Geoff Godfrey

Haint That a Shame Part XVI

Back over on the old blog, when I was a much more serious and consistent writer, and before Tweets and Instagrams and Tik Toks took over the internet, I used to record eerie and inexplicable events which happened in our house just outside Baltimore. Things started to go a bit haywire the final year we lived in there. I called the series Haint That a Shame for some reason which now eludes me, but presumably it was because my maternal grandma had used the word haint once to describe a ghost–I found this twisted form of the word haunt charming as a teen, and it stuck with me.

We moved downtown after ten years in that house and had only a few more strange happenings before things calmed down.

It’s been two and a half years since we bought the old mill in France which we currently inhabit. When the previous owner was showing us around before we bought the place he opened one old room with a skeleton key and referred to it as the chambre des fantômes. We had a brief exchange in French when he said this–I asked him if he’d had any experiences with ghosts and he said he was only joking about the room, which was an old machine shop filled with junk. But, he said, there had been some problems which he’d addressed by having an exorcism done on the building by a shaman (more about that another day).

At the end of February we adopted Bou-Bou, a 2.5 year old French Bulldog. Her previous owner had gotten a promotion at work and was unable to give Bou enough attention, so we bought her and have not once regretted the decision.

Before we met the dog we were told that she was the sweetest, most timid of creatures. When going for walks around town she would meet strangers and immediately roll over and display her stomach to everyone. When we went to visit her a couple times before adopting her, this was our experience–immediately she would shrink down and then flop over on her back with belly and neck displayed. This behavior continued the fist two months she lived with us, and when she was running free around our property she would unfailingly roll over when friends or strangers came by. As we run an hébergement we were quite happy to see this behavior. All spring and summer we have tourists in and out of our rental apartments and we of course wanted a happy dog who turned into a wiggly worm around strangers.

One day when we’d had the dog about two months, my wife went down to the 3rd floor of our building with Bou. That floor is unfinished and used to house several concrete spawning beds for trout. It’s basically an 85-meter-square empty space completely unfinished with some old radiators and debris and a bit of scaffolding off to the side. While my wife was doing some tidying she heard the dog rummaging around and then beginning to chew something. As anyone with a dog knows, you have to immediately check what the dog has in its mouth. Upon close examination, and following careful negotiations with our new pooch, Patricia discerned that Bou had found and started to chew the peculiar button pictured above. Somehow she had found it on the cement floor which had been swept clear earlier.

In French it reads Jamais ne dort–Aboie et mord, which translates in English to Never sleep–bark and bite. Pictured is a fierce-looking French bulldog with an angry red eye. On its collar is the ID number 214e-RR. When I searched this ID and the words french bulldog the top result on Google was a chat stream beginning with this description and a request for more info:

Définition de l’insigne

Le bouledogue régional jamais ne dort, aboie et mord. Dormez donc tranquilles braves Parisiens, les ouvrages d’art et les voies navigables de votre région sont bien gardés… Le réveil sera dur!

Sans nom de fabricant.

Le Colonel GEOFFROY prend le commandement du régiment à la mobilisation

Turns out 214e-RR was a regional regiment of the French army charged with protecting Paris, its art treasures, and its means of transport. Its commander during WW2 was Colonel Geoffroy (the French form of my first name). Nice bit of synchronicity there!

But most interestingly, and quite strangely…the very next day after she found this button and chewed it, Bou’s behavior changed dramatically. She barked at a person walking by, which shocked us as we’d never heard her bark or growl; her hackles were raised and she displayed a terrible fierce aspect wholly opposite to anything we’d seen before. She began charging and leaping at strangers and even friends when they knocked on the door. During tourist season we could no longer allow her to roam free around the property because she would charge ferociously at anyone, even people she’d met several times.

To this day she remains a fierce defender of the Moulin and its grounds and its inhabitants. Even daily visitors get the treatment, and sometimes if I walk into the house suddenly she’ll charge and leap at me! We have to keep her locked on the porch or on a lead now. Somehow the ferocious bulldog spirit of 214-RR has inhabited our little regimental commander and transformed her from a gentle and timid soul to a true and aggressive defender of her territory.

The Corrections

Here’s another novel from the recent NY Times List of “Greatest Books of the 21st Century.” It’s almost 600 pages long, and, given how weighty and dense and serious it is as a work of fiction I was surprised to find the writing quite breezy. I laughed heartily several times and regretted my decision 20-odd years ago to classify Jonathan Franzen as merely one of a crop of young writers at the time whose voices and themes and styles all seemed indistinguishable to me: Safran-Foer, Lethem, Chabon, Schteyngart, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed The Corrections.

