Uncle John’s Log & Co.

Today’s swim was as meditative as Tuesday’s was strenuous. Before I came home I walked over to the Jones Center and looked over the exhibition of sculptures. Standing in the painting studio among the half-finished canvases, I breathed in the vapors of turpentine and tried to get the Paul Watkins story out of my system (it made matters worse). Last night I listened to a 1993 radio interview that helped me gain a greater sense of the young man. The interviewer used the word “precocious,” but I must say I didn’t have that impression after having lived with David Halifax for a week. Well, I suppose most contemporary artists tend to squander youth before getting their act together, so any disciplined person who hits the ground running by the age of 20 is now considered prematurely developed.

I was talking to Marty about the novel and immediately he thought it would translate well as a motion picture. He chose Tobey Maguire as Halifax and Sean Connery as Pankratov. Not bad. I’d go with Michael Gambon or Brian Cox as the gruff, mysterious Russian myself (but who besides Cox could be Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring?). The character of Guillaume Fleury is trickier. John Turturro could have played him early in his career (maybe a bit too tall). Perhaps Jason Schwartzman would be a good match today, but I’m not familiar enough with his work. The likeness of Fluery that I picture in my mind is similar to a self-portrait by Pierre Bonnard. Marty suggested Adrien Brody—not bad again. He asked me how one gets to be a casting director in Hollywood, and I’m ashamed to admit that I came back with a snide reply inappropriate for a fourteen-year-old lad. Needless to say, it doesn’t please me when I witness a pocket of cynicism erupt from below the surface, like looking in the mirror to discover a conspicuous pimple.

Speaking of Marty, I had to pick him up from school yesterday when he was feeling too sick to wait for a bus ride home. I told him to stay warm, rest, take some vitamin C, and, so he wouldn’t miss any class time today, not to be “outside playing football after your friends get home.” When I talked to Terie later she said that he was fine. “Really?” I asked. “Yeah, he’s playing football,” she said.