Christmas .2

Sunday 28th

Exchanged presents late this morning.  Again super bright sunshine outside.  Everyone happy with gifts, followed by two group photos, Dave providing foreground on the floor, Eliot and Dave in matching pjs.  Few more xmas cards.  Egg nog too rich Dave and I agreed.  Needs the brandy or rum.  Kids planning another sledding trip now after a snack lunch.  Still no tiny postcard from Widge.  First time in ? 50 years? Booklet from Watchman Nee from Petie.  Christmas letter from Helen Frink.   Garnet Hill linen sheets order a bust.  No delivery until Feb-March.  

Saturday Dec 27

E & E are making a video about something, using some of the figures from the glass case.  No interest in adding more decor to the tree.  Dave off on shopping missions.  I got to Wally's to find no flossers.  Flosser crisis.  Amazon get them here by Monday.  Cold and super bright now.  I had not realized how long the trip was, after leaving la plagne they had a three hour train ride to Lyon.  There they spent the night at an airport motel.  Flight to Amsterdam, four hours in the airport there before the Boston flight.  Walking in W's realized there had been no fruitcake on display to tempt me.  Bought one of those Panettone loafs.  Patsy also gave us one of her cranberry (or raisin?) breads.  Dave wants us to go to La Familia this evening and do the Christmas in the morning.  Cécile got a great night's sleep.  Dave still nursing the tail end of his cold, slept downstairs so his snoring didn't bother the others.  Eliot taller than in August.  Emma  more sure and graceful.  Waiting for the boys in her class to catch up with her, she told Bela.  Wants to move to Holland to find tall guys.  

unboxing day

 Asked Chat if I would like Underworld since I discovered that Chris Viala devotes three hours to talking about it for his end of year video.  That alone made me suspect I would not dig DeLillo that much and AI confirms it, especially with this line about what Handke features: Concerned with individual perception, the boundaries of language, and a skepticism of grand narratives.  Does Viala ever talk about Handke, not that that would matter much.  I enjoyed his takes on Schattenfroh.  Nope.  

This morning we wait for tech delivery from Dead River.  Called them but they have no idea of the route the truck is taking today.  Oh well.  Wait.  Pick up the car at 2 pm.  It closes at 3 pm.  

Yesterday we managed to rack up over 2k steps just here in the house.  Do that again today.  Really cold outside, below 10, will go up only to 17 or so.  

Found one person on Quora that Chat said sees Handke as an infJ!  Clearly wrong.  Playing Myers-Briggs as bad as astrology I guess.  Headache strong five minutes ago.  Diminished a bit since.  Wait before popping another advil.  Do a stretch walk around the house or something.  Rinse off some dishes.  

The painter's tirade against border fraud and the horrible stairway at the Festival theater is magnificent!  And not at all the work of a J but of an F in tirade mode, rife with cultural observations and niggles, perceptions and discernments about the deadly weight of bad design on the soul of the place and the souls of those condemned to climb the stairs and run down it.  77  "The painter stopped and laughed. 'Hm. What will I do? What will we do? Because my enemies elude my enmity.'" 

Dead River delivery.  If I had known the main office was in Philadelphia I would have switched thirty years ago!!!  Paid for the rental car too.  Bright afternoon, cold!!  High of 17 or so.  General Hospital on too.  

from John the literary historian---

I don't think I have anything as interesting to say on this subject as you guys have. To go way back, there was a time in high school where I thought about the priesthood, and though libido had pretty well convinced me by graduation that that wasn't the road, I was still torn at the end of h.s. about whether to go to Harvard or Holy Cross, the top Catholic college I'd applied to. 

  As I recall (and I wish I'd been a journaler, Phi), I stopped going to Mass by the summer after freshman year.  For me, the theology was crucial. Sometimes I wish it weren't. There is something good for manyin hanging onto community and custom, but I couldn't do it.  I would call myself an agnostic rather than atheist, in no small part because modern cosmology and physics are so mind-boggling. Sometimes I joke that I'm so agnostic I'm not sure I am. 

