Withdrew a hundred bucks from my account. This is the first time since arriving I've had unborrowed cash in my pocket, thanks to a French banking card I forgot to activate for foreign travel. We'll see whether I can withstand weight gain or or fruitless spending or either one.

June 14, 2003 Brookline
Raleigh and Beacon Street. Young hitchiker anarchist bums trying to draw water out of a fire hydrant. The apartment all the way across Kenmore does remind me slightly of France but lest one be deceived, the building closer at hand (J.S. Waterman Funeral Services) reminds you that this city's soul is made of brick. Not the popular brick of Montparnasse, but the expensive looking Episcopal arrangements found in England. I share this terrace with Russians, one of whom talks with his secretary over his short-wave cellphone about being six hundred dollars overdrawn. People coming here with clawsfull of Mardi Gras beads.

Walking down Beacon, I caught C.'s scent and it stopped me cold. Was crossing through Cooligde Corner, headed to the Post Office to buy stamps for postcards to my former students.

June 15, 2003 Brookline
Park behind library on Washington Street, 12h51. Cotton wool in the air, am sitting on the bleachers by the baseball diamond. Squirrels chattering in the trees right above my head.

Am reading the newspaper so much less. Some stories that I would have been all over in France, simply go unnoticed. The current congressional filibuster, for example, my uncle had to tell me about. If you grew up in Brookline, like the kids up the hill with their squirt guns, you would think everyone was comfortable, had good jobs, was satisfied. You wouldn't be anything but a good citizen surprised by misfortune, even one who thought of others. My mother's neighborhood. The courthouse across the street from the library was built 1941, year of her birth.

June 16, 2003 Brookline
Have resolved not to move from my spot today. Writing in the breakfast nook. Radio interview with a Nabokov scholar, the one who wrote the popular account of reading Lolita in Tehran. Recitation of several poems, on read by his son.

Eating cassoulet dated May 27 tonight when I was going through my papers and taking final tours through the garden. Uncle G. came home and we had drinks and cigars on the terrace. Like spending time with him. We went in and watched television for half an hour, until he fell asleep and dropped the remote. He always comes home and sleeps in front of the television until he drops the remote.

Was offered a four-week contract at the language school. Am waiting to hear how much it pays, as I completely forgot to discuss the matter at my interview.

June 17, 2003 Brookline
He describes the meals. Carp (mostly bones) served with roe and boiled potatoes with a vinegar cream sauce. Pork chops with the kidneys attached. A pork dish she made with neck bones. Peasant fare. "I'm only now able to appreciate the subtleties of my mother's cooking," said G. speaking of his mother, my grandmother. This while we were waiting to eat coq-au-vin. He had been paging through a New York Times International cookbook from the seventies ("Four pages for England, forty for France.").

How my uncle and my aunt interrupt each other as the read. Aunt P. with her copy of the Globe. Which paper has been running a week-long profile of John Kerry. They proceed by sentences, reading to the other what they have just finished reading. George taken with the copy of Harper's I bought and much amused by the citation of Herman Göring Lewis Lapham begins his essay with this month.

June 18, 2003 Cambridge
Am going to Chicago Friday, on a last-minute ticket. I've advised absolutely no one. Bad form I will likely regret. Love, however, the notion that nobody will know where to find me. Running off like that, avoiding all but the eyes of the ticket agents and toll takers, is just so fine and restful for the soul, especially now under the orange terror alert. If I can't get anyone on the phone I'll simply hide out at the Hotel Cass, as I've done several times before.

Went to Cambridge this evening on the hope of meeting with a French language discussion group. Should have smelled something was up when the advertisement suggested Starbuck's as the venue. It isn't as if places like Starbuck's and Wendy's are empty of atmosphere--their rotten ambience owing rather to moral and imaginative failure in strict juxtaposition with financial success. Heard no French spoken this evening but did overhear the future ruling class talk about itself ad nauseum.

The natural mode of the twenty-year-old made acute by privileged settings. Almost too grim to record. A very young student commiserating with fellow summer program inductees. "I was selected out of, like, six hundred students for this program and I just don't feel worthy. There's someone else who deserves this more. I can't keep up with the reading. Like, what's the point? I called my mom and she said 'skip a few classes'. I just want to go back to Las Vegas."

Remembered how the Harvard graduates I worked with at Random House always said they had gone to school in "Boston." How they were not at all amused if you then asked them "Boston College or University?" Just being in the area made me feel bad, as if there were no air. I wanted to hide. Old hippie chatting up a credulous young thing in front of the newsstand. "Yes, I was able to live quite comfortably in Bombay," he said. The Young Thing wanted to hear about Bombay, sleep with the old hippie, not sleep with him, go to Bombay, stay at Harvard, all at the same time. Long criticisms of the American Socialist Party written in magic marker on a wall along JFK street. So weak.

June 19, 2003 Brookline
How the United States specialize in the production of highly educated idiots whose vocabularies, consisting largely of "like," "basically," "sorta," and "hopefully" do nothing to impede their ruthless progress toward doctorhood or lawyership.

It is, of course, not sporting to point this out. Criticism or even noticing isn't entertainment--superheroes, now that's innertainment. Doctors describing Shakespeare to each other: "So basically it was a queen and king thing. He's like unfaithful all the time and, you know, uncool with the queen. It was quite sad. It was very sad."

"I look good on paper--I'm not worried 'cause I interview well. "This the psychology graduate student who says "Yeah, like I'm gonna finish my dissertation a year early 'cause basically I've got all the like theory done already and I've just got to graft on the research."

The essential sentimentality and intellectual defensiveness perceived necessary to American life.