amazing final sentence

late afternoon, Friday.  Super bright day, high winds have come back.  Long nap before and during GH, Bela still there.  I just finished Handke's essay on The Juke Box.  Surely David Foster Wallace had read it at some time.  Since Soria is so important for it and we have spent some time in Soria it had that special resonance even though I remember very little about Soria except being grumpy that we were even there where there clearly was nothing.  Ok, the 12th century church of Santo Domingo which Bela kept trying to get me to look at more closely every time we walked around it, the street on the right being so close to it as to almost be shaving off the corner of the building.   Photos on google show that they have fixed that, looks like they made it all pedestrian zone all around the church.  Neither of us can recall exactly why we ever spent some time in Soria.  Machado yes, but nothing of Valle-Inclán.  My only notable memory is of a long walk I took down along the river, wide stretches of reeds in the shallow edges on both sides.  Some young women, teenagers were playing around ahead of me and across on the other side at a distance, it was the town side, a man, middle-aged, appeared in the tall reeds, almost hidden but not quite enough, stood still and then moved slightly in very familiar bodily movements, he was masturbating as he watched the young girls far across the river.  

So Handke weaves all around his topics, juke boxes and geologies and Soria and how place and the spark of writing and of completing a piece of writing are all involved in the details of places.  He has found Soria of all places has one Chinese restaurant.  The essay closes with this sentence which the great translator had rendered so well I can understant what Michael Lentz meant when he praised Handke's magnificent writing style in German.  "The young girl, otherwise idle, was painting Chinese letters into a notebook at the next table, one close to the other, in a writing far more even than his own during these weeks (not only the storm gusts, the rain and the darkness when he took notes outdoors, since he had been at work, had ruined it), and as he kept watching her, a girl who had to feel incomparably more foreign than he did in this area, in this Spain, he sensed with amazement that he had only now really set out from the place he came from."   

This almost took my breath away and with some tears.  How powerful this is exactly because I have been reading his work in timeline order and so I have seen him repeat and repeat so many large and small details over and over in various ways.  In this essay he mentions the woman who invited him to share experience, sex, love, with him, in Alaska at a bar where they saw each other.  In his other work he allows his imagination to flesh out what happened, in this essay he explains that it did not happen, after all, but it might have and maybe it should have.  She takes him out to the parking lot where her Land Cruiser is parked.  "And in this moment it became clear to him that for once in his life there was a decision imagined not by him alone but by someone else; . . . . it was the moment when Percival hovered on the verge of the question that would prove his salvation, and he? on the verge of the corresponding Yes.  And like Percival, and not because he was uncertain---he had that image, after all--but as if it were innate and quite proper, he hesitated, and in the next moment the image, the woman, had literally vanished into the snowy night." 229

wow, such writing  such consciousness, awareness of one's consciousness, recalled & reconstructed & situated within the tale of Percival  It is from Chretien de Troyes Perceval: The Story of the Grail.  He hesitates to ask why the spear bled, why the king suffers, and fails in his quest.  (ok had to look that up)

"as if it were innate and quite proper"  a result of his naive adherence to advice against speaking too much

searching for the right room for writing the essay

 

1 April

Well, I just finished Handke's Don Juan.  But did I even read it?  It is short and slight and yesterday and the day before I was passing my eyes over passages, pages, without letting them in very much or taking me out very much.  But this afternoon, the wind howling and raging outside, I did comprehend the final twenty or so pages, or pretended to get them somewhat clearly, with sufficient attention to declare that the book is after all wholly in line with April Fool's Day.  It is not a joke, this tale, no, but it jokes and pokes and slips and slivers all over the place.  Of course, non-euro that I am, I am barely informed about Don Juan and I have no lifetime store of info or feeling coming from the whole body of lore found in the operas and plays and re-tellings and embellishments---Racine, Molier, Mozart et al.  Later this summer I can ask my French grandchildren to tell me all about Don Juan and Eliot now 12 will fill me in and Emma will instruct me in all the nuances of his stories.  So now I am finished with this little book and I know enough about Handke to know how much I have missed even if I know how many of his pet peeves, moves, memes and steps I recognize from all of his other books.  Took a look on youtube at a longish movie made about him when he was really young--in 1975.  He had made a good amount of money, 100k franks with the Slow Homecoming and other books and lived large with his six year old daughter in a noble apartment in the 16th!  His hair is long and his manner superbly brilliant, quick and confident, and puzzled and puzzling.  

