rainy Tuesday evening 14 October

The post-Columbus Day rain that drops all the leaves off the trees, except for the oak.  Week or so later.

Finished David Szalay's Flesh.  Two days after finishing Lentz's Schattenfroh.  Quite a contrast.  

Woolf and Beckett

 Found most interesting his high praise for Beckett and Woolf in his list of most influential writers upon his work.   

"Virginia Woolf’s language is incredibly elegant. She practises admirable wave aesthetics and employs a language that glides through consciousness without marked breaks. Her handling of characters is truly unique. The narratological questions that underpin any act of reading — “Who speaks?” “Who sees?” — become highly relevant for my own writing when she addresses them. Is it perception that is being described, or consciousness? Where lies the difference between the two? Or is there none? These are the questions that, prompted by my reading of Virginia Woolf, accompanied me when I was writing Schattenfroh."

Beckett, Woolf, Peter Weiss, Gertrude Stein, Claude Simon, Peter Handke, Kafka, and Rilke

What fascinates me about Rainer Maria Rilke is his paradoxical thinking and rhythmic gestures, and the fact that the form of his poems often has a homologous effect on their semantic levels. Rilke wrote the most incredible line I know: “Die Vögel fliegen still durch uns hindurch.” (“The birds fly silently through us.”)

The Untranslated.  

incomprehension phases

 Lentz "On the other hand, the so-called naive reader is the ideal one: he reads without preconceptions, untroubled, and is not disturbed by occasional incomprehension — in life one does not always understand everything, and reading is part of life. Taking things literally reveals wondrous networks of meaning that appeal to all the senses; it sparks the imagination directly. It allows for a kind of reading that feels almost tactile."

interview with Lentz today

 today The Untranslated posts this fabulous Interview with Lentz. 

passage 

Schattenfroh is not a realist novel, but it does contain realistic elements that can make it all the more threatening. The uncertainty of the question of where Schattenfroh, the novel, is set — in the interior world or the exterior world, or in both — which has always accompanied my writing, spawned from the outset the phantasmagorical deliria that I considered more fitting than a straightforward realism of representation. On the contrary, for me these deliria were realistic in the sense of representing fear. Literature can pass through walls. It can also enter consciousness. It can move between levels effortlessly.

first pass through

 Finished the book at 3:11 today, 10.11.2025. have two copies, just in case 

enjoyed it all the way through, in awe of it too, two days after the Nobel to the Hungarian can't help but think it should go next year to Lentz.  Everything I had hoped it might be and more.  Many good reviews of it up at various places.  My favorite is still the one by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado on pghrev.com Totality Without Signification

Maps, buildings, cells, devices, printing, golems, crucifixions and tortures, Bavarian Catholicism, Luther and Lutheranism, God and self, Self and gods, obsessions, raptures, divinations, divigations, definitions, uncertainties, unknowings, clouds, chambers, Mother, brother and Father. Death. Wondering about death, when will it come, how will it happen, who will know.

