of all

 "Of all the paths opening before me, I should choose the widest, where the gaze is lost."

Rachel wants to do Tuesday.  But we have Brook for Tuesday.  Will she stay with that?  Could Rachel do another day?  How many helpers do we want for a given week?  

a quotable line

 "Always choose what pushes toward the future."  Guyotat, In the Deep, 185

24 July Thursday.  Crew slowly packing for jaunt south.  Willow and I walked from living room red chair to green chair in den.  Big coffee brown recliner lift chair now defines the great room.  Arlyn came to look over the lawn and hedges.  Doug popped over with question about whether plant in his hand was edible.  

Guyotat's book a surprise in most every way.  And it works with me now, for me now.  Strange to say.  Fascinating, really, his writing.  Interested in reading in other works to see how one relates to another.  In this one he is remembering/recreating his fifteenth year.  

One day with Brook.  Is she backing out of going on?  Note from Justin, he thinks Rachel wants to do Tuesdays.  Comfort Keepers has a woman who will start August 13?  Hourly now $47.00.  Going to call CK in Abq to see what their rate is.  $35 an hour plus 7.625 % state tax.  So 140. for four hours plus 10.68. Andrea just called back to recall our phone talk a year or so ago.  

Dennis may arrive in Philly by the end of the month.  He's so excited.  

Here crew still gathering for blast off.  Will they lunch before the wheels roll?  Or will they pack edibles and stop further down the road?  

Always choose what pushes toward the future.  

"The future is what doesn't yet exist; it's what I must create out of nothing: poetry and its double: the text of the deep--'beyond-creation.'" 185 

Saturday 19th

 Perfect turn in the weather for the fam's arrival yesterday.  Eliot indeed has gotten legs, taller.  Everyone looks so good.  They head to the McLane beach this afternoon, did a dinner at dox last night.  Willow sad or miffed that she missed Martha's memorial and seeing her book group.  Ken sent a succinct report about it.  

Finished These Violent Delights.  Shoulda guessed the title was from Shakespeare.  Enjoyed it ok but felt a bit irritated by this and that and some other things.  Young writer trying to please everyone too much.  Not as memorable and perfect as Donna Tartt's The Secret History.  These goes for the muddled ambivalent ending.  Buries the gay love story under a pile of social, familial anxieties and obligations.  Sort of even throws it away.  Or under the sociological bus.  

What to read next.  Took down the big Antunes novel Everything on Fire that I had started last year and had no idea how to read and enjoy.  More experienced now with Antunes.  Also have two by the other unknown French guy, Guyotat.  Should I try him next?  

Oh, the film about Ney Matogrosso the Brazilian singer resonated as we watched about half of Bohemian Rhapsody last night.  Ney and Freddie Mercury exactly same generation (five years difference, Ney born in '41, Freddie in '46).  Same body types, same bi-sexuality, same exhibitionistic performance demands, same theatricality of costuming and music and dance, oh and similar similar use of falsetto.  Amazing.  Only because English language dominates the world, perhaps, did one star become worldwide and the other stayed in the Portuguese/Latin world.  

Now we are looking for super narrow transport chair to fit through the doorway into the downstairs bathroom.  

In place

 Judith wrapping up her second visit now.  Glorious looking day outside.  Watered the hanging plants, the bright begonias, pinks, golds, and one violet and white bunch of petunias in the sun.  Maria called the other evening from Abq about putting two roses in the water spot at the back wall.  Brook visited yesterday and seems a perfect godsend of a young woman.  Ashley's twin.  She talked about the extraordinary house they grew up in in WV that her father sort of fell into building because after he bought Goose Hollow Campground he got into handling huge beams of wood, ash?  stripped and planed them, eventually had enough to start putting up a big house in the Valley.  

Judith helped me roll up the large rug, floors now bare except for the hall and den.  Feels nice and summery.  K and C coming at 5 for dinner from Thai Smile.  I plan to make faux frozen cosmopolitans. Or frozen faux.  Shopping yesterday I pulled carton of drinks into the cart to have it fall on the floor.  Bottle plastic didn't break, unlike the jar of jam in Walmart the day before.  

July 11 Drowning or Ballooning?

 Back in Plymouth for second day now today.  Still napping off and on.  