We both enjoyed the visit with Dr Mirta this morning.  She's referring Bela to an orthopedic surgeon to explore hip surgery.  We now live once more with the transport chair and pivots.  Bela was able to walk into the shower this morning and get dressed in the usual manner.  All the stuff I ordered for bed care has arrived so we are stocked for further catastrophe.  What will happend and what will be the timeline?  Have to give up trying to figure that, imagine it, or plan for it.  Let things happen as they will.  We both seem to sleep in strange clumps of time.  Breaking Bad has taken over our lives and we have at last only the last season to finish up.  General Hospital guides us each day with its love and wisdom.  

I posted one of those photos of all my books stacked up to compete with the other performative male readers on the social media sites.  In the Ortovert quiz I said I never use those things but I realize that indeed I do, so I guess my point score might rise from 243 out of 280 up to 248 or 250.  Should take the quiz a few weeks from now.  

What next?  Complete the essays in Quiet Places and wait for the Thucydides book to get here.  The Don Juan has a whole anti-women section that surely enraged lots of readers---but by 2004 when it appeared being the provocateur was well established in Handke's quiver of personas and arrows, and having the women be avengers and destroyers fit perfectly both the feminism and anti-feminism of the times and of the inner logic of the whole Don Juan figure of legend and culture.  

Monday 30th

 Bela's hip has given out, in some pain with it.  Rested in bed earlier.  Made it to the table for lunch, in the blue recliner all afternoon, both took long naps.  Almost 5 now.  

Finished Handke's mushroom essay.  He says his essays are as slow as a milk train near dawn.  

page 135 would type out the long paragraph.   Fit my needs earlier when I was ordering toilet supplies and fearing what might be next.  

Shakespeare "so consciousness doth make maniacs of us all"  

embrace taking things as they came, laissez-faire, not interfering

at every moment, horrifyingly and ceaselessly aware---instead of letting things go, leaving welll enough alone

well these words had more resonance in the terror of the moment earlier---is this it? will Bela be bedridden from now on?  

one rose on each of our rose bushes, red in front, pink in the back 

Otrovert

science news just in   with a score of 243 out of 280 it seems I am indeed an Otrovert   invention of NYC psychiatrist Rami Kaminski, himself one, author of a book and founder of the OthernessInstitute!  we are outside of the introvert-extrovert spectrum 

Handke might be our Nobel laureate extraordinaire --  just emailed the Institute with this proclamation  

more sublme pop psychology, via Time  Kaminski has four decades of distinguished career in NY  there

are other "versions" too such as Omniversion, according to Wiki 

day off Saturday, Bela's back bothering her all night,  

in Handke's Villages we hear indeed the spoken, dramatic voice, almost declamatory, poetic speech, meant to be heard not read quietly   

for if you remain devoted to yourselves, don't you see the shimmer of the gods?

The tree top is the legitimate weapon of liberation.  

When the river trembling sets my heart atremble, only then am I within being.

Look into the land---that is how the evil stupidity will pass. 

Haven't all of you already experienced vastness?  Vastness counts --- without a home or a second home anywhere.  

Move---so that you can be slow: slowness is the secret   The good power is that of overlooking.  

The only effective prayer is the thanksgiving 

Only when you quake do you see clearly   Your trembling eyelids is the trembling of truth  The form is the law, and the law is great, and it rights you up.  The sky is great.  The village is great.  Eternal peace can be!

Walk eternally towards.  Walk about the villages.  

-----

if I were going to the no kings rallies today I could declaim Nova's oration and the crowds would cheer!!!

27 March

 Dave asked for face visit  C's birthday today   high winds all day  I see a new doctor at Oak St Atrisco at noon

enjoying villages ok   see how it makes a 4th around mt st victoire essays  poem play  convoluted introduction by the translator   handke finally praises his work in the letters   gratifying to him  

the tunnel arrived  moresco postponed  email about address change for that from The jon repetti  

villages book falls apart as I read   spine glue dried out  fine  fits the dispose at once approach  

handed on misdelivered mail to neighbor across the street  Lydia T ?  sweet, in her 70s?  worked as custodian at petroglyph elementary school, must be the one on the corner of Western Trails  

also continuing in the mushroom mania essay   handke says his writing is laconic in the letter to the villages translator   

listened to some credence clearwater revival   could not hear just what handke had heard so long ago took over into his aesthetic   too fancy a word for it

have to read his Absence again    what was the onset of puberty but the experience of absence  if yearning was dawning what was I yearning for  wandering around johnson heights  wandering around DC and college park   years of wondering wandering floating  decoding the mysteries of talk and chatter about what might have been desired should have been desired   yearning without comprehending anything 