6 Oct Stannah Kaput again

Monday. Stair climber not working again.  Chris due to show after noon.  Same as three days ago.  Shows number 2 on the window but switches to 3 as soon as we try to go down.  Reading day.  Willow up in the blue chair.  Towels washing.  Rachel is able to do Wednesday.  Maybe I will finish Schattenfroh today or tomorrow.  What would Robert Lax do?  What would Dennis Brock do?  Wait.  Appointment reminder for George Culler showed up on the watch this morning.  October 13, same day a year ago that Annie Dessertenne died (if info correct).  Not noted on the family photo calendar.  Just pre-registered for the Telehealth visit with Culler.  Acorns dropping have been making a racket past few weeks.  Dry. Drought. Hot today, will reach high 70s even 80.  Kim and Owen should be in Albq from last night.  Every morning the same questions about the headaches.  Is it the caffeine, lower or higher, is it the adaptogens in the mushroom dusts,  is it too much water or too little?  Is it butterfat or peanut butter fat?  Is it something in the granola or the fruits, either the dried fruits in the granola or the fresh fruits layered on top or within the granolas?  Today it was a few slices of pink lady apple.  Is it the chocolate itself in the adaptogenic cacao powder added into the water?  Is it the yogurt?  The yogurt mixed with a bit of milk?  The zero yogurt or the yogurt with 1% fat or the other one with the 2% fat? Am I sounded yet just a little like the narrative voice of Schattenfroh?  By page 828 surely I should be able to mimic it just a bit.  How much longer is it than Infinite Jest?  could one even compare them.  Deep Vellum has not published exactly what Font it is using in the printed edition.  The name of the book designer is given, I could look it up once again if I wanted to put that here.  But if I google Infinite Jest, how many pages will it say?  Should I go onward and backward and commit myself to reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy at last?  1079 the number google gives for IJ.  1300 pages as an average for modern, full editions.  The mark of odd beauty pulls all glyphs from the printed page. 829 So much fun he has with the antique details of the old printing process, including the making of the lead type.  Makes me realize that of course because of Martin Luther the printing of books is essential to the national characters and histories of the Germanic peoples because Luther printing his books and translations liberated all of Central Europe and before it Germany from the imperial crowns of Rome.  The Reformation and its wars and slaughters created modern Germany and Europe as surely as Rome before it created post-Athens Europe.  The delegator, the deletion mark in proofreading. Just as I pulled the micro-ed mushroom and spinach pasta from the oven, Chris from National Mobility phoned and walked to the front door.  He is wrangling with the lift as we type.  Will he have a solution to keep this from happening in the future?  Will be buy a new lift?  This one is five years old.  

3 Oct Teensy Bits of H

sent this note to Ed and then realized what a great post it would be 

repair guy still not finished yet---satisfying that it has taken him a while, three or four up an down the stairs so far . . . .  his name is Jordan, luckily when I called back he was close by in Ashland.  10:12 am

Hi Ed   

Thought you might get a chuckle from seeing how I 

dip a finger into the brew for a few seconds at a time 

thanks to posts others throw out like this one this

morning on the evil X site.  

“Philosophy is the opposite of all calm and assurance. It is the whirlwind into which man is hurled, so that alone — without fantasy — he may grasp Dasein.”

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

Balloons ballooning now there.    Our friends from CO will use our house starting Monday for a few days.   

Really glad Betsy will use it to see you over Thanksgiving.  

Virginia stuck upstairs this morning, luckily repairman here now to get the stair climber to work again.  

In my flash of anger earlier I couldn't stop myself from saying in Abq this would not be a problem!!

What can you do?  I'm on page 728 out of 1001 in Schattenfroh (German novel--translator says it helps to know both H and H so no doubt I'm missing hundreds of nuances and hilarious hidden jokes! 

Hope all goes well there.  

Bob 

Jordan left around 10:30. We made it to the appointment with Dr Philips at Mid-State.

Yesterday Dr Scott did the magic restoration cleaning with his laser and my left eyesight is as clear and bright as it was after the first cataract procedure.  Miraculous.  

1 October

Rilke needs only a few lines to make one forget all about novels.  You need a novel so as to forget yourself.   682. 

Dox walk at noon,  Gorgeous day.  Topped that off with lunch of grilled cheese sandwiches at George's. 

 

Something in this house

 "Something in this house makes it so that I see myself thinking."  Schattenfroh 553

Lots of chunks on writing and reading, this book and books, that I love.  Could go to the text on Kobo and cut and paste some.

Brief coffee with Dennis yesterday morning at Chase.  Glimpses into the wondrous world of his generation, two below me.  He's 32? ish.  Ten years or so younger than David, who turns 37 later this week!  

Dennis keep doing the Ayahuasca retreats at the place on the Hudson valley, Kingston area?  Has been a number of times.  Credits it with great insight about himself and his journey and healing process.  With ChapGPT he has created a few personas with which to talk things over.  Told him about Pessoa's heteronyms.  Could also have brought in Barbara's mother's cast of characters in her late life.  And now Dennis de Brock is writing a faux Rechy novel of his own in weekly or daily installments, sending them.  