Description of reading Antunes "Midnight" Matt Parker posted on X:  "realMattKParker (@𝑀𝑎𝑡𝑡 𝐾. 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑒𝑟) posted: Finished. 

An experience like drowning. Wave after wave of memory, overlapping, tumbling, and each wave stretching back into a past of intergenerational and political trauma.

Relentless, overwhelming, intimate, terminal. 

Wondered today if that could be lightened a bit as in transvaluation of values.  An experience like riding in a hot air balloon.  Wave after wave of air currents, overlapping, rising, tumbling, each stream or current or wave stretching forward into a future of expectation and discovering as memories of intergenerational trauma becomes escaped and released back into past memory.  

Here I wonder if we are now house-bound and wheelchair bound.  A new life?  Willow's legs are softer and softer it seems.  Airport overnight between planes wiped us out.  Fortunately morning shower routine still works. Rest of the day a matter of multiple transports between types of chairs.  

Hope for Brook Saba's help.  Alan with Lakes Shuttle a godsend for being big and strong enough to lift Bela up the stairs into the sunroom.  

July 6

 5 July 

Fireworks last night.  All along the horizon from Barbara's patio.  Lots here in the neighborhood too, even after we got back about a quarter to ten.  

Sticking it out with Midnight.  One reader liked my comment on the ethics of publication on X.  Who knows?  Read along the jazz riffs, dementia or not.  Part of the new century, new worlds?  

Ivan told me about the trip to Yellowstone his son-in-law is taking them on in two weeks.  Eleven guests, ten days, all paid.  The son works for Autism Centers, large network of help locations for autistic children.  

Suitcases in the spare room.  List printed out.  How to do the remaining days.  No Chatter, No Beckie, no Graciela.  But the promise of Brook Saba-McDowell in Plymouth.  

6 July

Finished Midnight yesterday.  Consistently fresh material until the end, if that means the artist-author was in control.  And---no matter how it went it was still 10 times better than Enard's most recent entry.  And, yes, maybe that WaPo review was a puff piece planted by the evil texan deep vellum people but it did give us the reassurance of a concise plot summary so we could see if we were getting anything, or just enough to keep going.  Look, the book got under my skin.  Proof.  Compare to responses so far to Goytisolo's "shocking" Count Julien.  Cleve enough and right on the money in so many fine details but I could easily not finish it and would not miss it or the voice in which it drones on.  I have his book on exile on the Kobo so I will take a look at it.  Also another Antunes, an earlier one Ceremonial something which has had good tweets about it.  

Few more days to pack and loiter before we fly East.  

About Face

 Wednesday, July 02, 2025

About Face

 July 2  This morning I wrote a complaint to Dalkey Archive about Antunes because last night I found a piece from 2009 where his biographer said he was lost to dementia.  Was that a premature diagnosis and assumption.

In this morning's WashPo a rave review for this novel by Morten Høi Jensen (who has a new book out on the contradictions of The Magic Mountain coming out in October.  Danish.  So given his help in this review I suppose I will continue on in Midnight.  

here is his piece ---  

António Lobo Antunes’s novels are inventions of inflamed interiority. [good phrase there ]   They defy summation with a shrug. If our inner lives cannot be easily summarized, Antunes seems to say, then why should a novel? His sentences, long and unpunctuated, often accommodate several voices at once. And yet this polyphony belies his basic readability; it may not always be clear what is going on, or who is saying what, but the effect is nevertheless intensely absorbing. Yes, one thinks, this is indeed what our minds are made of: a commotion of thoughts, voices, memories half-remembered or wholly made-up, intrusions and evasions.   [Yes this is the experience and the pleasure.]

Antunes, often (and rightfully) listed as a Nobel Prize contender, is arguably Portugal’s greatest living writer, the author of more than 30 novels whose long roster of admirers has included über-critics George Steiner and Harold Bloom. Born in Lisbon in 1942, Antunes trained as a doctor and later practiced psychiatry. Not long after graduating from medical school, he was drafted to serve as a medic in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974), a long, costly and ultimately futile attempt by dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s to retain Portugal’s colonies in Africa. The experience strongly marked Antunes, who has repeatedly returned to the war in his fiction, not least because of the public silence that followed after the Salazar regime was overthrown in 1974. “There was a kind of unspeakable culpability in Portugal,” Antunes has said. “Everyone just wanted to forget.” 