Villages

now I am moving backwards in time to the dramatic poem that goes with the Mt St Victoire essays, 1981 Walk About the Villages 

John sent a handout of poems about spring that he was presenting at a county nursing home in Atlanta today    I did a poor job of skimming them this morning 

Bela's swim went well.  We ate at Panda Express and 28% went to the Repertory Ballet company we saw at the Kimo last Sunday  

also back into the essay on mushrooms  his earlier attachment to edges, rims, and clearings

parasol mushrooms sauteed well  peerlessly tender delicacies 

different for the stinkhorn mushrooms  Latin name! phallus impudicus  "the head---impossible not to associate with the head of a human penis"  

Kant's disinterested pleasure as the chosen model and measure of his life   that smiling equanimity could make my blood boil 

that area from which we both came where tragedy had never been at home 

prescriptions

 finished the 1996 book, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House.  Not sure I read it very well.  It is strange, strangely fairy tale -esque and anti-tale in every way.  Prescribing 

write nothing but love stories from now on Love and adventure   After all what kind of storytelling do we have nowadays---not for the marketplace, royal court, middle class, not even addressed to an individual---"merely for the person to whom the story happened, himself?"  179

final address to raven  you can sreech and squawk and do otherwise   Taxham an almost forgotten place

the pharmacist forever changed  but did I get the change?  I missed the change, didn't I?  

ok, weak as I am, I am cheating majorly ---

He is transformed in the following ways:

• From Estrangement to Connection: Initially, the pharmacist is a lonely, estranged figure who finds comfort in solitude and hallucinogenic mushrooms. The trauma forces him to leave his isolated existence and engage with the world in a new way.
• A Shift in Perception: Following the head injury, the narrative of his life changes from "ironic description" to a collection of "sensual impressions, observations and reflections".
• The Journey as "The Driver": He embarks on a quest through the Alps with a former Olympic skiing champion and a formerly famous poet, experiences in which he is beaten and stalked, which leads to a, "final series of bizarre, cathartic events".
• Renewal: Although he is eventually taken back to his pharmacy and his former life, he is fundamentally altered by the surreal, often frightening experience. 

He moves from a state of silent, isolated existence to one that has undergone a profound, almost spiritual, ordeal.

magical fairy tale

 that is what Handke turned to in On a Dark Night after his year in the Bay.  I'm a little past half-way. Missing the details and moods of Bay, this one feels a bit vague and hypothetical even though pleasant enough and clearly evoking the folk tales in which a wandering musician or such gets a bump on the head, falls asleep, wakes up in a new reality.  

Moving to this  house near the Petroglyphs prepared me for Handke's love of landscape, of basins and edges, basalt and lava, sand, wind, peaks and crests.  He loves to describe interior spaces too.  Bravo.

In this tale the pharmacist replaces the geologist.  So why the failed poet and the has-been athlete? Two forms of fleeting fame.  

Oh and the whole fascination with mushrooms and mushroom hunting---well of late I tuned in to all the people now offering to help me replace morning coffee with morning mushroom sludge and ritual beverage.  I tried Ryze and sent them angry letters.  Now of late I've been happy with Alcami and various chocolate suppliers, Embue and Ora.  The one from Peru, the big chunks, I worry about quality and metals.

News today that kimchee removes nanoplastics from our bodies.  Mainly I suppose how Handke seems to reject the tragic and vote for the tale, the story and the epic.  Without turning to dream work too much.  Nature and earth, land forms, earth where we land, center, rest, nest, shelter, wander.  

now we are deep into Breaking Bad, started season 3 at last and in for every detail forward   Makes me curious to try Pluribus again.  Va against that, might take a look when the ladies lunch today.  

just chanced into looking at Lars Iyer's blog about Jakob Taubes. No connection to Handke (yet) ---

"Bernhard’s repeated phrase, ‘in the opposite direction’ is an intensifier, a force of active nihilation which becomes a rising, an acceleration, even a jubilation. There is the joy of outcycling or outstriding or outrunning the world. There is great joy in his work as it affirms its own virtuosity in hyperbolic invective, as it lets its blunderbuss scatter at some deserving targets. A joy of rhythm, not in the sense of a pulsed beat, but a dance of language, that Dionysianism that unites death and chaos with both desire and the affirmation of life. A music that creates as it destroys."