I must however admit that the family at the center of the novel is deeply troubling. Most of the characters are eminently likeable and relatable–I found much in the family interactions which was all-too-familiar from my own experiences. And yet every character does hateful, despicable, awful things. Again, pretty typical of my experience not only of my own family but also of others I know well. This is where the sophistication of the book lies: documenting a time period in US/world history via the lives of a single midwestern family teetering on the brink of total and utter disarray and giving us a full picture of why across three generations. Franzen’s book shows us lovable people who we want to care for despite how truly terribly they behave–and given where American society has gone since its publication there is a bit of prescience in his vision. The entire nation these days feels like a dysfunctional family full of badly behaving people who are at heart decent and reasonable but whose unpredictable, selfish, and greedy behavior makes them despicable.

This morning I read an essay by Wallace Shawn in the NY Review of Books. The essay, called The End of a Village, will serve as the introduction to a newly re-issued book about the Vietnam War. Shawn was a college pal of the author Jonathan Schell, and manages to paint an evocative portrait of his friend and what he hoped to achieve through reporting on The Village of Ben Suc. Schell observed the complete and utter destruction of a peasant village by US forces, and tried to portray both the victims of this assault and the perpetrators with as much objectivity as he could muster. Having just finished The Corrections, I was struck when Shawn wrote this about Schell: “He generally seemed to like the military men he encountered. It’s just that what they were doing was appalling.”

This of course leads us to Hannah Arendt in The New Yorker 50-some years ago and her “banality of evil” (Wallace Shawn’s dad was managing editor of The New Yorker at the time). Shawn makes the connection, stating “If one accepts the idea that the ugliest of crimes can by perpetrated by people who aren’t ugly criminals, then the possibility seems to arise that even reasonably nice people might be at times involved in evil.”

The characters in The Corrections do horrible things as their family dangles by a frayed thread over the abyss of the 21st century. But at different parts of the novel, told from their different perspectives, I found myself rooting for each of them and caring deeply about their situations despite the decisions they made. And if individuals can do horrible things despite being “good” people, then so of course can societies and nations.

So we all make poor decisions and we all allow questionable motivations to drive us now and again. But how do we fix things after? When we go catastrophically awry and cause catastrophe, what is the means of repair? The word corrections has a lush ambiguity because the word has so many applications. A teacher corrects her student’s work. Parents correct their children (well, ideally). Some behavior is considered correct, and society drills us in the niceties of acceptable interactions. A captain who discovers her ship is off course will make corrections, a market which is overheated will face an inevitable correction. All of these senses of the word have a similar basis but different nuances. Every generation goes through a reaction to what was considered correct by the previous, now aging members of a family or civilization. So what is correct can be in flux, and those doing the correcting can be wrong or misled or mal-informed. When everything is called into question, when religion, government, the media, when public institutions previously held in high regard, when family itself all face skeptical and factual analysis and are thereby doubted and eventually shorn of their importance, and when much of the traditional underpinnings of a society and its very history are demonstrated as false and hypocritical, what is left? Where can we turn for guidance and support? How do we rebuild? I guess we’ll find out together.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

The town where I grew up in the 1970s was still, in many ways, actually in the 1950s. In Stewartstown, PA The Beatles were long-haired hippy freaks who hated Jesus, anyone to the left of Barry Goldwater was a Communist, and guys still hung out in their denim overalls by a potbelly stove in the feed store. My grandfather, who was almost totally bald, walked two blocks to the barber’s to get his “ears lowered” and hung out with the gents there for a couple hours. Our neighbor one house south of us on Main St was Mrs. Hersey.

Mrs. Hersey wore dark blue or black dresses which covered all the way to her neck, to her wrists, and to her ankles. The dresses were finely made and very austere, but there was elaborate white lace at the neck and on the sleeves. She also covered her hair in the traditional manner of churchwomen in that region at the time when she was outside or when she was hosting company. She would summon me to the fence between our yards when I was four or five years old. “Master Godfrey how do you fare today?” She always referred to me as “Master” followed by my last name, and addressed Christmas cards to me in the same manner (I think I still have one of those). After a bit of conversation she would hand me a small paper bag of chestnuts.