Willow is back on her Entwell Tales.  Maybe Fall is the time to take up one's authorial pen persona.

Chase was hopping.  Years since I was there with someone on a Monday morning.  Dennis does also write a journal.  And in his advertising writing days they create persons who are the intended target buyers, give them names, personalities.  

Nodded hello to Wendy Palmquist as she walked by our table.  I had a wee espresso, they used a cute little ceramic cup.  Dennis said hi to a very tall, fit guy in a t-shirt who he later said was a hero who saved a few guys in Iraq warfare, former green beret, now at the Campton fire and rescue crew and in the yoga classes Dennis attends.  

Talked about his courses for Columbia. He described also how AI or Chat is used for papers for the course.  He had one due, wrote it, then asked Chat to grade it for him after he fed in the CV for the professor of the course.  At Columbia he got help from the writing center director, online.  There they can help you with everything from brainstorming your topic to grammar.  He's also got an appt with the Director of University Libraries to talk about how to do research for his courses using the plethora of databases Columbia accesses.  So a grad student now has support networks around him we never even imagined invoking fifty years ago when grad students at Chicago.  It was all cold-turkey, cold immersion, sink or swim.  Although grade inflation was in place and it was pretty hard to actually flunk out.  One guy in our cohort had been also an undergrad English major and carried with him after admission to grad work six or more Incompletes from his course work in the college.   Years later he got a tenured job at UMiss in English.  

Billings' list

 " Exacting as Lentz’s literalism can be, it is also fresh and suggestive. After all, there are plenty of novels that embrace writerly self-consciousness—there are even several that do so by showing a prisoner trying to talk his way out of a prison (Claudio Magris’s 2006 novel Blindly and Elias Khoury’s Yalo, from 2004, are two recent examples that feel like spiritual cousins to Schattenfroh). In each of these books, the unreliability of the narrator’s monologizing can feel unsettling, but it ultimately serves to reinforce a larger settledness about the world outside the book. It suggests that there is a difference between such hyper-articulate (and, in Magris and Khoury’s cases, traumatized) narrators and us, the readers, who have somehow, despite being creatures of language ourselves, managed to hover above its dangers like Romans in a gladiatorial arena. They, the characters, are trapped by language. We, on the other hand, know where the world ends and writing begins—which means that, at the end of the day, we are safe, or at least certain enough about the potential pitfalls of language to stay away from them. "

pre pub essay

by Deep Vellum used this line by Rilke. Beauty is nothing more than a terror that we are still able to withstand  

Josh Billings

 has a fabulous essay review of Schattenfroh on LA RB 

just want to copy and paste the whole thing  so fine and brilliant it makes you weep with hope and joy

Gazing into One’s Own Head

Josh Billings reviews German author Michael Lentz’s novel “Schattenfroh,” newly translated by Max Lawton.

September 9, 2025

September 5 Friday and Schattenfroh

 Call yesterday afternoon while we were watching GH.  Michael McDermand to tell us Nancy died the day before, Sept 3.  Undiagnosed aggressive leukemia.  Hospice moved into the house the same evening or the next after the diagnosis.  Nancy didn't want to try any chemo or other procedures.  That was Friday a week ago.  She died on Wednesday.  Was calm and peaceful and tired most of the time.  Made lots of lists for Mike, Cindy and Bob.  Said maybe in a few months have a gathering for people to tell the funniest anecdote about her they could remember.  Feels still like we are in shock.  Gray morning doesn't help.  Wayne coming at 1 and the Natalie had scheduled a visit at 2 to chat GH stuff and general visit.  Nice visit with Pat last week.  I emailed the group yesterday, shock responses.  

Earlier I had a boost surprise.  We went to Meredith for a dental cleaning for Va.  Sally noted her purple outfit, as I had said she would.  She is very proud that her eldest son has been named master chef at Grand View Hotel in Whitefield.  He and his wife have a free five room house along with other perks.  Driving into Holderness Va said let's see the Inn where Carole's birthday party will be.  Drove in, looked at the asphalt slope by the rear garage that I thought was to be our entrance path.  Young man down there noticed us and I motioned to have him come up to talk about details.  Entrance is really in the front, a brick walk.

