Midnight is not for Everyone

 July 1   On page 271 of 572 pages in this book.  Am I reading this book?  Does one read a book by António Lobo Antunes?  Can I tell you what it is about (had I not read the translator's Note)?  So beautifully produced, printed, designed.  For such a large book, it holds so well in the hand.  But what about the reading?  The reading experience.  Is it me or is it the book?  Is it my age and ancient brain/mind?  Memory?  Attention?  Whatever---it is an extraordinary experience, just as was reading the previous L A book was.  "The Inquisitors' Manual."  

Long Day and Swedish shoes

Yesterday a big day for Portuguese elements in my life.  The Wyde shoes arrived, designed in Sweden, crafted in Portugual and news that the new Lobo Antunes book is due to arrive today, Wednesday.  Can't wait.  Goytisolo's Count Julian is a fine dream tour of Tangier, but Lobo Antunes is my main companion these days.  See if he continues to be worthy.  

Ed just told me about a British film maker I've never heard of---Terence Davies, on Criterion.  

from a 2015 article in The Guardian as his film Sunset Song comes out ---

This seems of a piece with aspects of the Davies emotional landscape familiar to anyone who has seen his early films. The “scar” that Catholicism left on him, for one: “I was terribly devout, I believed it completely. I prayed literally till my knees bled. My teenage years were awful because of that.” Then there was the realisation that he was gay (“that was even worse, that was beyond the grace of God. It was awful”), which he still appears to resent. “I have hated being gay, and I’ve been celibate for most of my life. Some people are just good at sex, and others aren’t; I’m one of them who isn’t. I’m just too self-conscious.”

Be that as it may, Davies is quietly grabbing his second chance with both hands. His Emily Dickinson film is in the can, and Mother of Sorrows, based on the Richard McCann book, looks like being his next. “Whatever or whoever is up there, I just thank my lucky stars. I don’t question it, I don’t know how it’s come about, and when it ends, I’ll think: ‘Well, I got a second chance.’ A lot of people don’t even get a first chance. I’ve just been very lucky.”

Yesterday

 Bloomsday 

Yesterday a big day worldwide.  Chatter had a great piece:  "A Kind of Mirror" by Brendon Randall-Myers for piano and fixed electronics.  Miki Sawada on piano, from Boston, on her way to do a 100 mile marathon through the Sierras in California.  

We went to Tablao Flamenco at the Hotel Albuquerque at 4.  It was good.  Better than a few years ago, three dancers, cantatara? andEguitarist.  

Earlier in the month Mathias Énard's "The Deserters" was a terrible disappointment.  

Since then been enjoying Lobo Antunes' "Knowledge of Hell."  It probably helps that I did read his shorter earlier work about the Angola war.  But what helps more is knowing he trained as a psychiatrist and my memories of Eugenia Memorial Hospital.  Faint yet scorched memories now, enough to conjure and elaborate with.  

Photo from Paris of Emma in her ballet recital.  She looks wonderful in pale blue tutu and much more graceful and beautiful in motion than a year or two ago.  Now fourteen.  We'll see them at last in about a month.  

Feeling 80

 June 2025  

13 th  

Major week for exchange of texts from Phil Jones and John Sitter.  We are now assured that we suffer from Anthropocene Disorder, apart from also being 81 years old.  

Phil —  

Hello, 

Today I'm feeling very 80, almost 81.   It's not due to any physical problems.   Rather, it's the effect of listening to an hour-long discussion about politics and the future between Pete Buttigieg and Heather Cox Richardson today.  In the past, I've been impressed by Richardson's knowledge of history and her ability to make something in history relevant to what is happening today.  I get her daily newsletter, and usually I agree with what she has to say.  I've also heard  Buttigieg talking about issues and felt he is far more knowledgeable than any other politician I've heard recently.   Yet their discussion today left me feeling depressed.  Richardson went to Exeter and Harvard, and Buttigieg went to Harvard and Oxford, and both did extremely well.  Perhaps that was part of the problem.  I felt that all they did  today was express all the "right" opinions about current American political issues as they displayed  their in-depth knowledge of both our history and current politics. I suppose nearly all listeners except Republicans would likely have given them an A+.  But I felt that all they did was simply "ace" a grad school exam  rather than analyze what really needs to be done going forward.  Perhaps they needed  BSc degrees rather than their  BA's to really understand  and address the huge problems all the nations on earth face.  On the other hand, even if they could discuss techie problems, I'm sure they both knew that talking in techie terms loses listeners and voters and, likely, elections.   So what occurred today was just one more discussion of today's American politics. "What do Dems need to do to win elections?"  Which, of course, is better than today's Reps winning, but, as Buttigieg admitted,  that doesn't really mean that necessary solutions to major problems will be adequately addressed.  And it all left me feeling like a depressed, perhaps overly critical old man  who thinks societies and industries and economies over this entire world are facing HUGE, soon to be URGENT, natural shortages and other big, overwhelming  technical problems that could affect human survival yet are not being addressed in any meaningful way by Dems who can't stop talking about income inequality,  gay rights, Ukraine, trans rights , Russia, immigrants, China, race, and, of course, Trump and MAGA.  In other words, what today's American voters  and politicians know and care about.......  So I took a 2.5 mile walk but that didn't help improve my  critical old-man  view of this typical discussion today…………..Phil

