Jacques Barzun Is Alive and Well and Living in Texas

In a couple of weeks its going to be Jacques Barzun's 102nd birthday. I hope Jacques hangs in there because in this degraded epoch of ours where ill educated oafs like Glenn Beck and Patrick J Buchanan are lauded as sages Barzun is a rare link to an age when a person would be ashamed to pontificate on any subject without having a thorough knowledge of history, the classics and several European languages.
...
Born in France, educated in America, Barzun was for many decades the doyen of the Great Books programme at Columbia University. I have read three books by Monsieur B: Simple & Direct - a sensible and practical guide to writing; The Use and Abuse of Art - an essay which does exactly what it says on the tin describing the uses and abuses of art; From Dawn to Decadence - probably the best history of western civilization from 1500 - 2000 that has ever been written. Let me talk a little more about Dawn to Dec. It's basically a long but fast paced cultural history for the general reader. Barzun's prose is effortless, his learning eclectic, his wit playful, clever and acerbic. It's a book that manages to be both deep and wide ranging and most important of all it, is never dull. If you haven't read From Dawn to Decadence I both pity and envy you. I pity because you're undoubtedly lost in a sea of unknowning, but I envy because you've got a real treat to look forward to. (Hmm, doesn't Mr. T. famously say the previous sentence in a more concise way?)
...
Anyway, Joyeux Anniversaire, Jacques.

Birthday Greetings From Philip Larkin

Tomorrow is Philip Larkin's birthday. He would have been 88 had he not shuffled off this mortal whatsit in 1985. Since his death it's become increasingly apparent that he was England's most important post war poet. I'd go farther and say he was England's most important poet of the entire twentieth century (and that includes some stiff competition). He also wrote Jazz criticism for The Daily Telegraph and two excellent, hard to find novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. His novels are so good, in fact, and were written when he was so young, that I think he could have been a major British novelist had he stuck at it. But he didn't. He settled for poetry. This is one of my favourites:

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anasthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Philip K Dick and Me

Next week is Philip K Dick 's 80th's birthday. For nearly a decade or so, when it hasn't been snowing, I've driven up to Fort Morgan, Colorado, where PKD is buried to wish him a happy birthday, leave some flowers and have a little chat about writing, failure, and the meaning of it all. Unlike the characters in PKD's Ubik Phil has never quite held up his end of the conversation. I won't be there next week because I'm 10,000 miles away in Australia but if you're in the neighborhood of Denver, Boulder or Ft Morgan you could drop into the Ft Morgan Municipal Cemetery next to I-76 and say hi from me. It won't be maudlin: I guarantee you there will be people there from Japan, France, Germany, Mexico etc as well as a few Americans.