Entries 2001-2002

(Letter to Sybil Trubin, Santa Monica, California 1/1/02)

Sybilla—the food boobs think oil and butter are foods, but the staff are sweet, affectionate and efficient. Too much smoke escapes the designated ashtray areas, but the excursions are informative and well-conducted. The entertainment has been energetic, sometimes melodious, often frenetic, and a few evenings inept. McDonald’s arches loom like tombstones in every road-cracked, crumbling, dust-coated town. The penguins are nonchalant, pure and precious. We’ve sucked out of the trip every droplet of recuperative liquor allowed.

                                                                                                                        Love,

                                                                                                                        Daniel J.

(Note on the absurdity of human prejudice)

            Coleridge in the nineteenth century wrote of Iago’s motiveless malignity.

            Ralph Ellison writes of his hero in “Invisible Man” that he must be dogged. Bledsoe, a black man, a university president, someone who ought to be proud and glad of the chance to promote a young African American, instead writes in letters to influential white men the suggestion that they “keep this ****** running.”

            The viciousness seems unexplainable. So outrageous that is almost implausible. But we accept it as the author’s truth; but we try to make sense of it.

            It is not sensible—unless we are prepared to explore Bledsoe’s deep fears and hatreds and paranoia, perhaps. Ellison the author is not writing a book about Bledsoe’s neuroses. The novel is about his hero’s struggles.

            Shakespeare writes a play about Othello’s struggle with himself and his society. He is Iago’s ****** being kept running for no discernable reason.

            Hatred for a race, a nationality or a culture is not sensible. But it exists in all human tribes; always has existed.

            (Iago finds fidelity, purity and friendship absurd—existentialism?)

                                                            (12/24/01 Ushuaia Port, Argentina)