Mrs. Hersey didn’t have a living room like everyone else, she had a parlor. But the parlor to my at the time little mind just seemed like an old-timey living room. There were glass oil lamps with globes and wicks which had been converted to electric lamps. The glass was infused with different colors like mauve or mint green, often swirled with white foamy glass and sparkle flakes. Her parlor reminded me of the interiors in old western movies. There were doilies under everything: hard candy dish full of root beer barrels, the lamps, family pictures. And every table was covered with a cloth to boot, as were the chairs, which also had lace at the top and on the arms.

In Stewartstown I had the freedom to go anywhere unsupervised, and my friends and I did so. Favorite haunt was the old town cemetery directly behind our house, but we roamed widely and often for hours at a time without adults or elder siblings. We had this freedom because of the old ladies in town, who knew everyone and everyone’s brood and everyone’s business. From their front porches and from chairs hidden behind front window curtains they somehow divined all the latest gossip. But the old ladies kept an eye on us, took us in when we tumbled by on the sidewalk, came out with Band-Aids when someone fell, and in certain circumstances might deliver a stern lecture, a warning to call our moms, and occasionally, dealt us a smack.

I used to love visiting with the old ladies. They were all born around the turn of the 20th century and had seen so much–imagine they’d all had horses and horse carts when they were teenagers? They told wonderful stories and told me about my grandparents and father when they were all young people. When my parents got divorced and my mom and sister and I moved in with my maternal grandparents in a different small Pennsylvania town, I continued the tradition of visiting old ladies. My grandma would give me a sack of veggies from her garden and say “Take this up to old Mrs. Kent and tell her $1.20 please.” I’d tie the plastic bag to my bike handlebars and ride off. Mrs. Kent had more hair on her chin than on top of her head, and wore simple house dresses with a full body apron as she sat in her rocker and told me about the photos on her tables, or about her knick-knacks, or about that one time she got a train to Baltimore, or about her long-gone husband. Then she’d give me some shoefly pie and $1.20 in coins to take back with me.

All of this as prologue to show I’ve often delighted in the company of old people, and truly treasure my opportunities to do so when I was a very young lad. And this novel by G. B. Edwards reminded me so much of my visits with old folk back in the 1970s and early 1980s that I felt a profound nostalgia, despite never having been to Guernsey Island.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page came to my attention recently as I was scanning my bookshelves and planning future reads. I’d read a couple articles lately about Guernsey Island and some controversies about its time under German occupation and what exactly happened in the labor camps there. I picked it up to read as a secondary novel (I typically have a primary novel and a secondary going at the same time (and also a primary non-fiction and fiction going at the same time (and routinely a primary novel in French as well))) and with regular 6-8 page chapters finished it off in a couple months.

What a pleasant and interesting old chap Ebenezer Le Page turned out to be. And what a lens through which to see the changes in an island culture over the early 2/3rds of the 20th century. Ebenezer of course is not an old man throughout the novel, but the novel is told by old Ebenezer who is writing his memoirs. If you are a fan of plot and excitement, this is not a novel for you. If you like to visit old folk and set a piece and hear what they have to say–you may well enjoy this book. I particularly enjoyed Ebenezer’s run-ins with Liza and actually laughed out loud reading them. But we get his entire life story and his interactions with friends and family as the island where he lives moves from the 19th century and into the 20th and through the world wars.

Surprisingly, there are gay characters in the book and it’s interesting to note Ebenezer’s mindset and reactions to them. And Ebenezer remembers some details of the Nazi occupation of Guernsey which continue to be controversial. I particularly enjoyed learning about the patois of the island with its mixture of French and English cultures and languages. There is a useful dictionary in the back!

I was genuinely sad to reach the end of this novel–that rarely happens in life, even when you read a lot of great stuff.

In Ascension

I first heard of the writer Martin MacInnes while having lunch outside the cafeteria at an international school in Panama where I worked as a Social Studies teacher for four years. At my table was the author’s brother, who was director of athletics and who held some other leadership responsibilities, including eventually a Safety Committee role assuring the school’s compliance with all COVID 19 protocols. “I’m sure you’re skeptical because it’s my brother I’m touting, but I assure you he’s a really gifted novelist. I think you need to check out his stuff–he’s got three novels and a fourth on the way. They’re all quite interesting and well-done.”

The “fourth on the way” turned out to be the first MacInnes I’ve read: In Ascension. Based on its quality, it won’t be the last. MacInnes is certainly good–I’d rank the craft of this novel right up there at the upper echelon with folks like Richard Powers, Colm Tóibín, Ian McKewan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Louise Erdrich, etc. This is a science fiction novel, but it’s not merely a genre piece–it’s a work of densely layered literary fiction.

