes, it's Veteran’s Day. The mail has been irregular lately. For years, it arrived around four p.m., but Trump meddled and it hasn’t been the same. The deliverers are, however, uniformly nice.

105

I rose early to help my wife get her car to the mechanic and then rush to the train. That done, I shopped and then, returning home,

I wrote a poem after reading a review of the work of another poet who, like Cavafy, refers to beauty directly. A poetry editor, a poet herself, said that we grab phrases when we’re writing and then we have to go back and find better ones. I typically don’t revise at once, but collect them and then episodically have a look.

The Thanksgiving turkey is crammed into the refrigerator along with other things for the feast. (We have a small fridge my wife

106 shifted the third bookcase into the upstairs hallway (below) and transferred its books shelf by shelf. Then I filled the bookcase that my oldest son and I moved to the barn so the main shelves on the north wall aren't so cluttered. When I rearrange a room, I pause and absorb it before I use it. How odd this is, I think.

The IChingsuggests that I see what we share as humans (and what we, as humans, share with our co inhabitants on the planet) as the deep heart of many matters obscured by surface distractions. At the start of VR, there was a lot of hype about it. It was off by a big factor, and I wonder if Meta isn’t premature, too, given the cumbersome nature of the headsets. At the time, I told a colleague that VR would make it possible for everyone to have their own setting that struck me as the most interesting possibility, that you could place yourself in a baroque palace and dress like an Elector, but at the same time ensure that your avatar fit other contexts (or not). To my knowledge, no one is granting us this kind of freedom to play. The avatar of Mark Zuckenberg made me laugh. If I ever do this, I want to look like a Russian soprano pay off my boy soprano childhood. Otherwise, where’s the fun? That corporations are piling on, that it will be used for all staffs: this is the kiss of death, but if school Zoom can be hacked, the Metaverse cries out for disruption.

December 2021

The photographer Airyka Rockefeller visited Pallas, my daughter’s bookstore gallery in San Francisco, documenting it along the way. I spent the day writing my Christmas letter. For a year in which not much seemed to happen, a surprising amount happened. Reading the papers, I wondered if China will invade Taiwan and Russia will invade the Ukraine at the same time, offering the same rationale. The situations seem similar and the EU and the US are unlikely to respond militarily, although this could change down the road.

107 complimented me for getting the turkey to fit.) I booked a COVID booster, but put off a doctor’s appointment involving transit. (It's probably silly. It really reflects my insularity. Or is it agoraphobia?)

108

The apostle above is my second son John. "Pray for us!" a friend in France commented on social media. I finally finished the Christmas letter, which has a life of its own as I remember things and people I’ve forgotten to mention. By keeping it to two pages, it becomes a zero sum game, but I’m good at editing things to fit. I always write and post an illustrated year end wrap up in early January, an opportunity to make amends after I’ve mailed the Christmas letter. I end up reworking the contents, since time has passed. This is the story of my life: reworking things as time passes. An email from Berlin led me to sign up for session two of a writing course I took a year ago. My sister in law will take it with me. I walked down to the pharmacy to get my COVID booster this morning. In the afternoon, I crashed. I feel better, having napped. Nothing like a COVID booster to make you feel 100 years old. The latest ParisReviewarrived, looking sharp. Four good poems at the start about divorce. They were written decades ago, naturally.

The dance company, Nishikawa Collective, that visited from Brooklyn returned home. Two of its members who stayed with us left a thank you card, a jar of apple butter, cookies from Chez Panisse, and some Greek olive oil, the last only barely used. Their performance and workshop at our daughter's Pallas was a success. In the PointReyesLight, I read the obituary of Prince Andrew Romanoff, who died at 98. His son Peter is a car mechanic in the town. His father really was a prince, raised at Windsor Castle as a child in exile. When the ban was lifted, he attended the funeral rites of the murdered czar and his family. When his mind slipped, he only spoke Russian, not the posh English he learned from his nanny.

Our Christmas tree was harvested near the dacha by our oldest son. He explained that the county culled stands of Bishop pines, but then burned them. They propagate when their pinecones explode in fires, so this was a mistake. Our lovely tree was among the progeny.

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In a dream, I noted that every culture looks bizarre and hypocritical to any culture that doesn't share its core assumptions. Waking, I thought how we refuse goods made by slave labor in China, yet buy things made by prisoners here and in sweatshops worldwide.

Reading a review of a new translation of four plays by Aristophanes made me want to write a full length play in his spirit, "The Gnats."

