Merkin wrote:
...as he regales us with stories of washing dishes in Paris with George Orwell and Ho Chi Minh, roadie-ing for Woody Guthrie and sneaking off to the beach with Lillian Hellman...
Robinson was seated in front of the fire.
I knew Johns, he said. I met him in Detroit in '38. We were trapped together in a bar by the great blizzard of that winter. It was the only time he ever spoke to me of his past life - of his adventures as sailor and shepherd, of the extraordinary enterprises he had founded in various parts of the world, and of that encounter with Rouxinol you just mentioned, when he lay sick with fever in New Guinea. Rouxinol's devoted care of him, he told me, expressed the silent acknowledgement of a moral debt that the old man contracted twenty-odd years before: first alpinist to accost the Himalayas, he too had been succored in the helpless aftermath of a solitary fall by one he did not know - Borgmann, the Danish lepidopterist.
At the time he saved Rouxinol's life, Borgmann was travelling with old Jeremiah Keats, who is best remembered as having been confidential secretary to Kuromato, the original Japanese ambassador to St Petersburg. The fact has eclipsed his earlier and remarkably versatile career as diplomat and man of letters - Keats was, for instance, instrumental in persuading Ketchum, who until then, using the pen name Clarissa Rivers, had achieved only a mild notoriety as an author of sentimental novels, to leave England and come to Chile...
Since nobody remarked on Harry Mathews, I'll keep peeling that onion. Dig down a couple centuries and one arrives at...
...It was Mongiat who as a young man set down the description, so precious to musicologists, of the singing of the Dublin-born Ahearne, when the latter joined the suite of Philip of Burgundy. Ahearne left writings of his own, but they have nothing to do with music...
...The poem, as you will recall, is dedicated to Omo di Lucca, a Dantean scholar known to have spent nearly all his life in Florence, far from the haunts of Alaric - a fact which has bemused historians until recently, when it was discovered that Omo had accompanied Tomasso Portinari to Bruges as tutor to his eldest daughter Benedetta...
Mathews is long dead. The story was published in the collection, "Country Cooking and Other Stories," by Burning Deck Press of Providence RI in 1980. To the best of my knowledge, Burning Deck is still an ongoing enterprise, and the copyright hasn't been transferred.
AKBAR has had no better success drawing comment on his game of preference, SKAT. It's possible that he and I are dealing with an obstinate readership, enjoying a collective talent for selective deafness. But it's more likely that our audience consists chiefly of Yankee puritans, who believe, within the limitations of their faith, that they have too many vices already.
This cannot possibly be true.
...
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