Yes, Lars Iyer references Peter Handke, specifically in the context of discussions regarding the nature of fiction, the "récit" (narrative/tale), and the removal of fictional elements from literature.

• Removal of Fictions: In a 2011 interview with Full Stop, Iyer references an early comment by Handke at a Group 47 meeting: "Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions". Iyer links this sentiment to his own work, particularly in his novel Spurious, where he aims to capture what remains after such a removal.
• Definition of Fiction: In a discussion regarding the nature of "The Disintegrations" (likely referencing Alistair McCartney's work), Iyer's perspective on the "récit" is mentioned, which aligns with Handke’s view of fiction as an intersection of daily occurrences, according to an interview in LA Review of Books.
• Themed Lists: Handke’s work, such as Across, has appeared in lists of "strange and ineffable" literature favored by writers in circles surrounding Iyer. 

Additionally, in his own "Notes from a Room" blog, he or discussions related to his work have referenced a A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Handke. 

Handke’s view of fiction as an intersection of daily occurrences, according to an interview in LA Review of Books.

back in the book---we meet a hermit, vanished classics teacher Andreas Loser--name appears in another, earlier book.  

Handke sees his works more and more as recít.  "Maurice Blanchot describes the récit as follows:

If we regard the récit as the true telling of an exceptional event which has taken place and which someone is trying to report, then we have not even come close to sensing the true nature of the récit. The récit is not the narration of an event, but the event itself, the approach to that event, the place where that event is made to happen—an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the récit can come into being, too."

duh   I will have to study this Nobel interview carefully ---  he starts with a feeling ---  there it is 

Interview with the 2019 Nobel Prize laureate in literature Peter Handke on 9 December 2019 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

How does your writing process begin? 

Peter Handke: I start with a feeling and images and rhythm. This is inside me. Sometimes I have a story to tell. It is always this transformation during the work. This keeps me alive. I don’t want to know exactly what I have to do. It happens, and it should be a wonderful surprise to me, to the writer too. I write, I have to be surprised, not by myself, by somebody who is not only me. 

No critic, no opinion, only images, rhythm, feeling. Like Kafka said, I could search in myself during one year to find a real feeling. He was a little bit exaggerating for he was a very shy man. One real feeling, it’s not much. But nevertheless, this exists. I think I wrote a long story about the man despair. I think it’s translated in Swedish. It is A Moment of True Feeling. This is my “point de départ,” in French. I am traveling with the moment of true feeling. It’s a kind of travelling. 

lots of walking backward  146  not one strep back--with the exception of going forward by walking backward! 

ok I looked at two final episodes of Pluribus and read an explanation in Esquire.  Does it all feel like YA lit?  has the world gone YA.  

 

 

lines from the Bay

 and I noticed for the first time that this man sitting across from me had beautiful eyes now

Both of us know what to think of each other 

he probably had the decisive qualification for a book, intution; but since his life was elsewhere, he despised this 

And why do I still believe . . . that no better support can be found than in a vacillating, yearning person?

it was only through my writing that I had ever been able to feel something like a connection with the world 

he jerked the pencil out of my hand   And I stopped at the nearby gas station, where the attendant lent me his ballpoint pen for a note 

If you knew how beautiful you look as silhouettes you would never want to be anything else again.  If I were a painter, I would never paint anything but silhouettes 

if a television interviewer had been there, how they would have spilled their most intimate stories

I have not asked, not once in this entire year 

In magnificent Paris nothing required my observation anymore; here, however, in the suburb-bay, almost everything did.  

And that almost painful appetite in my breast was called longing

in my style of jumbled thinking 

I have love of the world.  It is within me.  Except that I cannot keep love of the world at the heart of the story.  For that I had to go to the margins.  The silhouettes: I feel the weakness in them, the lack of presence. 

Perhaps the outsider is in fact best equipped to see you as all together.  

