Reality

is a form of fermentation that occurs only in particulate fashion. But that cannot be offset in particulate fashion."  Lentz  Motherdying 145 

18 Nov  Tuesday.  10:54 am. Finished reading the Isolarii edition of Motherdying. 

Next to finish another book about mother dying, the one by Handke!  So many women all at once--i.e. Orlando has now become a woman.  I am reading it because I thought I had never read it.  But after a few pages moving onward I later think, well, you know I think maybe I have read that before, years ago.  Still inching a few pages a day through Antunes.  It is like reading some poetry every day, just a little bit.  And while the lines make some sense there is way in the background another set of connections that one can faintly put together and remember about the people in the lines, the lives portrayed in such intensely fragmented ways.  Shattered glass.  

"being a type relieved the human molecule of his humiliating loneliness and isolation; he lost himself, yet now and then he was somebody, if only briefly."  Handke. 26.  Strikes at my long obsession with Myers-briggs.  And as it happens the same figured last night in the movie we watched, enjoyed, Materialists.  Dakota stars as a champion matchmaker, Pedro Pascal the unicorn she thinks she wants, Chris Evans as the failure she loves for real.  Failure with more "value" than the rich guy who spent a fortune getting his legs broken and lengthened by six inches.  

"the moments I have already mentioned, in which extreme need to communicate coincides with extreme speechlessness."  

both books are astonishing.  Are books about the death of mother a thing in German literary traditions?

"But the golden haze is all in the manner of listing."  "the foot and hand operated Singer sewing machine"

again the confirmation that in the reach of my memory at least we were indeed growing up in a world closer to Mann's than to ?  Lentz's.  Perhaps Handke's.  

"the habit of thinking in terms of advantages and disadvantages, the most evil of all ways of looking at life". 42. 

Finished the book, Bela on the piano.  What a chilling book, so intense, astonishing, painful.  "Fear of death when I wake up at night and the light is on in the hallway."  

"Horror is something perfectly natural: . . . . there is nothing more to think."

Written in two months in 1972.  "indispensable" said Bill Marx in The Boston Globe. (back cover)

this book reprinted last week, 9 days ago, in Middletown, DE  WITHOUT the Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides promised on the cover!!!!