This is a near-future bit of sci-fi and unspools within the next couple decades we face here in the real world. The novel’s protagonist is Leigh, an expert biologist/geneticist who specializes in the study of early life and who loves tiny critters like archaea and algae in particular. Because she is also a deep sea diver she is invited on a scientific expedition to chart a newly discovered volcanic vent which might be home to some interesting microscopic life. While doing a dive at the site Leigh has what can only be described as a mystical experience. She and other divers have visions and develop an unknown illness. They become obsessed with returning to the water. Drifting around for weeks at the surface on site and doing the boat crew and scientific work becomes more difficult as something below calls to them. Leigh meets and interacts with other scientists on this mission, which becomes important later in the story.

Meanwhile a discovery is made which will impact humanity in unforeseeable ways: a new means of propulsion has been uncovered, which can expand the reach of humans to the furthest limits of the solar system and potentially beyond. There are hints that the mystical experience Leigh and her fellow divers had in the Atlantic Ocean may be connected to dreams had by the scientists who discovered this propulsion system simultaneously on different continents. Leigh eventually is invited to work on creating a sustainable food system for the first manned ships which will used this drive.

But Leigh is not merely a scientist tapped as an expert in a near-future sci-fi novel; she is also a fully-rounded human being with all that entails. MacInness is excellent at letting us see her family: the abusive father who had ambitions as an architect which were thwarted, but who still becomes an important engineer who manages the systems which recapture land for the government of the Netherlands; the brilliant mathematician mother who is largely absent and exists solely in a state of academic indifference to human suffering in her household. Just as Leigh is signed up for a top-secret scientific space mission her mother begins showing signs of dementia, and Leigh will be absent as her mother and sister start a terribly difficult stage of their lives.

And so this is a sci-fi story of a certain sort (2001 A Space Odyssey, Annihilation, Solaris come to mind) where there are indications an advanced race is meddling in life on Earth and may perhaps have even seeded life there in the distant past. The sci-fi is twinged with a New Age mysticism; as Arthur C. Clark once intoned, there is no difference really between advanced technology and magic to the more primitive species…

But the novel is still mostly about Leigh and her family relations and how she ended up the person she is. The sci-fi elements aside the themes of the novel are about an inability of children to understand or relate to their parents, and the distances between loved ones are as vast as any physical distances. Despite her incredible levels of technical proficiency and innovative use of science to solve problems, despite her profound specialization concerning the origins of life and how to modify genetic codes, our protagonist still can’t have a simple conversation with her mother or sister. Leigh discovers that even after plumbing the vast depths of the ocean and the outer regions of the solar system and journeying through time itself, our own true self remains the deepest mystery of all.

The Human Stain

I read a lot of Roth back in the ’90s, to the point where I found myself Zuckered out. When The Human Stain arrived I bought it in hardcover but never got around to reading it (my copy still has a “Borders Books 30% off sticker” on the cover, LOL). Recently the NY Times released their Best Books of the Century list; the novel’s inclusion sent me downstairs to dig it out.

The Human Stain is third in a trilogy of novels (the previous two are American Pastoral and I Married a Communist). There’s a twenty-some year gap between my readings of Volume 2 and Volume 3!

Roth is typically strong at recreating a time period of American political and cultural absurdities, which he’d done in the previous novels in the trilogy for earlier eras. As the title and timing of the novel might indicate, we’re in the era of Bill Clinton and Monica’s stained blue dress. What a terrible time to be alive and American! Moralizing hypocrites unbound, a sleazy and easily manipulated Chief Executive who fell for a honey trap even the bait didn’t understand, the rise of sensationalist and salacious cable ‘news’ coverage, etc. Out of that mess came an extreme and reactionary right-wing movement angry that Clinton out-triangulated them and co-opted their economic wish list to the point where he hammered through the final achievements of the Reagan Revolution. As the Democrats moved right wing economically the Republicans went wholly off the rails. A Democratic Party beholden to Wall St and corporate interests emerged, leaving the political left in the US nobody to support except for the occasional quaint New Deal Dem who got smoked in the primaries or a third-party candidate. What a joke all that was, and yet the consequences were dire and are yet to be resolved in the USA.

The Human Stain centers around (SPOILER ALERT) a Black academic who chose to pass for white and Jewish and pulled it off, who is fired from his position of Dean for using a racist expression while teaching at a small elite liberal arts college in the wilds of New England. But the slur was not necessarily a slur given its ambiguities and the context, and perhaps the firing was an unreasonable rush to judgment (Roth perceived the emerging phenomenon of cancel culture?). Nathan Zuckerman, who befriends the fired prof and former Dean central to the story, sets out to untangle the events leading up to the situation and to write a book.