And since I have been here in the suburbs, I have come to see myself as such an associate judge.  As a reader.  To read a book of a new-blown world. 

Where do I belong?  At home at the edge of the field.

When alone I appear to myself again and again as a villain. 

at the thought of being alone, I should like to spend my whole life this way 

And where are the readers?  Mysterious brood!  Passersby, hieroglyphic mankind.

Those who have not undergone metamorphosis have done themselves in.  

as if I were being butted from below, at the knees, as if by a goat, from sheer joy 

And all of them, I saw, had hangnails on their fingers from fumbling around in their pockets in foreign lands

I have never felt more tranquil inside than when I have been listening to such a Thersites, metamorphosed into an epic narrator 

To be one with the singer, without having to sing: my ideal.  

Eternally amazed, we sat together, each on a ladder rung.  The adventure of life showed itself in the form of a single rolling wave in the otherwise tranquil sea.  

With that began his new, his Last Song.

Friday

Handke now examining mushrooms----in depth! and all over his basin.  Thoreau would be proud (I think, don't know if he also scoured for mushrooms but surely he must have.  Handke shows us what attention finds.  His centering focus on his landscape amazes this reader.  Just when you think you will doze off and dismiss and skip ahead the 

5:43 pm Friday March 20

Just finished My Year in No-Man's Bay, is it our first and only suburban epic?  Handke manages to end it most marvelously, a magnificent gathering up and repetition of all the motifs and themes and crochets and images and threads from the whole year.  Jan-Dec 1993 fictionalized as 1999 and so a millennial epic to end the eon with joy and song.  Birds, bees, beasts, grasses, flowers, trees, ladders, beggars, silhouettes. Metamorphosis.  

Porchefontaine is a neighborhood in the south-east of Versilles, in Yvelines department of France.  

It was a living working class residential area. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood declined in activity and population.

It features a tiny downtown, two schools, a sports complex, a camping, and a green space that is surrounded by the Versailles, Satory, and Meudon woods.

The neighborhood has a small station served by the RER C.  

Metamorphosis.    Wonder if he made up the Bar des Voyageurs?  Renamed one of the bars there?

Now, if I ever return to Paris, I will have to do that silly thing of looking for all the places he talks about in the book, retrace all of his steps, as if that would be possible.  Better to allow it all to be in the book.  

"But the only vision I know is reconciliation. . . . The great are those who make peace exciting, not war.  Homer today would sing the epic of the souvlake eaters on the train from Corinth to Athens."  "How certain I am, even in the world's worst times, that everything is different. . . . And on yet another morning: Even if human history should come to an end soon, even in terror, something will have taken place in that history, from the beginning, and will have continued steadily, so glorious, so childlike, so gripping, so interconnected that it could happen only once; as human history in the universe could not possibly be better and more beautiful.  God does not see me because I do not let myself be seen by him.  Hair-root wind, from-the-ground wind, Habakkuk wind: it is still there, it still exists.  The omega, the last letter of the ancient alphabet, has the form of a jump rope."    466

I underlined and marked many places in the last ten or so pages of the book.  He gives it a great finale.  Longeurs yes of course and entirely worth it.  

Monday

pasted up some fragments about Handke--- seemed too few journalists knew much about Ezra Pound to explore similarities between his views and Handke's.  Wiki makes sure we see him called an idiot and a moron, so that's ok one supposes in the current day and age after serbia now fades behind today's headlines about Gaza and on and on   -----part of his attack on journalism in general  --- the writer versus the news packagers ---  I started by looking up photos of the house he writes about with such loving infatuation in My Year --- which is a work of genius   for one thing if you think of "writing a study of Handke" you immediately droop and say oh my goodness how to do this---tracing lines of this and that just will miss the whole, we need lifetimes to find critical ways of dealing with it over and over, as with all the greats 

yesterday's party a fine affair.  sent off video clips, everyone had a good time singing and singing a few more times until we got the energy up 

reading day today before the rigors of another birthday party tomorrow 

oh the visit to Page One was a downer, of course, how did I not remember that?  well, bought Genet's Funeral in memory of Phil, and taking a gamble on Donesco, see if I try him sometime.  Lunched at Twisters   hung out a bit at Starbucks   reminded of how tangled that area is   grew up in last seven or so years, Beckie says   west mesa feels so open and airy and grand  

digging into Handke's prize some more

 Alex Marshall and Christopher F Schuetze 

Sunday 15 December 2019 03:38 EST

Peter Handke, the Austrian author who received the  on Tuesday, said recently that he hated opinions.