110

Someone said about a poet that her lines broke to tip off the reader. Also, that she broke with meter. My own sense of meter is that it’s implicit, even in the Nancarrow sense of willful dissonance. Writing isn’t speaking and reading isn’t hearing. I’m surprised sometimes by how a line is read aloud. This then alters how I read it.

Eve Babitz died. I have two books of hers. A bombshell, her photo below reminded me of the Walter Winchell line, “her two talents.” But Babitz could write, and did. I went to the produce market. Walking back to my car with two bags of groceries, my left calf, out of sorts for a week, acted up. I sent off 16 Christmas letters my wife brought me a roll of stamps, but now I’m almost out of envelopes. A box of books arrived from a publisher. There’s one I like, and a journal that’s well done, but the others, beautifully produced, are exercises in self aggrandizement.

Charles Stein read his translations beautifully they were beautiful, while his poems, deliberately algorithmic, were painful to hear.

The architect Richard Rogers also died. I liked Centre Beaubourg (with Piano), his River Café in London, and the Madrid Airport. Thom Gunn to a college audience:

"Nothing is hidden," Dõgen Eihei commented. Poetry sets out the territory of self and not self, including the off part of the binary from the standpoint of consciousness. It's an unfolding revelation prompted by contingency (as Nagarjuna argued, positioning Buddhism as a constant response to it an aware receptivity).

Talk of a drought is giving way to talk about a lot of rain. The truth is somewhere in between. The latest variant has the same quality. How bad is it? It probably varies. Two friends got COVID early on and while one was able to help the other, I think he survived despite a really bad case because he was never hospitalized. I don't think the doctors knew what they were doing at the outset, so people died from their efforts to do the best they could. My friend was lucky.

"Ultimately what pushes an artist of any kind to do his work is a secret above all from himself. But he knows that it is there: he protects it and develops it and uses it, without knowing exactly what he’s protecting, developing, and using. I can’t tell you what the secret is, and I’m glad I can’t. Every poet has it to some degree. … There is a private other self at work, I think, for the poet and for the diary keeper, a private self who lives as fully as the social self, yet is in touch with the social self. And he is in touch with a lot of other things. What they are is the secret."

Poetry sets down what’s revealed. What’s seen is my main subject, but revelation is a big word. Is there something simpler? Glimpses of it is more accurate. Poetry is pregnant with larger meanings, but our view of these implied wholes is necessarily fragmentary.

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I consulted the IChing, and received two auspicious hexagrams. The gist: work like hell and then see what results in the fall. One school of thought condemns the professional class for seeking to perpetuate itself. My family, first part of it in the mid 19th century, has perpetuated itself ever since, on two continents.

112 A new stove and stovepipe at the dacha, above. My favorite photo from Christmas dinner at our house, below.

Someone commented that she borrows interior design ideas from my photos of my house. “Bourgeois splendor,” I replied.

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Poetry pamphlets are four to 36 pages. The form may lend itself to selecting from poems written in 2021. In the past, I’ve run them verbatim in issues of my personal journal, which has the virtue of transparency in a warts and all sense. But is this kind to readers? I put my pamphlet together fairly quickly, occasioned by Poetry Birmingham, which is accepting online submissions. I may submit my two villanelles, having read some others recently. Not sure. A dinner guest faltered on our front steps last night. His struggle to get up led me to decide to take that problem more seriously. It’s lucky that I’m used to how the start of such things is disheartening. The main thing is to keep going. Last night was practically a gale. My wife made a pork roast, and the oven warmed the downstairs into the evening. The Christmas tree is drying out, but it's done well such a lovely tree. The city demands that we chop them up, so that’s an early January task. They used to take them as they were.

A distant friend observed that psychology is caught in a time warp: Freud, Skinner, and Rogers, a trio that looks back to Vienna when it was the capital of an empire, then stretches through behaviorism, Rogers' efforts to rescue it, and then therapy and/or chemistry (plus

Poems, memoirs, articles, and papers: seven small books of my own work produced in 2021.

January 2022 Texting with my daughter, I thought how Tech's “On to Mars” sloganeering is matched by the Metaverse and the idea that a bit of Blockchain will render a purloined image more valuable than its original. Later, I thought that the authoritarians in our midst are equally frivolous in their efforts to suppress dissent and even the memory of its suppression frivolous in that it's all happening against a backdrop of planetary dead man walking. They ramp up coal and oil, play with drones and hyper sonics, and pursue young apostates on Twitter as the world heats up. That kind of frivolity.

NationalEnquirerlike drivel, it’s easy to become distracted. What strikes me is how our blinkered stupidity plays out at every level, the result of ignorance or negligence just as often as conscious intent. It’s so easy to do idiotic things that can wreck lives en masse.