My favorite Roth novels feature a manic, hilarious, and zesty narrator. If you’ve read Sabbath’s Theater or Portnoy’s Complaint you know what I mean. Those novels breeze by in a vortex of delicious voice, and the reader is ensconced enchantingly in the conscience of a pervert who participates vividly in experience and has things to think about. But this novel (like The Plot Against America) succeeds on its level of refined craft. It brings up big themes, big ideas, big hypocrisies, and the reader is forced to examine her own beliefs and assumptions.

The Exorcist

Recently I saw that Amazon in France was selling The Exorcist for 2.99 euros. I’d not seen it for decades, and wanted to see how it held up. Also, the numerous times I’d watched it previously were on US television, heavily edited and pan-and scanned to fit the square TV screens at that time. I thought it would be fun to revisit.

I was absolutely horrified and disgusted and terrified! What a searing, potent film. Yes, some of the effects are a bit wobbly in our age of perfect CGI, but oh my god this is highly effective horror. I literally could not bear it.

On broadcast television I used to be bored by all the medical scenes and the initial consultations with the priest, etc. But re-watching now as an adult in a pristine high-quality stream on a large television I was totally absorbed.

I’d say that it’s in my top three horror films of all time, easily. I’ve read the novel and know the “true” case upon which the story is based, had seen edited versions likely a dozen times–but still I found the tension and the tragedy of the film difficult to endure. I love the hard-drinking, cigarette-smoking priests, and of course Max von Sydow was a force of nature in everything he ever did.

Interesting to notice how much influence The Exorcist had on other movies–particularly there are several scenes or shots completely ripped off by Spielburg/Lucas in Raiders of the Lost Ark. That initial sequence introducing Father Merrin in the desert is re-used substantially to build Indiana Jones’s character.

Funny a couple days after watching The Exorcist to receive in the mail the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The cover story is about a surge in exorcisms performed in the USA of late. Old Scratch is busy as ever possessing the economically dispossessed in Appalachia.

I should also note that the previous owner of our building in France had an exorcism performed to clear away a malevolent female spirit he encountered several times, including one instance where he was physically attacked. I asked him what the ceremony entailed, and he said “love and forgiveness and total acceptance of the entity.”

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

I bought this Bantam mass market paperback at the B. Dalton Booksellers shop in Hunt Valley Mall, probably around 1985 or ’86. At the time I’d read a lot of sci-fi, horror, and fantasy but I was beginning to push out and explore other stuff. Not that the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy weren’t satisfying, but I wanted something else. The reason for this was due partially to reading a bit of Dickens, Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Harper Lee, William Golding, and Hemingway in school. What mostly made me crave more ‘literary’ fare was Samuel R. Delany and his novel Dhalgren.

Dhalgren is supposed to be a sci-fi novel, and it is, but it was actually the first absolutely confounding and densely packed work of serious artistic and philosophic intention (what would later be called a “Post-Modern novel”) that I’d ever read. I had a couple different jobs at the time and I used my money to buy records and books (I should have bought shares in Apple, but WTFK back then?). I was drawn to Dhalgren by its spectacular cover and its length–I’d recently finished a couple Dostoevsky novels and this one was like Bros. K long; and that first sentence!

to wound the autumnal city.

I went all-in. The plot? Simple. Guy walks around a post-apocalyptic urban hell-scape. Keeps a notebook, writes poetry. Gets laid a lot, men and women. There are parties and things are collapsed but people still host dinners in their apartments. But inside the text are other texts inserted in strange places, and featuring different events and characters and settings than the novel narrative itself. But, since these were also in the novel narrative, despite being kind of asides and or comments or edits or revisions or re-imaginings of the primary action, I assumed they must be important also. Were these excerpts from the protagonist’s notebook? Who knew for sure, but probably. At one point the narrator sees himself in the mirror and describes what he sees and what he describes is the author of the novel, and my mind just went soaring. I read all the Delany novels I could get–Babel-17, Nova, Triton, The Einstein Intersection. But then I got to the Tales of Neveryon series and couldn’t cut it. I saw Stars in My Pocket when it came out and bought it, thinking I’d read it in 1986 0r 1987. And now in France I pulled that same mass market off my bookshelves and read it after nearly 40 years. When was the last time I read a mass market paperback?! LOL the text is so tiny. And of course due to age the book was yellowed and crumbly despite being unread.