  Having a number of very smart friends at Notre Dame who are devout Catholics has been interesting. They were politically liberal and very often complaining about "the Church" but not inclined to leave. Catholicism has this interesting dual tradition of authoritarianism, including siding with Fascism, and leftist concern for the poor and suspicion of capitalism.

   There are times, including these last few months, where I miss believing in prayer. But a fundamental problem for me is that I have trouble imagining a god who would  need or want to be prayed to. 

   So here I am. Some nostalgia at Christmas and other times, but not enough to think about returning.

---

we watched the second Love in Barcelona movie from Hallmark Media.  Village in Euskadi famous for making azafran from the fields of crocuses.  Family over generations, village so remote no one can find it.  Sounds like the village we found and later got the photo of it from Bill Baker.  L'Alberca.  Wow that name came after only a few seconds of searching my mind for it.  

Waiting now for the plane to land and the kids to arrive.  Maybe by 10 pm.  Now almost 5 pm.  Bela on the piano now.  She found a house in Javea with a heated pool.  

White Christmas 2026

 second light snow shower of the morning.  Bela sent a jacquielawson proposing paris and javea.  Message from Gail Dorval with grandson photo.  Phil wants to know about Catholicism.  

That doesn't answer my question. Does Catholicism appeal to you at all these days?    If so, why or how?

Little factoid:   Harvard was established as a Congregationalist school,  Princeton was Prebyterian, and Brown was Baptist.  Brown was the first to dissassociate itself from religion.... P

---

Just the other day my 91 yr old retired French prof, Greorge, assured me that the church has

changed greatly and I should start going to services because you can now be an atheist catholic

and no one cares about theologies or such any more, it is all about caring and community.  If so

it looks like catholicism has gone full unitarian after all.  

Two years ago our dear friend from St Louis, Donald, retired prof of catholic theology at a small.

now closed, college came to visit us in Albuquerque.  That December he had gone to St Patrick's

Cathedral in NYC to become a Knight of Malta.  In Albuquerque one day he came into the living

room wearing his full knighthood robe and regalia, banner and gold medals.  His whole life as

a professor of theology he seems to have had no personal trouble with church teachings---i.e.

he's homosexual, every summer he went to France as part of an entourage of a gay aristocrat

there, parties in Tangiers (Malcolm Forbes et al), gay life all over the continent, no concern for

what the church may have had to say about such things. 

Years ago in Chicago a friend from Japan reassured me that no one listens to the pope.  His family

dates back to conversion to the church through St Francis Xavier (?), samurai links, etc. 

It is, it looks like, a great world religion.  Does everyone make of it what they want? Suppose so.

A mayor in a village in Spain was asked why the village that fought for the Republic against Franco

would continue celebrating all the feast days of the church they didn't support.  Do you think we're

Moors?  (Or did he say Do you think we're communists?  faulty memory here ruins the ostensible

punch line!)  

Actually the only other person who actually asked me point blank to join their church is the neighbor

across the corner, Doug.   Goes to the Unitarian fellowship here in town.  Child in a large family of a famous

(in his day) church historian at UChicago Divinity school, raised in the campus Lab school and high school (but

never completed college anywhere, chess wiz-computer genie).

In Bangkok we were taken to see one of the major temples.  Va's disability meant they had to find an elevator

that would take us up to the main level.  This meant we were taken behind the scenes as it were and

lo and behold the room was full of aspirant monks, teen boys, in their saffron robes, horsing around with

balls and games while their mothers cooked a big dinner for the temple.  The basement church dinner, universal once

again.  

What is one to do with all of this?  

Meanwhile Merry Christmas to all.  

The mid-state navigator assured Va the other day that this would be the first white christmas here in 25 years.  I don't think it is that long ago, so am polling my sources.  

HERE is the passage just read 11:42 in Handke's Across:  "Above them, there was not a star to be seen; only a blinking satellite flashed for a moment across a last hole in the clouds.  The leaf buds seemed to have blown off the trees, leaving a dead forest of swaying crags; the clumps of MISTLETOE in the branches were abandoned birds' nests.  The mountain was now inaccessible; and yet, wide open to nature's grandeur, I thought: This is the world!  Together with the beaklike shells of the empty beechnuts above me, the lights on the plain below were its capital city."  55 

Of course he has just killed a man with a rock, it seems.  The action against him would be a "challenge."