—-

John's reply —  

Hail, Phil.

    First reaction is Welcome to my world (meant less flippantly than it sounds).    Much of what you describe is much of what I've been feeling for the past two decades, since I started teaching mainly environmental lit and sustainability studies. It is a sense, in my case anyway, of living in two worlds. One is a growing consciousness of global emergencies (all the more alarming for being undeclared emergencies) and the other the sense of being locked into the business-as-usual world that ,if not always explicit denialism, is de facto denialism.  

   You're right that little of the discourse is on target. I can't help thinking that if a few hundred votes had gone the other way in Florida 25 years ago the country as a whole might be better educated by now on climate and other environmental issues.  Since then, even the Dems seem to have taken to heart the idea that the last presidential candidate to call for recognizing limits, Jimmy Carter, did not get re-elected.  One small but emblematic problem: ethanol.    One of the dumber ideas in our lifetime: using cropland to grow "food" for cars.  But what are the odds of a candidate campaigning in Iowa and saying that?

   You & I seem to be suffering from Anthropocene Disorder.  

    I'm pasting in below a description from an English literary critic I admire, Timothy Clark. For the phrase "of what lit crit and interpretations" insert "of what most of the things we consider meaningful.

"The disruptions of the anthropocene (“the death of nature”) are set to be so massive as to pose anew major questions of what literary criticism and interpretations are for, and in relation to what emergent or unknown norms. The more degraded and dangerous the once-natural environment becomes, the more the future or possible futures will insist on themselves as part of any context to be considered or critical method to be used. . .

 

 [“Anthropocene disorder”]  The phrase is coined to name a new kind of psychic disorder, inherent in the mismatch between familiar day-to-day perception and the sneering voice of even a minimal ecological understanding of awareness of scale effects; and in the gap between the human sense of time and slow-motion catastrophe and, finally, in a sense of disjunction between the destructive processes at issue and the adequacy of the arguments and measures being urged to address them. In response, the mind is suspended, uncertainly between a sense of rage and even despair on one side, and a consciousness of the majority perception of such reactions as disproportionate and imbalanced on the other." 

-John

—-

I chimed in —-

me in dis boat, too.  these boats  

currently reading 

Knowledge of Hell  life under Salazar in a psych hospital by doc fed up with psych  Lobo Antunes  the author 

also Goytisolo's book Count Julian, in exile from Franco's Spain 

nice passage by Clark and fine name for the whole 

new despair  Anthropene Disorder Studies departments

must be somewhere now  

—-

looked up some of Timothy Clark's work—-quite an extensive bibliography, University of Durham.  Got into anthropocene criticial thought via Derrida, Blanchot, Heidegger et al.   Found one review in TLS Education that has a fllip

British last line that both appalls and delights.  

The Value of Ecocriticism, by Timothy Clark

Book of the week: Leo Mellor assesses a bold attempt to make the case for literature and criticism in the light of environmental disaster

June 20, 2019

Leo Mellor 

Last Friday, I walked to work past many banners. There were the direct “We love the earth”; the desolate “There is no planet B”; and one even had a stylised student flinching from books: “What’s the point of page turning if the world is now burning?” Yes, fair enough. The climate strike again gave the world a vision of action rather than fatalistic acceptance. But might some turning and looking at pages actually be part of the answer? Both to understand how we got here and the kinds of writing that might explore the current condition.

The Value of Ecocriticism is a dense, perceptive and provocative book, and it makes a convincing case for its title. But it does have a fight on its hands. There is both cynicism and doubt about ecocriticism: some see it as little more than an intellectual landgrab; others as a way to further reduce literary study to silos of specialism; or even, through the affirming infrastructure of conferences, a spectacular way to perform bad faith and gain air miles, flying to talk about climate change. Such misgivings are prevalent, perhaps most bracingly among self-identifying ecocritics.

