16 August 2004

No good news from Boston: FSG arguably worse rather than better. When I left him on Friday, it seemed that his fevers were beginning to subside, or at least to drift downward--now there is some unidentifiable fluid between his lung and his chest wall, making FSG short of breath. His sister A is near at hand, and his other sister and her family not far; still, I expect to return to his hospital bed before long.
BC has reminded me that it was she who inspired my return to Eaters of the Dead: it was playing in her car as a recorded book when she drove up to my house for a visit. It is strangely poignant for me to have read Crichton's book again: I have never forgotten that the last person who spoke to me of it was my last piano teacher, Dale Anthony. Dale Anthony, with his neurotic, high-flying wishes for greatness, his fan of Gene-Wilder-like wiry yellow hair, who (despite what seemed to be a very happy marriage) died of AIDS so many years ago. Perhaps I have been afraid to return to the book because of the little darts of sorrow for him that I associate with it--but it was so long ago--he and his lovely wife and their grandly rattling Victorian house by the side of the railroad in Virginia are like figures from another world now, farther away than Pompeii.
I have begun at the gym, promising myself that I am permitted to hate every moment, so long as I go. I can't say that I get no exercise, but gravity is so much stronger than our wishes. I have begun to say, with Paul Simon, "Why am I soft in the middle/When the rest of my life is so hard?"
I have been half-watching a few of the Olympic events, praying that the athletes cannot hear--and will never hear--the gaseous, obvious jaw-flapping of the sportscasters. Men's gymnastics full of mishaps--stumbles and outright falls and missed chances. How is it that their comparative youth and dedication make every error seem like the first act of a Sophoclean tragedy? any of these goofs committed by, say, Rodney Dangerfield, would have us blind and hoarse with laughter.
BC has sent me a now-rejected preface to her favorite guide to the opera--inspired inanity about the consistent absurdities of opera--bodily functions and births offstage; everything sung, frequently at essence, even when speed ought to be of the essence. These, of course belong to the same family of cliches that in films guarantee that sprays of bullets fall all around but do not puncture our hero, that car-chases always find ethnic markets with carts of colorful vegetables to upset, and so on. One lovely phrase--for the feasts sumptuously served but never eaten in opera: "hunca-munca food."