A postcard from Willa Cather
Journals of Jules Renard
I’ve started on the Jules Renard’s journals, at this point I know next to nothing about Renard other than he was a French writer1.
In her introduction, Louise Bogan provides some detail.
I had to look up boulevardier, the Merriam-Webster defines such a person as:
The first boulevardiers got their name from the thoroughfares they frequented: the typically straight and geometrically precise boulevards of Paris. These particular men must have cut an impressive figure because the word boulevardier was eventually applied to any worldly and socially active man. Unlike many near-synonyms, "boulevardier" is generally a complimentary term.
In Jacques Perret’s 1964 book, Horace, the great Roman poet is described as a boulevardier:
Oh, and the boulevardier cocktail sounds rather tasty2.
Here are some excerpts:
It’s enough to throw you into despair: to read everything, and remember nothing! Because you do remember nothing. You may strain as much as you like: everything escapes. Here and there a few tatters remain, fragile as those puffs of smoke left over after a train has passed.
I adore the green of certain magazines after they have been washed by the weather in the kiosques.
His ideas resemble the pile of glass panes in a glazier’s basket: separately clear, opaque when together
A Latvian lullaby
A rather lovely, wistful, dreamy, folk song from Latvia…Aija, Baby, in the Womb by Ada Benefelde (1884-1967).
via the National Latvian Digital Library.
Xenophanes on greeting strangers
On Conrad’s Shadow line
Halford E. Luccock (1960)…
…and from Rationalism in Politics (1962) by Michael Oakeshott
I recently broke with a friend of 40 years over some stupid culture war topic. He (a tenured professor) continues to tweet idiocies such as ‘scratch a capitalist, and you’ll find a fascist’. Sure, this is the kind of thing I’d say back in my youth and twenties but then I grew up, experienced the world a little, talked to people from outside of my ‘group’, and sailed past Conrad’s line. My old friend is still on the other side, I wonder if he will ever join me?
I asked Chat GPT: “Jules Renard (1864–1910) was a French author and playwright known for his wit, precise style, and keen observations of nature and human character.”
I was waiting for my bacon and egg roll in Newtown (very lefty hippy/student inner city suburb of Sydney) on Thursday and 2 straight out of central casting (white, upper middle class, students, with the accent and clothes I’m sure you can picture) Pro-Palestine student protestors were handing out leaflets demanding a ceasefire
They were very much in friendly territory but it took 3 minutes before one person spoke up for the Israeli victims, within seconds the leaflet distributors were screaming at him that the was a racist (seemed they weren’t used to the idea of people questioning them, seems bad for people in the influence business)
Then a polite older lady asked how they planned to create the ceasefire seeing as they were in, you know.... Australia and we aren’t providing Israel with weapons or anything, nothing more in fact than speeches in parliament of support and its not like Bibi and the IDF would care what we say and the answer was just classic self-absorbed narcissism, apparently enough people at a protest in Sydney would create people power and this would force Israel to stop
The total childishness of these people makes me question the value of a university education