I got out of the car to go with him to see the walk and the small places with edges where the transport chair will need to edge up and over.  He looked at me and said are you Bob Garlitz?  Yes.  I took you for Composition my first year at PSC and it was my best course.  You told me something I still remember.  You said just write your essay and when you'r through throw away the first paragraph.  That has stayed with me because I have a hard time just figuring what my thoughts are and what I want to say, so after the first paragraph I finally start finding out.  He was/is a snowboarder from a high school in MA.  Majored in Political Science then taught challenged kids at Sandwich school.  His wife worked for the previous owners of the Inn for some years, also went to Plymouth but maybe a few years younger.  They bought the Inn five years ago.  He loves the change of work.  He asked us if we were related to Jessica Shaw, took a moment to realize it is Jessica Wixson Shaw and Sky Shaw.  He also knows Dave's musician Brendan Dowd (?).  Brendon (or Brendan?) Matthews.  They have a six year old daughter and twin three year old boys.  Thanked him for remembering me and saying hi.  Looking forward to the dinner more now!!  Delightful surprise.  

Oh, and Schattenfroh is super.  As good as, better than, I had hoped and expected.  Tweets say it is already viewed as a masterpiece of German Lit, five or more years old there.  Big reviews coming out in NYRB etc.  I tweeted two lines about it.  It is a book that is in love with how books are in love with books.  And the suggestion that reading K Burke's Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven would be a great companion piece to the novel, as a closing satyr play in comic mode.  Debating about whether to suggest it to Ed on the basis that the translator's tweet says the book assumes you've read your Hegel and Heidegger.  Max Lawton, who I've been following on X for a year or so.  That's how I caught wind of the book and its importance.  He works in four or more languages, mostly in Russian first and took on German because he wanted to translate this book.  I heard some bits of an interview on YouTube with the author, Michael Lenz.  But I'm in that phase of wanting to postpone digging around for commentary until well after I've finished the first read.  Already assuming I will want to read it again.  Love the voices and the flow through the rich materials from German/world lit and history.  Theologies.  Meanderings of all sorts.  

Last week of August 2025

 Heading into Labor Day weekend.  As if that will bring anything.  Markers.  Liturgical tabs.  

Eye procedure in about an hour.  Clearing up or away the obfuscatory smudge on the left eye.  Dr Scott who went to University of Chicago Medical School.  Which years.  Seems about my age maybe a few years younger.  Sent more funds to the kids.  Grateful praying hands emoji from Cécile.  Hope it helps her worry a bit less, especially in this first anniversary of Annie's death.  Sure to be hard for her and her father. They say they will come for Christmas but I'm a wee skeptical.

Doc's laser gizmo would not work.  Postponed until early October.  He said he went to Bowdoin, happiest years of his life.  No reply about Chicago.  

Discovering the Secret Path to Unleashing Your True Potential

 The Yielding Warrior is about the concept of yielding and how it can be applied to almost any area of life. The book dives into the three main directions of yielding: physical, mental, and emotional. You will learn how to break down and dissect the concept of yielding while learning how to build a set of life skills that can be applied to business, sports, education, music, art and relationships. Yielding has three areas of practice ritual, active, and philosophical based training applications. "The Yielding Warrior" helps you to understand why we use these different areas and how you can use them to create a life practice for yourself. The art of yielding has been practiced for centuries and in reality, everyone does it to some degree. As one of my old instructors once told me "it is easy to get an athlete to 85% of his or her potential the last 15% is always exponentially harder". The true beauty in the arts is always in the last 3-5% of your potential. As you watch someone like Michael Jordan play basketball or listen to music created by Johann Sebastian Bach you can appreciate their magical abilities and feel the energetic emotion emanating when they perform. Yielding helps us to be more aware of, and to nurture these subtleties that allow our passion to shine.

Jeff Paterson's book 

Annie Ernaux's Look at the Lights, My Love about Auchan Hypermarché Cergy

Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as “a great human meeting place, a spectacle”—a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life. 