The narrator of “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach,” the latest novel by Antunes to be translated into English, also longs for oblivion, though of a more permanent kind. Set over the course of a single late-summer weekend in 2011, the novel follows the narrator, a schoolteacher, to the house on the Portuguese coast where she spent summers as a child, and where, significantly, her oldest brother drowned himself in the ocean 40 years before. “I wasn’t eleven anymore, I was fifty-two, or rather here I was eleven and fifty-two,” the narrator reflects. “I’ve come to say goodbye to this house, or to my older brother, or to myself.” It may also be significant that 1971, the apparent year of the brother’s death, was the same year Antunes was sent to Angola during the war.

These few details are the buoys the reader is given to navigate the novel’s stormy narrative. The first sentence opens, “I awoke in the middle of the night certain that the ocean was calling me through the closed shutters,” and doesn’t close, properly speaking, until Page 32, with the conclusion of the first chapter. (The novel’s three parts, one for each day of the weekend, consist of 10 chapters each). But unlike long-sentence soliloquists like W. G. Sebald or Javier Marías, Antunes’s sentences are noisily peopled, and his translator, Elizabeth Lowe, is right to compare them to jazz, “with improvisations that interrupt the narrative flow, and refrains that mark the melody,” as she puts it in her translator’s note.

A single page of “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach” might therefore consist of three or more characters’ voices and take place in as many different points in time and be interrupted by a line of dialogue or the narrator’s own reflections. Admittedly, this absence of grammatical and narrative convention requires that readers be on their toes; for the first few pages, it may seem difficult to follow, but as with jazz it creates its own subtle rhythms over time, so that the reader eventually begins to nod along, more and more deeply engrossed.

[again, "nod" is the right word choice here!]

As the weekend at the beach house unfolds, we realize that the narrator is taking stock of her life, reading the balance sheet and moving toward a last attempt at justice or requital, gradually revealing the more specific details of her biography. We learn that she has had both a miscarriage and a mastectomy, that her marriage to her husband is falling apart and that for some time she has been engaged in an affair with an older, female colleague. Mostly, however, we learn about her family when she was growing up: her unemployed, alcoholic father and unaffectionate mother, the oldest brother who dies by suicide, a sadistic older brother who never recovers from the war in Angola, and a deaf brother who constantly draws out and repeats the tongue twister “Sheee saaills seeea sheells.”

There are memories returned to obsessively, like wounds: the oldest brother letting the narrator sit on the fender of his bicycle; the father always disappearing into the pantry to drink from his arsenal of bottles; the mother always complaining to someone or other: “Do you see the cross I bear?” Other memories — “the amount of junk, buried inside us, that resuscitates […] bringing more ruins along with it,” the narrator muses — surface unbidden, and still others don’t belong to the narrator at all: Each of the novel’s three parts concludes with chapters narrated by someone else.  

{this detail I had not realized} [is it really accurate?]

Over nearly 575 pages, this relentless probing of memory also demonstrates something of its desperate futility. Powerless to change the past, the narrator doubts and ponders, argues and accuses, remembers insults and settles scores: “What have I done?”; “why do people grow apart”; “you were the one who killed him, mother”; “where did you go, all of you.” And to what end? Only to long for “peace, and a ceiling of ocean in which the waves move without hurting.” 

Antunes’s prose, viscous, metaphorical and baroque in his earlier novels, is made here of a more tentative, airier substance, filled with the surges, flickers and confusions of consciousness: “Death, I’m not afraid of dying, I’m only afraid of suffering, of pain, what a lie, I’m afraid of the Alto da Vigia, and my body, my body falling and not of suffering or pain, it’s death that terrifies me, no older brother waiting for me in the water, I helpless and nevertheless I have to do it not for my older brother, for me.”

In this elegy for a family, or for the family that could have been, Antunes masterfully evokes the obsessive pull of family life, the peculiar intensity of its joys and miseries. “We had missed being happy by a thread,” the narrator thinks at one point, “what did we do wrong.” Readers should not be put off by the narrative disorder and paucity of plot; “Midnight Is Not in Everyone’s Reach” is fiction of the highest order.