I really liked it a lot. There are similarities to Dhalgren and the novel has aged well. I mean here in the early 80s Delany has imagined the Web, and called it the Web, and there are many interesting questions raised about what constitutes gender and who is really male and female despite their genitalia, and there are difficulties with meaning and visual representation of language and how gestures and utterances between species and races become confused for multiple reasons. It’s a surprising series of accurate predictions of the near-future from the perspective of the 1980s but imagined FAR in the future. Again, like in Dhalgren, there is not much plot, but there is a lot of meat packed onto this skeleton. It starts off with a kind of reverse Frederick Douglass–a kid on the fringes who undergoes a treatment to render him “less anxious” and a bit incapacitated intellectually, knowing that following this treatment he will become a slave. But he undergoes the treatment and we join him as he is exploited but doesn’t really care because his brain has been altered. But a set of special finger rings attached to a Web database, provided by a female kidnapper who uses him for sex, give him a taste of what he’s missed and then the story takes off.

I’d recommend it, but not as the first Delany you read. Get to know him first!

Some Milestones

These past two months have been a bit exhausting. We’ve hosted an open mic night with a full band, a harp concert, several workshops and a dance performance, as well as the usual run of weekly classes and ateliers. All of this on top of the two rental apartments ramping up into tourist season, the crush of garden maintenance, a quick five-day vacation in Spain AND working at the local street food festival, electrical and plumbing challenges, renovations, etc, etc.

We’ve also adopted a French bulldog, two baby goats, and four songbirds. I’ve put in at least 50 hours on fencing alone over the past three months–building the goat enclosure, then expanding it, adapting it as needed, and repairing it several times as the goats found weaknesses and pushed through.

And with all this work going on I’ve allowed some major milestones to pass unacknowledged here.

The Milestones

As of June 2024 it has been 6 years since we moved out of the USA. We left behind an elaborate social calendar, a Victorian rowhome filled with art and objects, political and business connections, the best next-door neighbors ever, our pet dove Godzilla (RIP), and a city with which we were infinitely familiar, where we’d carefully developed an intricate network of deep involvements over the years. And, of course we left behind beloved family members and dear friends.

But, I regret nothing. All of the challenges and myriad difficulties of being voluntary immigrants were worth the sacrifices. I was looking for a new push, a new means of developing skills and becoming a stronger and better version of myself, and moving abroad definitely pushed all my faculties to the brink on multiple occasions. I often thought about involuntary immigrants, those who have no choice but to migrate, and considered how my difficulties paled in comparison (while the privileges granted by my paleness greased many wheels for us). Our experiences in Panama–living in luxurious high-rises by the ocean, pushing ourselves professionally in a completely different environment than the Baltimore City Public School System at a swank international school, making friendships with locals and other expats from around the world, going routinely to beaches on two oceans, going into the mountains, rainforests, cloud forests, jungles, seeing wild animals, getting the most out of our crippled Spanish–we loved it all. Further, there is nothing more liberating (after the trauma subsides) of getting rid of all the stuff Americans accumulate over decades. So many possessions! It was a lot to let go but we learned how to do that.

As of the first half of June 2024 we’ve lived in France for 2 years. Our French expat experience has been much different from the Panamanian, and for beyond the expected reasons of climate, geography, culture, history, language, as well as living in a decolonized nation versus living in a former colonial power. In Panama we had jobs and an employer with lawyers and an HR department who handled the heavy lifting for us. For the move to France we did much of our own heavy lifting, with the help of an excellent hand-holding service based in Paris. And we had no employer, instead we started our own business, which I suppose counts as another milestone (In June 2024 we marked the two year anniversary of not working for The Man and became ‘self-employed‘).

Our humble abode from an island in the Vezere River: Moulin Sage

We are loving the Correze region of France. The village of Treignac has proved to be everything we hoped when we chose it after touring dozens of small medieval towns across France as we researched moving here. Many people in and around Treignac have helped and supported us as we work toward our goal of creating an event space/concert venue/professional development center/arts and crafts atelier/pop-up cafe/retreat center/eco resort/organic farm/anarchist commune/naturalist resort/vinyard/exposition space. Yeah, we live in a run-down apartment in a largely decrepit old factory building, but it’s the best life! People come here for concerts and shit, which amuses me no end (our first concert was a gathering of about 30 people to hear ellen cherry). People we need seem to arise by magic at the exact moment we need them–could we host yoga classes here? A yoga teacher appears. Can we find a contractor willing to use recycled or repurposed materials found in the mill to create new useful spaces? Tom puts a home-made flier in our mailbox. It’s been a blast, and quite exhausting at times. But it’s different working hard for yourselves and your clients and not for somebody else.