 

The saying "secrets transform into diamonds" suggests that 

hidden truths or undisclosed information, when brought to light or revealed, can ultimately result in something valuable or powerful.

This metaphor draws parallels between the formation of diamonds under intense pressure and heat, and the process by which concealed information can, through various circumstances, become something precious or impactful.

The exact phrasing "secrets transform into diamonds" is not found in the search results for novel titles containing "diamond" and "secret."

 

However, the quote is likely a metaphorical statement about secrets having value, and being revealed as something precious. The themes of secrets and diamonds are prominent in several works:

• The Famous Five series by Enid Blyton includes the novel Five on a Secret Trail, where the children likely uncover a secret that leads to an adventure involving a treasure hunt. In Five Go Off in a Caravan, the children's mother's past is hinted at, suggesting the possibility of a concealed past and hidden wealth.
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas involves secrets, hidden treasure, and the theme of delayed gratification. A fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria, educates Edmond Dantès and informs him of a hidden treasure on Monte Cristo. This aligns with the theme of secrets eventually yielding valuable outcomes. After escaping, Dantès finds the treasure and uses his wealth to exact revenge, while also performing acts of generosity, hinting at the potential for secrets to be used for both positive and negative purposes.
• The Diamond of Darkhold by Jeanne DuPrau features a secret discovered by Lina and Doon that could change their lives. This secret, a forgotten technology to harness the power of the sun, highlights the idea that concealed knowledge can lead to breakthroughs and new opportunities.
• The Diamond Secret (Love Inspired Suspense) by Lenora Worth involves a search for a legendary chocolate diamond and a dangerous man. This could potentially connect secrets and diamonds in the context of the story's suspenseful plot. 

In conclusion, while the exact phrase might not be present, the concept it evokes is found within the themes of secrets and diamonds in various novels like The Famous Five, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Diamond of Darkhold. 

myth of coal into diamond

Coals are just the solidified form of carbon, while diamonds are the crystallized form. All the carbon trapped inside the deepest layers of earth is turned into either coal or diamond.

The quote "secrets transform into luminous stars" appears in the novel 

Black Star Requiem Epilogue: The Final Echo by Jeffery J. Davis. 

This novel is the concluding part of an epic saga exploring themes of survival, power, identity, and the fragility of civilization in a galaxy on the brink of collapse. The main character, Seren Vael, is the last remaining member of an ancient and powerful collective, the Choir, and embarks on a journey to uncover the hidden truths about her people and the fall of their empire. 

an AI way to blog anew?

 

The phrase "He became so good at keeping his life secret, he kept it secret from himself" is a thought-provoking idea exploring self-deception and the lengths to which individuals might go to compartmentalize or deny aspects of their own lives

While this exact wording isn't directly attributed to a specific novel in the search results, it aligns with concepts explored in works like George Orwell's 1984, particularly the quote: "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself". This quote from 1984 captures the essence of the sentiment in the user's inquiry, highlighting the psychological process of internalizing and suppressing secrets even from one's conscious awareness. 

--------

August 2

 Was it yesterday's depression and last night's school anxiety dreams that have me thinking I will cave in and subscribe to The NY Times?  Fell into looking up stuff on Compton Wynyates, Ronale Manor and Anselm Hall.  Lots more no seems to pop up online.  Or my personal algorhythms are in tune.  

Finished reading, looking through (at the final few pages) Guyotat's Coma.  Two books by him are enough.  Now I will Google "how to enjoy reading Lobo Antunes" to see if AI can give a hand here.

Ramps.  We bought that fine ramp with handrails in Albuquerque last year.  Now in the garage we have a shiny new foldable ramp, 7 foot long, to use with the new stair climbing chair due to be installed this Wednesday.  The Era of Ramps thrust upon us.  

not bad actually ---  To enjoy reading António Lobo Antunes's books, it's helpful to embrace their unique style, which often features multiple, overlapping narratives, stream-of-consciousness, and a focus on memory and subjective experience.Antunes's writing can be challenging due to its dense prose and shifting perspectives, but understanding his techniques and the context of his work can enhance the reading experience. 

