Fare Thee Well

I’ve preferred this saying throughout my life. Three soft syllables to the terse, good-bye. This is to say I am not continuing with a website (Wix) or gailwilsonkenna.com. This means no more blogs. Yet I’ve enjoyed doing one the past many years. It has been a weekly discipline that kept me writing. And I am deeply grateful to Ilona Duncan for giving my words an artistic presentation each week.

Lately, I’ve been going through files and drawers and trying to get rid of paper. It’s as if I am re-visiting my life from the late 1970s in the Napa Valley. That’s when I took a weekend course at UC Berkeley, Overcoming the Fear of Writing. The instructor pulled my essay from the 80 or so she received, and told me I had “voice” and should write. Soon after, I was paid to take the Bay Area Writing Project through Berkeley and heard the same message. So after moving to Montgomery, Alabama, and no longer teaching high school English, I began writing each morning while the children were in pre-school. After that year our family began a sojourn that took us to five other countries and several U.S. cities. Throughout that time I taught for colleges and universities in Germany, Malaysia, Venezuela, Colombia, and Washington, D.C.

I’m keying these words to Elgar’s Enigma Variations. This British composer was told he lacked the talent to compose music. But he did it anyway and succeeded.

Edna O'Brian

                                       The other day in a thick folder on the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, I found these words. “I would be much lonelier on this earth without literature, and I might even have gone mad.” She continued, “As a last word, let me say this: Literature is the big bonanza, and writing is getting down one one’s knees each day and searching for the exact words.” Edna like Elgar succeeded.

Earlier I opened a file for an unpublished book I wrote, Long Night’s Journey, an epistolary novel set in Caracas, Venezuela, in which an imprisoned attorney writes to his 16-year-old daughter, a bright and talented student in a private Catholic school for girls in Georgetown, D.C. What  happened when I opened the file? Microsoft AI came on and told me it was a long document. Would I like it summarized?

But AI, I said aloud, the letter writer is Nate, an erudite and well-read lawyer, who passed his intelligence on to his daughter, Lucinda.  Nate, like all of us (excluding AI) did something human and stupid. Only he made his mistake in the land of Napoleonic Law where you are guilty until proven innocent.  Nate survives by writing and reading Moby Dick, along with the help of Jan, the U.S. Embassy’s vice-consul.

Yet brilliant AI will somehow summarize this novel, a good chunk of it using Spanish and language from Melville’s Ishmael? I had to laugh so as not to scream or cry. (Elgar easily brings my tears.)

Tech Boys

Earlier this morning I finished re-reading “Child’s Play” by Sam Kriss in the March 2026 Harper’s. The cover’s ‘tease’ for the article is, “Tech Boys in Toyland: Fear of Girls, Sperm Racing, and Silicon Valley’s Lust for Global Destruction.” One of the ‘boys’ interviewed is named Eric. He has a new company. I quote from the Harper’s article. “Last April Eric held a live sperm-racing event in Los Angeles. Hundreds of frat boys came out to watch a head-to-head between the effluvia of USC’s and UCLA’s most virile students, moving through a plastic maze.” Author Kriss then heard a spiel from Eric about how sperm racing draws attention to important issues and the “venture seemed to be of a piece with a general trend toward obsessive masculine self-optimization á la RFK Jr…. “This comment made me think of Hep the Warrior.  Perhaps the two cabinet members should contact Eric and offer their optimum bodies for testing.

I only know this. Except for author Sam and a young man known as Donald the Boat, who tricked a lot of high tech folk, I have no way to relate to the boys described in the article. I did love reading in the next to last column of a ten-page article that Donald had taken two Penguin classics to Roy at Cluely. The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron.” Roy’s response. “I do not obtain value from reading books.”

Now I hear Elgar returning to his theme, representing the loneliness of the creative artist. He dedicated The Enigma Variations to thirteen of his friends, beginning with his wife Alice.

My gift in life besides family, friends and music, has been literature, beginning with The Yearling in third grade.  My first blog years ago was about this novel by Marjorie Kennan Rawlings. I hope to do a RILL course on this writer’s books. Not ready to stop teaching or writing.

Onward, I say, and Fare Thee Well …Gail

Lolita Makes the News in Relation to Epstein.

I have in front of me a November 18, 2025 article by Travis Andersen. The caption is as follows:  

“Elisa New, wife of Larry Summers, mentioned “Lolita” in email to Jeffrey Epstein.” Dr. New, an emeritus Harvard literature professor, is identified in the article as the wife of former Harvard University President, Summers. From a 2018 e-mail released last fall in 2025, it sounds as if Elisa was going to look for her copy of Lolita for Jeffrey Epstein in response to his request for it. Would the literature professor’s copy have been the annotated Lolita? I assume, yes. 

