memo to Pegeen

---

O, Pegeen, I’m sorrowed to hear that your husband was supposed to save you from suicide, but didn’t show up in time. Maybe, Sylvia Plath had a similar expectation.

Men!

“Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict” is delicious, if you can forget that, by now, the art is cliché. The art was regarded as worthless at the time! Peggy Guggenheim was an idiosyncratic savant, a naïve existentialist before Paris existentialism. She was living outsider art before it keynoted the mid-century.

catkins, Kathryne

---

Kathryne jumped off the ice-encrusted bridge before her students’ final papers were graded, December 2010. So, I guess her impulse to give up wasn’t premeditated. She dearly loved her kitty cat, but didn’t leave instructions about that (I was told). Virginia Woolf had a rather deliberate approach to the option. I don’t know whether she loved cats. November 2009, Janna’s approach was elaborate, methodic, including a note to be e-mailed after her death to everyone who loved her and directions about what to do with her cats.

There will be spring!...

---

...though maybe you find spring figuratively in your work, no matter the winter. I hope so!

Facebook algorithms thought I might know you—evidently because I saw your Facebook page years ago, when we were corresponding by e-mail—not via Facebook!—about history. Technology! [Other readers: Johanna in icy Michigan got an e-mail about this posting.]

I’m still engaged with Habermas’s work, and a new set of essays by him is coming into English this spring, The Lure of Technocracy. I’m still a promoter of his work, even though I disagree with him like one may disagree exuberantly with one’s much-loved partner.