Here's a more detailed guide:

somehow the text would not copy and paste well.  Is that by design?  

Just noticed this blog goes all the way back to 2006 which had 115 entries.  Most for any year.  Three years after Virginia's catastrophic event, in 2003.  So at least the blog has some sort of presence as a chronicle.  When one does is the event automatically reported to Google and the blog removed?  Or can any forensic net nerd find anything forever?  

sent this to Phil earlier ---  wmhuo168 (@William Huo) posted: Milton Friedman didn’t just destroy public education. He rewired how Americans think about everything from housing to health to patriotism.  

to which he replied. 

I think that part of the attraction is the mathematics of a strictly economic view.   It's "econmaththink."  One uses calculus to arrive at the "ideal solution" of any and all economic questions.  I'm very familiar with it and, if not for Exeter and the Peace Corps, might be trapped in it.  Liberalism seems like sloppy thinking to people attracted by econmath's definite goals and answers, which Friedman definitely was.   So were all my fellow econ majors at Brown.   They are still that way.  Which is why I get along best with a Brown classmate who majored in history and later went to law school but whose Jewish decency and background in history enable him to avoid being trapped in the restrictive  lawthink.  Another think mode that I don't like is militarythink.  I find the best generals and admirals are not trapped in militarythink but most generals, colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants and nearly all sergeants are.   P 

Virginia is now going into her second Iris Murdoch novel!!  gasp. her first was The Sea, the Sea, finished a few days ago.  She finished watching Indian Summers yesterday.  

Traveling family returns late tomorrow night and starts Theater Camp bright and early Monday morning. 

Might be that this house demands, commands, writing in this blog as extension, continuation, of "work"---the work we did here for 40 plus years as teachers and scribes and clerks and copyists and scribblers.  Artists, actors, producers.  Content Influencers, content creators.  Whole host of new terms by which to measure lives beyond coffee spoons.  Or was it tea spoons?  

Thursday. Last day of July

 Cooler.  Rain.  Gray.  Driving the car around.  Embarrassed to be so pleased with such a thing.  Ashamed to be having too much.  Relieved and pleased it is just like the car in Albuquerque and even a few tweaks better.  

Guyotat.  At the end of the book we hear he went to a school run by the Brothers of the Christian Schools.  Perfect.  Now I think I won't send the book to John Miller, from high school.  Gave up recommending books to people a while back.  Good move.  However the strangeness of the book resonated with me in odd ways, it surely will not with John.  I've heard a bit from Phil about him over the last thirty years, but I hardly know him.  Or if he reads anything other than the WSJ.  

Is Guyotat's Coma any better than In the Deep. So far perhaps a bit.  But it gives the sense again that we're dealing with a strange bird who may not be the artist-author he wants to be.  Who can tell.  What about the huge Antunes volumes stacked up here?  With Schattenfroh due to arrive, should I start anything?  

Charger anxiety became terrible yesterday.  Could not use the Mac book for days because I could not find the charger for it.  Ordered one and it turned out to be the wrong fit.  Desperately ordered others and then canceled those after finding the correct ones in the Apple Store online.  

Was not going to do this blog anymore. 

car lust car lost

 Whether to go ahead and lease a car now or not.  Strong urge this Sunday morning to proceed and go for the ID.4.  Just looked at a few tube reviews of the Soltera.  Black plastic fenders.  Low hatchback profile in the rear means our transport chair might be a harder fit.  I know the ID.4 well, why not stay with it for here?  What if we stay in NM soon?  Plug-in ev still fits this house better, best.  Or resale.  

Monkey mind project for sure.  Cars be mirror trophies of who we be.  Wannabe coaches.  Dream chariots. Fortress cocoons.  

In the Deep moves forward.  First published 2010 under title Arriere-Fond  rear-back. i.e. back drop, background.  so translator's "in the deep" is an interesting invention/rendition.   How before the internet the book might seem to be; how the internet has caught up with it in every possible detail.  

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.”