We earn about 8% of the income we had when we had jobs. But our stress and anxiety is way down, and we can afford to live a quality life here on a small income.

Our growing menagerie of small mammals: Cornichon, Capri, and Bou-Bou the Frenchie

On May 13th, I turned 55 years old

So being in my mid-fifties is pretty much the same as every other age I’ve been. Differences? My collection of unguents and gels has grown, my toes suddenly look like my grandfather’s toes, and I go to bed before 10pm every day. 85% of the time I feel physically like I’m in my early 30s–in fact, due to Tai Chi I often feel more limber than I did back then. But the other 15% of the time is where mid-fifties life gets interesting: 5% of the time I feel exactly my age, 5% of the time I feel like I’m in my 70s, and the last 5% of the time I’m stiff and sore and feel at least 90 years old. I can do renovation projects and work in the garden cutting and stacking and digging like a maniac no problem, and then get injured standing up from the couch or opening a pickle jar.

The biggest realization over the first half of this decade? Shut the fuck up. Keep your opinions to yourself, listen to what others have to say and shut the fuck up. Don’t participate in or encourage gossip of any kind. Petty annoyances and grievances? Let that shit go. This is the time to work on the inner self and start preparing for the next stages. What books to read, what books to re-read, what places to visit or revisit?–all of these questions become more delicate and nuanced. Typically American dudes live to be 75. Maybe I’ll get there, maybe not–maybe I’ll go beyond? But it’s time to start considering the fact that you’ve got a couple strong decades left, and how to spend them is a key consideration.

As of June 11, 2024, we’ve been married 30 years. How does this happen? In the blink of an eye we’ve been married 30 years. It really seems like our 20th anniversary party was just a few years ago. It’s been a true pleasure seeing my wife bloom since we moved abroad–unfettered by an employer she’s just madly arranging events and ateliers and adding more and more artists and craftspeople and creatives to her roster. But as my Baltimore 8th graders used to say, “she do too much.” Sometimes I get completely wiped out trying to run logistics and preparing for all the gazillion things she’s got going on, and yet she continues adding more and trying more. We have this amazing piece of garden and an old stone building and sometimes I’d like to rest on my laurels and set a spell in a hammock by the river. Patricia tells me “you have to schedule some days off when you’re self-employed or you’ll burn out,” and then she adds two more retreats and another workshop to the calendar and buys some massive thing on FB Marketplace that I have heft downstairs. But it’s all about the love, and there’s nobody I’d rather spend 24/7 with as a business partner and life partner and lover and animal co-parent. She is a dynamo with a world-changing mission and has no interest in slowing down a bit, and I could not be luckier to see it all up close.

The Childhood of Jesus

Way back in the day–early ’90s–I was earning my first master’s degree at Temple U. Ostensibly a creative writing program, Temple also required some rather rigorous literary work. There was, for example, an enormous list of “books you should read before your 2 years here is up.” On that list were three books by Coetzee: Disgrace, The Life & Times of Michael K, and Waiting for the Barbarians. I was floored by these novels, how simple and elegant they seemed, but there was so much artful architecture supporting and obscuring dense layers of meaning. One of the courses I took assigned Coetzee alongside the short fiction of Nadime Gordimer.

And then, for more than 30 years, I kept my eye on Coetzee and often thought I should pick up something again–I even bought a couple of his novels and put them on the shelf. I think I bought The Childhood of Jesus more than 6 years ago before I finally read it. It was worth the wait.

When I had writerly aspirations as a youth and I’d get stuck in the glue trap of writer’s block, I’d think of a myth or fable or religious story I’d learned as a kid and re-tell it in a different time and setting. Coetzee’s novel reminded me of that useful trick as it retells the story of Christ’s early years but with migrants entering an unnamed Latin country to start a new life. The child David is of uncertain heritage and receives the name David from authorities in his new home. He is guarded by Simon, who took care of David after he lost a letter explaining his presence on a passenger boat, and who resolves to find David’s mother in their new land. Later on other familiar characters emerge but with different names: Ines is the virgin mother, Juan is the Baptist, Magdalene and Anne and other saints and apostles emerge, drop hints about their roles, and disappear.