I belonged to the nation of criminals; no nation is more dispersed and isolated."  

Card game.  His names is Andreas.  X shaped legs hold up the table.  Maple.  "the dark green lanceolate tips of oleander bushes."  "Threshold, play on," Priest, painter, master of the house, inn.  

losing valuable things

 not understanding quite what happens.  Added lines to previous post but they didn't stay.  

One was thresholds, key term in Handke's Across.  Key term in one of my earlier phases.  And key to current life manners because we live now in two houses, multiple thresholds, back and forth, NE to SW. Two houses and back and forth, more thresholds, more passages.  

And, so?

Justin sent the piece he wrote about fishing with Joe and spreading the ashes. "Ashes for the Fish."  Joe has this good line---"Fly-fishing is the only thing that I do that is the thing that I do."

Talk about when he and Wendy started to separate.  When Justin was about fifteen.  Wendy found out after the fact, after the book appeared? that Joe and Lou Ann wrote The Letters together, romance novel in Lou Ann's mode with Joe as collaborator, letters back and forth over a fictional love affair.  And yet anyone who read the book would know that real emotion wrote the letters, joined the writers.  I recall that period very clearly.  Maybe it was because of that that I gave Joe a bit more distance.  I was pretty aghast privately that he had done that without Wendy knowing a thing about it.  I could tell he felt guilty about it too.  Were we ever friends?  Colleagues.  Older father confessor.  He once aligned me with Kafka's? tale about a sin-eater.  

Wrapped the basketball for Eliot in a big box to give him a bit of mystery.  Bela wrote cards explaining the special gift from her she wants for each---jewelry-making for Emma and basketball lessons for Eliot.  

Just as snow started lightly around 2 pm I sped out to Hannaford to get the things for our xmas day.  Turns out Bela wants the salmon dish.  Earlier I had made it to the dump.  After lunch we allowed ourselves two of Rachel's homemade cookies.  They look like treasures in the box she made up for us.  

Town tax bill arrive.  Not yet the water & sewer.  Total up to 8,681.!!  Paid in July 3901.  Owe now 4780.

Gulp.  Can we indeed afford to keep both houses?  This house in particular?  

I don't feel interested in reading the Wendigo stories.  Justin and Wendy knew all about them, the genre, which are called cryptid.  Described one creature called something like the squamp--squonk, northern Pennsylvania pig-like creature.  

"struggling across the threshold" at this very moment--23 our teacher historian Herr Loser muses over Virgil's Georgics 

In the market in front of the rack of berries a young couple were laughing and joking about the wonderful aroma of the berries they were buying, a splurge.  I looked more closely, uuuhh they look like albino strawberries, pine berries I think they are called, fancy label.  I'll serve them for our Christmas dinner and see what they are like. 

Waiting for Rachel

heavy gray skies waiting for snow later today.  

Salzburg!  I looked it up because Handke's man is walking around it, working in it.  McSweeney's posted it is where Sound of Music happens!  duh  doom scrolling a good term, no?

started reading The Willows, did some more pages last night.  Big deja vu sense of having reading it, way way back in the norton anthology days?  big sense from the book cover that a copy has long been upstairs in the alcove.  Did Nicholas years ago mention it favorably or someone else?  The Swede character in the tale I picture as Mark C just from his one year here, so perhaps I tried to read it at that period.  Do I reallyl want to read it?  those stories? Remember I trained myself to fall asleep fast at summer camp so I could not hear the weird tales of hands rising up out of the lake that the counselors regaled us with.  Why read them again now?  The prose style reminds me at once of Poe, surely Blackwood read lots of Poe, all of Poe, over and over.  

What do we want, do we think we want? Really want?  Dave said last night he felt better.  Oh, reminder that cousin Ricky wants him to contact him.  