I don’t know if Jeffrey Epstein read Lolita but he named his private plane The Lolita Express. This perverted man, whose name is heard and seen daily, must not have realized that Lolita was published in 1955. Which means a reader will not find overtly sexual and prurient language in the novel. After all, it wasn’t until 1960 that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was allowed to be published in the USA. Nabokov did make a statement that  “my novel does contain various allusions to the physiological urges of a pervert.”

I try to imagine Jeffrey Epstein with the annotated Lolita, a book of 457 pages, with only 300 of it as the novel. The other pages are notes to explain literary allusions, endless word play, cross references, and other devices that Nabokov uses in the novel. Was the brilliant Vladimir trying to out-do James Joyce whose Ulysses requires a separate book to explain it? Nabakov, born in Russia, had written many novels in Russian. But in Lolita he used the English language with brilliance, displaying formidable knowledge and creating dazzling effects. No question about that.

Picture a thick file with all that Nabokov weaves into this novel, which purports to be Humbert Humbert’s jailhouse confession. (Yes, he uses the two names.)   If Epstein did read Lolita, would he have thought of it before his death in jail in 2019? As so much emerges about the world of those in this man’s sphere, it is impossible for me to believe Epstein’s death was suicide.

I now leap from one Epstein to another… to Joseph Epstein, a prolific writer and author of The Novel, Who Needs it? On page 50 of his 2023 book, Epstein calls the novel, Lolita, “the most overrated work of the past century.” He claims that “absence of largeness of heart” kept Vladimir Nabokov from being a truly great writer.

So much to shudder over these days related to absence of heart, especially from those wearing tiny gold crosses on their necks like the Attorney General.  I don’t know who said, “repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. But shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

Next week: Evelyn Waugh’s warning for us in Brideshead Revisited

Short piece read in a slow Southern drawl at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference

A few words this evening, gentlemen, while our fine ladies spread the feast they’ve prepared for us and we share the bounty of our lives.  But good sirs… I am truly sorry to repeat for what must be the 100^th time, an irrefutable fact. In our country we are on the wrong tracks. And as you know, the Dixie Limited cannot compete with the Liberal Express.

So many of us, gentlemen, recall the days of the Barnum & Bailey circus…and how it rolled on the rails into our fine town of Tuscazoola…and how for one week we heard the welcome roar of wild animals, their screeches and roars filling the air on humid summer nights.

But I know that you know, my good friends, that never once from our youthful days until the Barnum & Bailey circus rolled its tents and left Tuscszoola for the last time, was any lion from the circus responsible for the death of any BODY.  But neither gentlemen, did we ever question the nature of the beast.

Now stay with me in thought, good sirs. I am asking this. Given the absence of the circus trainer and the presence of a sweet little lamb, is any of us fatuous enough to believe The Lion Story would not end in blood. No, good sirs.  The lion gets trained. It does not get converted.

In late May, gentlemen, I will be delivering a commencement speech at Freedom University, when their fine Christian graduates go out into the world of ever multiplying heathens, fornicators, sodomites, transexuals, and other perverted Liberal-ators.  The title of my speech for the convocation will be: The False Conversion Theory of Human Nature, delivered by none other than your congressman, Lane Weldon.

I do readily admit, my friends, that recognizing paradox has never been my strong suit.  In this I take pride. And yes it has been pointed out to me by countless liberal agitators that Christianity is founded on the Golden Rule; that Jesus Christ would be a liberal Democrat and not a conservative Republican in today’s political world.  But I would argue this shallow claim obfuscates and muddies water like a rabid beaver.  And what do we do with a rabid beaver, good sirs?  Do we spend money to cure it? Do we tickle its big tail and show it kindness?  NO! We shoot the damn thing. And we don’t expect a panther in the Everglades to be our friend, or those boa constrictors let loose in the Glades by irresponsible folk who overly populate our fine country. 

It is a thousand acres of horse manure to believe that kindness keeps an alligator from opening its jaws and displaying its fearsome teeth.

As of late, I’ve been hearing a lot about the Dalai Lama. I confess the first time I heard the name, I had it confused with Dolly P from Tennessee. But recently I saw television clips of this Tibetan fellow and could see he’s a fine man with a twinkle in his eye. St. Nick wearing a maroon robe, you might say. But should the Dalai Lama show kindness to a rabid beaver, we can be certain he is not immune to rabies.

Gentlemen, I could go on talkin’… but I see my missus over there, waving her sweet little hand, telling me the bountiful food is ready to enjoy. 

And when you have a sweetened tea in hand, we shall raise our glasses in a toast to the eternal & bestial nature of Man and say  Ah….men.

Next week: Perhaps another short piece from files of writing being purged…