The first two chapters unpick the Anthropocene as a concept in both planetary history and cultural critique. As a way of designating the current time in which we live, “the human-influenced age”, the term was first formally adopted by a working group of the International Union of Geological Sciences in 2016. Clark’s work here is in dialogue with his much longer analysis in Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015). He is also a scholar of Derrida, Heidegger and Blanchot, so it is unsurprising that his theoretical coordinates lead him to be suspicious of critical works that do not reflect on how they are themselves shaped by what is thinkable within language. Sometimes his disdain can be glimpsed, as in his assessment of Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), as “a provocative if at times simplistic polemic”. Well, yes. But there might well be a place for such polemics. Perhaps Robert Macfarlane’s recent Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) could be useful here, partly as a literary work which, by being so hard to categorise, asks questions about cultural forms that do not just leave us helpless when considering timespans beyond the individual human life.

The penultimate chapter is on “material ecocriticism”, one of the most austere subdisciplines, where Clark notes that “the determining context…remains that of a primarily academic politics. By using terms such as ‘conversations’, etc. in relation to fields, rivers, etc. material critics are covertly staking a claim of a humanities discipline and its terms to the study of the environment”. But it gets worse: “academic politics is also apparent…in the exaggerated manifesto-like essays, texts whose shrill tone exemplifies the competitive institutional culture of the modern Western university”.

But traces of hope shape the final chapter, a place where theory does more – and more useful – work in thinking globally, and exploring the implications of this in an age of rapacious and totalising capitalism. And the activity of criticism might thus be rather more sympathetic to the art it encounters, such as when Clark quotes approvingly from a dictum: “criticism should not seek to reduce literature, like a dam in a river, to an ideologically fixed point”. For a book that is thoroughly suspicious of transcendent concepts this is perhaps a telling point. Indeed the implicit rationale of this series is that literary criticism has an identifiable “value” as a fluid activity, rather than structure, worth defending. This will require different kinds of reading, and of action, some of which will involve turning pages.

Leo Mellor is Roma Gill fellow in English at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

————

Theory all over again.  The rational mind doing it's damndest to explain, still faith seeking understanding, theology all over again.

Meanwhile I enjoy Lobo Antunes' attack from the inside on psychiatry and psychology, from within the mental hospital our hero works in, after having done time in the Angola war hell years before.  "Knowledge of Hell" feels as though Lobo Antunes is still teaching himself to write, to write in order to save himself from hell.  Brilliant word hoarding, word rich fluidity of consciousness, portraits of the denizens of the hospital-hell.  Granted my times in Eugenia Memorial Hospital near the Main Line were two short 7-10 day periods but they gave me a first-hand experience I still recall and which I can use to enjoy this book with a special, personal savor.  

——-posted 

a text by chatgpt or AI sent by a friend

 Robert Garlitz: Words, Watercolors, and the Quiet Power of Visibility**

For over three decades, Dr. Robert Garlitz was a fixture in the English Department at Plymouth State University — a scholar whose passion for literature, layered with a sharp eye for cultural nuance, left a lasting impression on students and colleagues alike. A soft-spoken but incisive thinker, Garlitz played a quiet but pivotal role in shaping the university’s exploration of identity, ... and aesthetics.
....................

Garlitz's studio walls are filled with sketches and half-finished pieces —  — a continuation of the same questions he once posed in class: *Who is allowed to look? Who is seen?*

Though he never sought a spotlight, Garlitz’s legacy as both an educator and artist is unmistakable. Former students recall his seminars as quietly transformative.  . . . .

Now in retirement, Robert Garlitz continues to paint, to write, and to reflect. His life is an ongoing dialogue between language and image, body and mind — and an enduring testament to the ways in which one person can reshape the cultural terrain of a small town without ever raising their voice

solitude

 here it is again, on page 53 of Enard's "The Deserter's, solitude, the word running through all the books I've been reading these past few months of this year.  "The solitude of the historian of mathematics."  

Aciman's Cornetto semplice

 A fine romance for the 60+ readership.  A perfect cornetto.  A Room by the Sea.

"A cornetto on the other hand isn’t so assiduously laminated, and can even be made with lard, not butter. The dough also contains more sugar. The result is a pastry that is just a lot sweeter than a proper French croissant, and can have a more enriched bread or cake-like texture, more like a French brioche. Some cornetti are very flaky and like croissants, but many others are more cakey; there’s a lot of variation."  

Naples and mother figure in good measure in the tale of lovers thrown together by surprise.

"Indeed, cornetti are sometimes called brioche in some northern parts of Italy, though in Naples, Sicily and parts of south with a historical French influence, the name brioche is used for a pastry more like the Gallic version. But that’s another story."