Rachel and Justin knew all about Wendigo and other crypto creatures, I think they called them.  Cryptid. Great visit with them.  Tales about Wendy and Joe and backstories on some of their events.  Lou Ann as the pivot point in emotional terms for when they started to break up.  The Letters, the novel Joe and LA wrote together with Wendy not knowing at all.  I recall that whole thing very clearly.  Justin had to ask her not to come to the memorial.  In between Wendy and Susan, he had no choice.  Rachel gave us a beautiful box of cookies she spent all day making yesterday; home made jam too and coloring pens and a mandala coloring book.   

Monday sun

 22 Dec  Amarylis double in bloom.  Loving Handke's The Afternoon of a Writer.  Going to go all premature and fall back onto the old m-b grid and declare he just might be the great INFP writer I've been looking for all my life!  Intuition even a prayerful blessing as we've already seen.  Being alone yet not lonely key.  One book even given Feeling in the Title.  And finding the new, the next, the forward, the not yet as essential as possible.  There you have it.  And the feel of the voice just right, the feel of the perceptions and explorations.  Without judgments or warfares.  So may passages I wish I could just paste in and say Yes, yes, that's the way to say that, yes, that's how it is, that's how it feels.  That is what is most important in a scene like the one you describe and the sense of landscape you are moving in and through.  So glad Lentz told me to look into Handke.  I hope I will enjoy Fosse as much down the line, for now it is Handke.  

Then on 64 the whole Hymn to Beauty!  Followed by the scene with the imperious, stinking talker who destroyed the writer's cerebral castle of writing to be written. 

Fine for the writer to write this, but what then of the reader who has not written it but who has (only!) read it?  "By isolating myself . . . excluded myself from society once and for all . . . I shall never be one of them."  69 Can the reader not as well share in this (great, guilty) pleasure/honor/distinction/destiny/desire?

"You are a weakling and a liar," said the dancer.  So he/we needs a legislator figure after all.  Perhaps the J, of the J who is Shadow of the P?  A silent listener who issues not an unvarying rule but a wordlessly sympalthetic rhythm which discharges the parties into silence.  The ideal storyteller, the ideal audience for the storyteller?  

Writing did not bring me inner peace after all.  Only Translating can do that. "As a translator and nothing else, without secret reservations, I am entirely what I am; in my writing days I often felt like a traitor, but now, day after day, I feel that I'm true to myself.  Translation brings me deep peace."  77  His variation on Beckett's Fail, try again, fail better.  Or Booth's today is when they will see what a fraud I am.  

"the same urgency . . . allows me to be refreshingly superficial."  "by displaying your wound as attractively as possible, I conceal my own."  

"the writer followed him in secret (as he often did with friends as well as strangers) "  

the newscaster overpowered by emotion  "like a man clinging desperately to a window ledge from which he would fall with a scream."  

"Why was it only when alone that he was able to participate fully?"  so similar to Joe's early passage in his life story about his need to be alone.  

"Why was it only after people had gone that he was able to take them into himself, the more deeply the farther away they went?

such a lovely ending "To himself he was a puzzle, a long-forgotten wonderment."  quoting Goethe, "but I am nothing."  

The soft beauty of this book, the gentle wisdom, the light, radiates back into the earlier books and promises forward.  I've tried to read his books in the order of publication more or less.  This appeared in 1987.  Like Fosse's The Shining it could be used as a prayer book, read over and over again.  On a daily or monthly or seasonal basis.   This uses winter snow and snowflakes for the light, the light of snow up into the house at night.  

Should I re-write the whole piece into The Afternoon of a Reader?  

---

Now this week we are waiting---for the holy day but more for the kids to arrive.  TV feels empty.  Another Handke book awaits, Across and Repetition, both from 1986.  And the weird tales of Algernon Blackwood.   Can I read those?  "how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming travelling companion as my friend, the Swede."  

from La Plagne earlier this morning

Sunday

Dave called.  Everyone else out skiing but he has a cold and earlier in the week was diagnosed as having an inguinal hernia.  Docs said to take it easy, has surgery scheduled for Jan 7.  Looking and feeling pretty punk.  Disappointed to see the new tree and how short it is, even up on its pedestal table.  Pleaded with a pitiful emoji gif of a baby-eyed chipmunk.  

Rachel going to stop Tuesday morning.  Have to remember when to shop, Weds is Christmas eve.  

