I’ve once again been stacking up all the London Review of Books issues, New York Review of Books, Harper’s, Time, The Week, Bloomberg Business Week, The Economist, AARP magazine, etc., etc., and moving them to the trash bay. While going through the LRBs, I was careful to look for one with a cover listing for a review about David Foster Wallace, as that means something to me (was reading a long memoir by a onetime fiancée when Moki was in his last days, and finished reading it a day or two after they took his body away…and here come the tears again).
And the issue wasn’t there. I accidentally threw it out, or misplaced it. Okay, so I would read it online? Eventually? When I re-upped my subscription? (For a while I was putting all subs on my Citi UK debit card since they were about to close out my account, and I didn’t want any automatic renewals.)
Out in the living room, on the back of the sofa, in a stack of mail, opened and folded in half, as though I had been carrying it in a sack…I found the issue just now. I must have taken it with me one of those times I went downtown on the subway. Perhaps the time I went to Petco at Union Square for erythromycin around December 15? Did I have it with me when I went to see Dottie on Christmas Eve? Or perhaps when I went to Petsmart on Dec. 30, when I finally did buy erythro, as well as José Cuervo a few minutes later?
I vaguely remember reading bits of this issue, probably on the subway. A review having to do with King Cyrus, and then just the opening of the David Foster Wallace thing. Anyway it’s here, not particularly interesting. About a mini-novel that was excised from Wallace’s last, posthumous doorstop.
At dentist 11-1 then home, where I ate a Mangia pizza (burrata, I think the special of the day was called) and drank most of a pint of vodka. I had just gone well over a day without any alcohol. I gulped it down, and with the pizza inside me was soon fast asleep. I had awakened around midnight on January 3rd. Drank coffee and threw stuff away. Reread my Philby piece and my last Teentime Substack. I have to figure out how to get from Teletape studios to the Pat Pleven myth to explaining what happened to Hornblower when he was carousing amongst the Jackson Whites. All except the Pleven part here is supportive fiction, unlike the last few chapters, which were mainly reconstructions of Hornblower’s flat and mindset. I shall put in some Aunt Pudge brutality. Maybe backdated: in the videotape I have a bandage on my head. One of the things the folks at Teletape liked. Only remembering it now. That was the time she broke the window.
I needed the sleep, though I ended up sleeping again toward midnight, getting up at intervals to grab the dregs in the Svedka bottle, if there were any. Besides dragging stuff to the trash bay, I went off to TMPL around 7 am. Very busy then, surprisingly. Surprising to me, because I seldom go to gyms in the early morning. I didn’t have the drive or stamina, and felt very tired after a little stationary and elliptical. Took a shower, my first in a week or two, but didn’t do my hair. I’d wanted to clean up and do my hair before going to the dentist at 11. Coliseum D, at 244 West 54th St., toward Eighth Ave., was a disappointment. One of those chain clinics with coons working the reception/business area. I’d signed up because I wanted the all-American dentist Scott Pope whose name is just a shill on the door. Instead I barely saw a dentist at all, I think a small-boned female J in face mask was what I got, after an hour or so of waiting and then being worked on by a mestizo or indian hygienist who took a million x-rays and then cleaned my teeth in three stages, with a water gun, a pick, and then the abrasive polisher. The dentist was nice enough but her prognosis was dismal. The 6-year molar will have to come out. It’s rotting the bone and will kill adjacent teeth. Actually I don’t think it’s much worse than it was ten years ago, and the major downside is that it’s become looser and has had abscesses periodically. So anyway I have to see yet another perio, a Chinawoman, on February 15th. It could have been January 11th, but that date looks like bad new for me. Fortunately my charges were only $46 on Delta Dental from AARP. Hundreds, thousands, more in the future. But if I have serious pain again, perhaps I can call them up and get a script.
What will we do with replacing that tooth? Can I get a partial, a removable bridge?
Talking through FB messaging to a friend of Paul Wood. Wants to get me on his (Australian) video program, talking about this or that. He went to Westminster, like Philby. I said, wasn’t Monty headmaster of Westminster for a while? Turns out he wasn’t. A delusion I’ve carried around for years.
I still have $900 in the ceramic duck. I want to put $100 back in there, and keep that there for peace of mind and emergencies. I remember when I found $600 in a zippered BofA case on an airplane back from my first C-C conference, and Moki got a kick out of that, put it in the safe under his desk. (What do I do about that safe? Is the combination anywhere? Can one set it? Are there instructions?)
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Forgot about that Weimar Culture book till I was packing up for TMPL. That was going to be one of the books in the roundup. What are the others?
Tariq Ali, Churchill
J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia
The Washington War
Andrew Lownie, Traitor King
Hollywood: An Oral History