David speaks and writes his own language, has his own ideas about how the world should work, and struggles with authority and limits on freedom. He learns to read from a child’s version of Don Quixote’s adventures, and cannot abide the idea that Quixote’s story is only in Quixote’s head, and that others around him see the same events in different and more mundane ways. He has mystical visions about numbers and their true meaning and sees people as tiny insects trying to be visible to him as he soars above the world. There are hints that Coetzee wants to underline the merging of early Christian thought and Greek philosophy and the knowledge and symbology of esoteric wisdom schools (for example, a Micky Mouse cartoon features Plato instead of Pluto as Micky’s canine companion). David’s revolutionary pedigree is underlined by his own dog’s name: Bolivar.

The expectations of the society in which David finds himself are too constraining and when the authorities determine he should be placed in a reform school the family of David flee to start a new life.

I enjoyed it so much that now I’m bound to read the rest of the Trilogy (or is it a Trinity?). Of course, it may take me another 30 years to get to the next volume.

Recent Books

I’ve been lax about posting lately; things are chaotic and our schedules have been packed with events and tourist rentals and visitors and animal care, then we went to Spain for a few days. So here are some rapid-fire blurbs about books I’ve read lately.

Written in a charged “hair-on-fire” tone, They Knew by Sarah Kendzior will raise your hackles whether you agree with her or not. It’s a book about conspiracy theories which notes that conspiracy theories are quite often true but are labeled conspiracy theories to make them seem crazy or loony and unworthy of your attention. She provides many examples of actually true and demonstrable conspiracies which have been lampooned or ignored in the press, which is guilty of aiding and abetting a long-standing conspiracy by major corporations, billionaire oligarchs, and DC politicians and insiders to undercut the rule of law and drain the USA dry. When your own government has become a self-policing criminal enterprise, what remains to be done? She notes that January 6 was a surprise to no one, and there were warnings from many sectors about its imminence and possible success which were shrugged off by the mainstream media until members of Congress were hiding in locked closets from a rampaging mob of deranged people who had been misled by well-funded conspiracy theories hatched in propaganda labs as part of a vast and ongoing conspiracy to delude Americans. Read it and weep.

And, speaking of conspiracies…I’ve read and enjoyed a few novels by Nicholson Baker, including the hilarious and randy The Fermata, as well as his breathless Checkpoint, about a conspiracy theorist who is so frightened by the unreal realities of the George W. Bush presidency that he imagines assassinating the then president in all sorts of nutty and creative ways. But this book is not a novel; Baseless delves deeply into the idea that the United States recruited Nazi and Japanese war criminals who helped develop biological weapons which were secretly used against North Korea, and that the intelligence agencies have hidden this history away in classified documents which are rapidly disappearing. Baker shares his frustration with the CIA’s often total disregard of Freedom of Information Act requirements, and he documents documents which have disappeared from their folders and which are redacted to the point of complete insensibility despite legal requirements that they be freely available. His conclusion is that the government is not protecting “sources or methods” but rather high crimes and misdemeanors. Like Sarah Kendzior, Baker notes that people in power and in the media scoffed absolutely at the idea that the USA would ever use dreadful weapons of this sort, and yet from his research and many testimonials it seems that the USA indeed did use them.

About 30 years ago I remember hosting a book signing and discussion with Mr. Menand at the Borders Books & Music just north of Baltimore in Towson. At the time he had published The Metaphysical Club, and though I never read that book I did attend the discussion. In The Free World, which I read periodically over a half-decade, Menand delves into intellectual, literary, critical, and artsy trends poinging back and forth across the Atlantic between Paris and New York during the height of the Cold War. There are chapters about popular music and trends in visual arts and art criticism, chapters about film, chapters about writers and editors. There are also some revelations about the CIA secretly funding publishers and certain writers and intellectuals and even founding journals, which Menand shrugs off as no big deal, because the Soviets also funded such stuff. But, I’d respond: the West always claimed to be a free marketplace of ideas, not a marketplace where some ideas received covert funding to place them in the forefront of mainstream media coverage and public discussion. Menand shrugs off US interference in elections in France and Italy as part of the game, and his take on Vietnam seems a bit shallow. But I rate this book highly nonetheless as an interesting examination of creative and intellectual trends at a time when many people thought we were going to blow ourselves up.

Beautiful, tender, deeply melancholic, and yet also surprisingly funny at times. What happened to Mr. Bauby was simply awful. How he processed his tragedy in this short elegant book, written by blinking his eye a letter at a time as he lay paralyzed in a hospital bed, deserves our awe.