Morten Høi Jensen is the author of “The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain,” which will be published in October.

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."  

last pages in Aciman's memoir

 shame gets mentioned a number of times throughout, here close to the end . . .

That shame had never gone away; shame never does, it was there on every corner of the street. Shame, which is the reluctance to own up to who we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity are buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures we couldn’t begin to name because they’ve been there since our earliest infancy and never went away. All I really wanted, as we began walking to the other end of Via Clelia, was to put the experience behind me now—We’ve done Via Clelia—knowing, though, that I

he gives the finale, however, the greatest of endings --  

I thought I'd learned to tolerate this city.  Instead, it was love.

    Now you know, says Via Clelia.

    Now I know, I want to say, now I know.  

lines from Aciman's Roman Year

 I was nursing a secret, other life.  It did not make me more reticent than I usually was when others described their real or proclaimed exploits; instead, my secret made me surer of myself.  806 Kobo

Having a separate life gave my old bookish aloofness a new cast.

I love the ease it gave me to revisit all my private corners with the space of a few hours without having to tell anyone.  824

But I also needed this book to know who I was now and what stood behind me, as if Durrell's novel allowed me to intuit things that weren't in his book at all, but in me, except that I needed his voice and its cadence to draw closer to myself.  841

Maybe this was what I was after, not the city as I remembered it, but traces of a city that might never have iexisted but was reinvented and in a strange way more real on paper for me that night than was my memory of it.  Maybe this was why I liked books:  they were not as real as life; they offered an altered, transposed, and stylized version of the real that I liked better because it was more persuasive.  It had radiance; real life never did.  854.  

our surest glory

 "To the people of the dead, Giacometti's work communicates the knowledge of the solitude of each

being and each thing, and that this solitude is our surest glory."   Genet 

Rilke's passage on marriage and solitude

 When did I first read Rilke's great lines about what makes a good marriage?  It was perhaps in C S Lewis's The Four Loves?  which we read at Elkins Park for a course or because it was very popular in Catholic circles then?  For sure I read it sometime in college.  I think I read it the book about notes to a yung poet.  Or Letters to a young poet.   The passage "It is a question in marriage, to my feeling, not of creating a quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude, and shows him this confidence, the greatest in his power to bestow."  

McGregor cites the passage in his book a number of times.  His book on solitude is well researched in a kind of researchy sort of way.  hmm am I finding fault?  

lines from Separate Rooms

 lines from the novel  by Tondelli    consonances going on with "solitude" in McGregor's book and other ones too 

In some ways he had managed to get by by remaining aloof, as he had in his boyish love affairs. The years of apprenticeship were important in this respect too. Because he did not achieve anything concrete, be it something accomplished, or some kind of a relationship. He did not realize that the suffering was enriching him and that he was developing in an inward direction as a person

He would rather have made love, had fun, and branched out into emotional experiences and political quests, but instead he ended up tense and repressed, working on the mystery of his own solitude and aloneness, unaware that in so doing he was getting closer to the most palpable seam of that other reality that we call art.

Leo realizes that his need for solitude cannot cut him off altogether

He is trying to find an answer to the need he feels to be with himself. He wants to carry on being generous and available and open, even if he is aware that it is not easy to reconcile such different demands. The fact is that solitude is changing him. He says: “You’re thirty-something, Leo. Your body does not react to things like it used to. You don’t have that constant desire to find things out any longer. You don’t have  

Pier Vittorio Tondelli  Separate Rooms   Fine Preface by André Aciman and soon to be a film

adaptation by Luca Guadagnino.  

Aciman's passages about writing letters, did I already post some passages from that?  

Genet

 The brilliance of Genet's mind hit me many times while in Our Lady of the Flowers.  Here is one such passage from a few days ago.  " Hateful nature, anti-poetic, ogress swallowing up all spirituality. As ogrish as beauty is greedy. Poetry is a vision of the world obtained by an effort, sometimes exhausting, of the taut, buttressed will. Poetry is willful It is not an abandonment, a free and gratuitous entry by the senses; it is not to be confused with sensuality, but rather, opposing it, was born, for example, on Saturdays, when, to clean the rooms, housewives put the red velvet chairs, gilded mirrors, and mahogany tables outside, in the nearby meadow. "