“I like literature,” he added, in a bad-tempered exchange during a news conference in Stockholm last week.

Unfortunately for  77, many people have opinions about him. Some see him as a genius who has pushed the boundaries of what novels and plays can be. But others are far less positive.

But some literary heavyweights see no better choice. “I can’t think of a more obvious Nobel laureate than him,” Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard said, adding that Handke had written masterpieces in every decade of his career.

“The great poet Handke has earned the Nobel prize 10 times,” Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian author who received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, said in a statement.

But few have had the chance to ask Handke himself in detail about his writing, or motivation. On 10 October, he met reporters at his home near Paris, but he ended the impromptu news conference after being asked about his writings on the Balkan wars. “I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes,” he said. “Leave me in peace and don’t ask me such questions.”

“He grew up in very poor conditions, in a remote provincial region,” said Malte Herwig, a journalist who wrote a biography of Handke. “It was dirt hard. He was the only one who went to college and so on.”

“He still has this air about him,” Herwig added. “If you look at his fingernails, there’s usually dirt underneath them.”

The family lived briefly in Berlin, but then returned to Griffen in 1948. During the journey, Handke’s sister was carried in a shopping bag, he wrote in A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a stark account of his mother’s life and suicide that was published in 1972.

The Second World War and its aftermath had a clear effect, Herwig said. “He was a highly sensitive kid,” he said of Handke, describing him as “nervous, easily aroused with anger, or easily startled” and “totally a square peg in a round hole”.

Handke made his childhood a focus of his Nobel lecture, saying that his mother’s stories – about the tragic life of an “idiot” milkmaid, and the death of her brother – had “provided the impetus for my almost lifelong career as a writer”.

“He had the sense for Yugoslavia as this incredible, rich multicultural state that lacked the kind of nationalisms that he saw in Germany and Austria,” Abbott said. “It was almost a utopian place for him.”

When Yugoslavia collapsed, Handke saw that utopia disappearing, Abbott said.

Zarko Radakovic, a friend who has travelled in the region with Handke, and who has translated his work, said in a telephone interview that “Yugo-nostalgia” was central to the writer’s worldview.

“Of course it is very difficult to write about civil war,” Radakovic said. Handke, he added, “just wanted to be a counterweight to everything that had been written and said in the media. He went there and walked and described.”

Radakovic and other Handke supporters believe that the critics had focused on a few controversial passages in Handke’s works, but had not read enough to judge the author’s motives.

“Handke is such a complex, difficult author,” Radakovic said. “All of his 87 works are somehow connected.”

“I trust somebody who is so completely free of clichés and just sees the world and reacts,” he added.

Herwig said he had no problem with Handke’s criticism of journalistic language, but added: “He eventually did some of the things he accused journalists of: false bias, false contextualisation.”

But even many of Handke’s most ardent supporters have difficulty explaining why he spoke at Milosevic’s funeral. “I look at those photos of him, against that huge photo of Milosevic, and I just think, ‘What the hell?’” Abbott said.

He added that Handke has insisted his funeral speech was not an endorsement of Milosevic, but a lament for Yugoslavia. “But what he’s stepping aside from is that if he stands there, that means something, too,” Abbot said.

Other writers would have backed down in the face of such condemnation, but Handke has not. “I need not defend or take back a single word,” Handke wrote in the preface to the American edition of A Journey to the Rivers. “I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.”

Herwig said this was not arrogance; “It’s defiance,” he said.

Clearly, for the Swedish Academy, the work takes precedence. Rebecka Karde, a journalist who advised the committee that awards the prize, said that Handke had “said, written and done things I find hard to stomach”. But, she added, that did not mean he did not deserve the award.

Handke went to Serbia “trying to unlock the world through his unique, idiosyncratic, literary presence”, Knausgaard said. “But the ambiguity and complexity that language offered, charged with Handke’s sympathies, unlocked a Pandora’s box of grief, anger and despair instead.”

Viewing Handke as some sort of diabolical figure, Knausgaard added, was the opposite of the people in his writings. “The world and the people in it never are black, never are white, never are good, never are bad,” he said, “but all these things combined.”