Handke's Afternoon of a Writer now.  "As a rule, these blackouts were put on."  27 

"this circuit of classifications and judgments .  .  . " 33    warring cliques 

"he would be carried away by his words, and later, if the result was published, he would be seized with terror or shame--he would even feel guilty, as if he had broken a taboo."  39  

He doesn't say so but search discovers that he is wandering around Salzburg, Austria, where he lived for about eleven years.  1979-1988 

O holy intuitions, stay with me."  50 

It was only when nameless and alone with things that he really started  functioning. 52

Slowness is the only illumination that I have ever had.  53

Laundry cycle

same Friday morning.  Called Richard and placed order for four cobalt mugs to be sent to PT.  Washer has just quieted.  Misty, foggy morning, raining.  Headache, two advils.  

helpful post from Poetry Chaikhana

Issa   Buddha's body 

         accepts it . . .

        winter rain 

paid the Water Authority Bill.  $1.21  Now to pre-info the car rental at enterprise.  Late lunch party at Walters has us doubled over in sleepiness after tasting some morsels of George's fruit cake under the pretex-pretense of tiding us over.  

Nice meal, fun get-together, relentless rain entering and leaving.  George and Darlene (and Keith) helped us get in and out of the place.  Had stir-fry duck!  pretty good, just my sort of glop and rice.  

Sat morning

Gained about four pounds between the meal and George's delicious fruit cake.  Geo says Hal, his AI friend, assures him that being an atheist Catholic you find the miracle in walking together--three emoji faces with teeth bared.   

Am I ready to like weird literature, classics of the weird tale says the intro.  Just because it is Nicholas's newest interest?  Perhaps and then again perhaps not.  I never succeeded in being as enthused about the novels of Claude Houghton as he has been.  But give it a chance.  Not now though.  Now I'm still in love with the novel by Peter Handke and maybe all of his works.  One love affair at a time.  "Possible Misattribution: It sounds like a witty, modern saying, maybe from a TV show or a contemporary book, rather than a classic literary figure."  Puts me in my place it does this AI genius.  

"It gave him real pain to expel his breath after looking for so long."  114  Did Handke read Modiano before or during writing his book about walking and wandering around Paris and using all the street names and place names to decorate the book, sustain the narrative, create the inner life of Gregory from the landscape of the city?  Or even after?  Or never.  Does Paris make writers use its map to construct their books, it being the literary city qua non?  ". . . and in any event was totally free from envy."  "the poor peasants among whom he had grown up." 

Still sleepy from a nap when I read the last pages of Feeling so I will read it again.  Will also go on to start Repetition and two others.  

Yesterday or was it this morning I threw away a book from its place on the shelf here in the den.  Blood of the Lamb by Peter DeVries.  My name in pencil on the first page with the date 1962.  Hardback with a plastic cover taped on it.  1962 was senior year, graduation from high school.  I had bought the book and read it because Brother Richard had mentioned it as one he had enjoyed, his laughter about it suggesting how much fun it contained, provoked, invited.  A satirical novel, maybe a bit like Evelyn Waugh?  A New Yorker writer.  Brother Richard brought old new yorker to the classroom, put them on the large wide windowsills of the classroom.  Anyone who got their work done early and had spare time could pick them up and leaf through them, read anything in them.  Did I laugh when I read the novel?  Did I understand it as easily and deeply as Brother Richard had done?  Or did I read it so I could drop casually at some point that yes I had bought it and read it and he could see how much his opinion meant to me.  No memory of whether any of that took place, no memory either of whether I did indeed enjoy the book.  It was the trophy value of it.  I had no idea of that at the time.  Why did I want to throw it away now, after carrying it around the country since 1962 and making sure it had a place on honor among many other sorts of trophy books gathered for many sorts of reasons?  Not sure.  Some sadness or reproach or loss it carried on its spine, some memory of high school confusions, longings, aspirations I no longer wished to see on a daily basis, out of the corner of my eye every time I entered and left the room.  