The first day of 2022. I asked the IChingabout the coming year. The oracle asked me to consider what my role is, and to take it seriously a responsibility. In passing, it noted that things I regret are in the past. I may still regret them, but life meanwhile unfolds. In both responses, the oracle noted a dichotomy: how my sense of order runs up against my sense of alarm. But my alarm is about an order that’s being undermined for specious reasons. Making this argument is unpopular, and I could hold back for that reason, but doing so squanders the freedom my situation permits. (I could say, "our situation permits,” because we are relatively freer to express our views than our likeminded sisters.) Caught up in social media's

114 electric shock, amazingly), which doesn’t seem like progress but rather a band aid we paste onto the open wounds of societies in which whole categories of people are written off and/or exploited. A lot of people seem to suffer from an inability to cope with everyday life that, from their standpoint, is organized for everyone but them. They lack the kind of supports that would move their lives out of mere subsistence or worse. When you get people into housing and then give them help sorting life so it works for them, the results are dramatic. We know this, yet we never do it at any meaningful scale.

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Randomness looks like fate or destiny, because this makes for a better story one that convinces us of its gravity, reflecting our sense of self importance, the solipsistic way we view life as happening to us (or not, often to our relief). I see destiny's handprints everywhere, yet it is random that we meet, that something transpires, runs its course, ends but leaves aftereffects. Walter Benjamin wrote that the past is just resonant fragments. Their surfacing may be random, resonant only because they align with narratives we construct.

A Lydia Davis essay mentions Kafka’s diaries. It led me to mine my own entries across the pandemic. It's interesting to revisit this still ongoing period in a microcosmically quotidian manner.

We grieve and we cause others to grieve. In my poems, I sometimes conflate situations while knowing full well how the tiniest details should be attributed. They're pulled together by association (and my memory is almost completely associative). The narratives that a memory like mine constructs are variations on themes such as grief. Grief is one way that being asserts itself. A.H. Almaas (in ThePoint ofExistence) contends that grief can be narcissistic a facsimile of grief that arises when ego is torn away. I inferred from this that we plunge in not simply from desire, but because the only way we can free ourselves is to experience this tearing. I’m not sure that grief can be categorized as Almaas has grief is grief, because it involves loss and rubs our faces in the transient, random nature of life itself.

Life has two qualities randomness, a source of misunderstandings, and the exactitude of karma, which leaves no misguided action untouched. They are often paired in that misunderstandings lead us to act and these actions lead karma to reply. Karma has the last word, which suggests that we let go of any misunderstanding that traces back to randomness, no matter how it subsequently evolved, and acknowledge the fictional nature of this unfolding. Karma lets us look at such "unfoldings" with wonder, a retrospective aesthetic pleasure. They are a source of poems, and of stories we repeat to ourselves and bring to mind in dreams. Karma lets us be grateful and is displeased if, with one futile gesture or another, we try to alter a narrative that, complete in itself, is only open to interpretation.

In less than an hour, following the custom of how these things are marked, I will have been out in the world for three quarters of a century. Coming upstairs, I remembered that my mother died at 75 and my father’s father at 76. On the other hand, my mother’s father died in a car crash at 86, and his father lived into his nineties. My daughter hosted a small celebration at her house, attended by her brother and his family. My wife made a spice cake, remarkably light, with a topping of whipped cream and chocolate flakes. I blew out a candle. My wish was for peace in Ukraine, a version of the things that beauty queens used to say in those televised pageants. Above, 75, more or less. Below, Rocky Hanish's birthday greeting.

The pandemic continues in fits and starts, so I could go on, but won't. It will peter out and so called normal life will resume. It will be the same but different, occluded probably by something worse. My guess is that despite everything, I'll be nostalgic for it. Things slowed down. Nothing was quite as pressing. I got a lot written.

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In this constricted world, small things are magnified. The growth of beans draws my attention and how tomatoes seem to know there's a wire frame close to hold them. Bamboo stakes do this for the beans, their tendrils wrapping around them after they felt their way. It takes twenty minutes to water them, twenty minutes times the days my wife has been away, but I've lost count now. The garden across the street I measure in watering cans: two and a half, more or less a bigger can than the one here, which takes two fills to water much less.

John J. Parman is a writer and editor, based in Berkeley. He is a visiting scholar in architecture at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley; a co founder of Snowden & Parman, an editorial studio; and an editorial advisor to ARCADE(Seattle) and AR+D, the research imprint of ORO Editions.

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