The literary Manafort
I'm re-reading Feneon's Novels in Three Lines which I keep in a glass case up in the cabin in the hopes of preserving my modernist roots while spending time in the non-literary, partially inaccessible wild west of rural Wyoming, and have created one of my own, based upon a recent newspaper story datelined, Las Vegas--
Case Closed.
50 Murders.
Motive still unknown.
Internet connection is poor here, poorer especially the last four days as the smoke from fires in California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and Utah pours into the Wapiti Valley, obstructing the satellite signal tower atop Cedar Mountain. So I stand on the big sandstone rock outcropping that graces the southside of my cabin, pointing my iPhone heavenward, trying to make contact with interstellular civilization and achievingh contact at least strong enough to play the NYTimes 'Mini-Crossword,' but have no luck and shut the thing down, getting my news from Feneon and Rabelais instead, whose Tweets are both reliable and enduring.
Feneon (1861-1944), a Parisian born in Trieste, is fantastic company, his news of mayhem, murder, suicide, folly and other human fun and games, translates well in the wilderness of contemporary life in rural USA, making any need for CNN et.al. obsolete.
Meantime, news from the other world leaks out, enough for me to say that I pity the poor Manafort, knowing a great man when I see one, knowing his home library is stocked with precious first editions--Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and Fitzgerald's Gatsby, a book Manafort once read to his children as a bedtime story. Not to mention the copy of Joyce's Ulysses--the rare Sylvia Beach 'Shakespeare and Company' edition--which Manafort claims contains 16,000 typos...and then the newsfeed goes dead.
How much does one really need to know? I don't know. I know Spike Lee, the film maker, calls Donald Trump, "Agent Orange" and that many astute social critics say it's now too late to reverse climate change, though we had the chance in the 1980's. I know that watching the clouds in Wyoming gives me both pleasure and practical information--their whiteness at noon is bionic, and by 4 p.m. or so I can tell by their color change whether there will be a evening thunder and lighting storm, or whether I can go down to the river and fish till it's dark.
That's about all I know right now. That's enough, now I'm free to make up the rest.
A peak inside Manafort's library, heretofore open only to scholars and think-tank habitues, never before seen by the public, said to be one of the the greatest repositories of codified western intellectual property in the world, August 5, 2018.