True Feeling

 Handke takes me into places where I had thought a week ago that only Fosse was trying to do.  More of a surprise in Handke.  This novel feels so unusual and fits my readerly wishes and hopes in unexpected ways every line, every paragraph.  I thought, oh, its a Rohmer movie, maybe.  No.  It is Handke and only Handke.  Still learning how to read him.  More delight in that than, ok, Lentz.  I finished the section before Washed and almost want to go back and read it again before going on.  

"He hadn't wished for a sign, but now unintentionally he had E X P E R I E N C E D one. 82

looking up and pasting in google text now feels like committing the worst sort of clerical apostasy, heresy, violation of the whole essence of writing and bookness --- 

Yes, the Austrian author Peter Handke's later work is particularly associated with the search for and experience of a 

"nearly mystical truth" or a heightened perception of reality, often tied to a quest for meaning that lies beyond the surface of everyday life and language. 

Key aspects of this include:

• "A Moment of True Feeling": His novel of this name explores a character who finds meaning when the world becomes "mysterious" and he can connect to it in a non-routine way.
• "Images" and Visions: In works like The Loss of Images (German title), a character experiences her interior life through "images"—a kind of "mystical, hallucinatory vision of landscapes and places"—which is central to the novel's experience.
• Metaphysics and Perception: Critics note a "metaphysic developed in Handke's newer books, which aims to translate the seen and perceived into language". His writing often works from "an area beyond psychology, where feelings acquire the adamancy of randomly encountered, geologically analyzed pebbles," as noted by John Updike.
• Beyond the "Linguistic Surface": Handke has evolved in his career from emphasizing the opacity of language to being "more and more concerned with the possibility of a nearly mystical truth lying somewhere beyond this same linguistic surface".
• Spirituality and Contemplation: While Handke is reticent about using the word "spirituality" too often, his travel writing and notebooks, such as Traveling Yesterday, include annotations with biblical citations and reflections about God and the divine, indicating a clear engagement with spiritual ideas and contemplation of Romanesque art. 

Handke's writing is often described as seeking to "do the world justice" by finding a language that captures an authentic, if elusive, reality or truth. 

------  bravo for this  ----next---how much has Fosse been influenced by Handke's work?  

Jon Fosse has acknowledged Peter Handke as one of his 

favorite authors and a significant influence, although the precise extent of the influence on his style is nuanced. 

Fosse considers himself a "Central European" writer and lists Austrian authors Georg Trakl, Thomas Bernhard, and Peter Handke as key literary inspirations. He has also publicly defended Handke from political criticism, supporting the decision to award him the Ibsen Prize in 2014 and the Nobel Prize in 2019, stating Handke was a worthy recipient based purely on literary merit. 

In terms of literary style, Fosse's work shares a minimalist, spare quality with Handke's, focusing on the "unsayable" and human anxiety, but critics often draw stronger direct comparisons to Samuel Beckett in Fosse's use of repetition and exploration of existential themes. While Handke's work is known for its linguistic ingenuity and experimental nature, Fosse's is characterized by a "quieter disturbance" and a focus on internal rhythms rather than the rage or theatricality sometimes found in other influenced writers like Bernhard. 

In summary, Handke is a highly admired and acknowledged influence, but Fosse has developed a distinct style that uses similar minimalist techniques for different emotional and thematic effects.  

Thursday Dec 18

Question now is how much penalty charge Irving will levy for breaking away.  Nice woman on the phone, thrilled that I am "moving to New Mexico."  

note to Dennis --- 

Enjoyed seeing how the saga ends.  Loved how you gave

Rodney the best line too ---  "“I like it best when everything is quiet. When you can hear your own heart pounding.”  sweet scene, hooray for Stella heading west and fine fun touch with the stranger and the painting.  And the price!!  

Hope you enjoyed spinning it out and that it helped you through this strange, unnerving? period for you.  Surely the chapter page will turn. this is far more than beckett prepares us for in Godot!!  I was listening to an interview with Peter Handke and he says he tries to write from a place and for that place within us that is beyond all arts, whethervisual, verbal or aural.  again it feels as if aging itself drags us there no matter what all else we try to do about it.   

oops

he said later that the book is not finished.  Few more weeks/months it will be.  Wants to know why I like Rodney Plunkett.  Is it just the name?  His haplessness?