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collectable pens

If I am thinking of sending my three fountain pens to KG for care (after I'm gone) now, why not also think of sending her or someone else (Dennis?) the painting by Aho for safe keeping and care as well?  Notice how the paintings hung on the walls do not seem to fit the same category for worry and concern as these three pens.  Books, pens, paintings, weavings, knick knacks.  What are "valuables" and how to worry about them and keep them until we die and until after we die?  Even if I don't use the pens I could take them out of the box and hold and pet them.  Or refill them with ink and draw a line or two.  Write a word or two every day if not in a journal in a daily word ink day.  Live Ink Lives!  sort of day.  That could just be the reason to keep them.  That Japanese word for extra books that I have seen lately---Tsundoku, buying books that pile up and wait for you to read them.  Some suggest it as a specific sort of pleasure, which seems right.  Why not say the same for these three pens?  They wait and serve in silence until something urges me to seek them out or one of them, rinse it and refill it with what ink is on hand (if it has not dried up) and then write something. Writing in flowing ink reminds both of dad and mother.  Mimi was proud of her beautiful handwriting and loved using the turquoise Parker ink in her pen.  Dad wrote/painted the big monthly window signs for the store with a collection of marking pens.  Would have made a great art project to have bought some of those pens, big aluminum ones with heavy wide felt tips that held lots of ink so you could write Weekly Special Rib-eye steaks at $1.49 per pound or such.  Green Giant Peas 6 cans for $3.00.  Could google grocery window signs from 1950 to see what images might show up.  This seems to be the opinion column of the day for the situation.  Kossi's work on the chair has various pings and bells going on as he looks over the innards of the recliner with his tech apps.  He says he's worked on lots of different variants.  My consumerism has already gone hyper and has me going to Tema this Saturday and saying, as lord of the estate, which recliner is in stock and can you bring out within two weeks?  Or to Lazy-Boy.  But I know from previous years that all of these items are on back orders these days, or factory order waiting lists if you want a certain cover or color.  Kossi has very long dreadlocks, early 40s?, thick black rimmed glasses, thin, muscular.  Some accent, Jamaican?  Not enough talk yet to hear enough to tell.  From the sounds of the process so far it seems as though he might be fixing it.  

Nice chat with Kossi.  I am his first customer for the business he just put on Yelp for the first time.  His glasses are horn-rimmed, readers, dark wine colored.  Interesting background.  Son of officials for IMF from Togoland.  French colony in West Africa.  He grew up in Bethesda, went to French prep school there.  Some college  but not enough. Got into working on tech, HDML, which got him good jobs fixing the stuff for big agencies and companies in DC.  

Togo at heart of the slave trade for a few centuries.  France took it over after Germany lost WWI.  Fewer than ten million people.  Kossi must be from a very elite family.  IMF diplomats in DC.  

Long naps this afternoon.  Bela feeling more over the cold.  Over the clock change too.  Gray skies most of the day, windy outside now.  

Enjoying Bay great deal.  Slow read, intricate and dense in all the most enjoyable ways.  Big hardback edition most satisfying.  

aliens encountering one another---me and Kossi 

such a caress

 and finally the morning star alone moved through his innermost being with the slowness of the universe and penetrated it.  Such a caress the singer had never experienced before.  My Year  203

yesterday Matei Varga playing Chopin and Brahms  at Chatter 

hardback copy of My Year arrived.  Glad I bought it.  Yes, larger print, easier on the eyes but more than that the gone world of book culture it conveys.  Printed in 1998 (our S American year), Farrar, Straus, Giroux.  Great blurbs from German literary sources.  The old world.  Aeons from the guidance we get daily on X.  Remember when I wrote to the PSC library begging them to continue putting plastic covers on new books with the dust jackets because the jackets themselves conveyed so much to the reader both in information, context and cultural pleasure.  

year ago

 Wonder how close it might actually be?  Bright sunny day off Saturday.  I walk a bit near Piedras Marcads canyon without quite realizing it.  Lunch at Thai Boran while I read the new Andre Aciman book, from FF in UK, hardback $, "Stowaway."  It is a short story between boards.  Novella?  not quite enough?  Is he creating a box of chocolates, a cache of jewels, a tray of jellied sweets.  Each of his recent stories could be the basis of a screenplay.  He knows his audience so well, a savy, knowing YA fairy tale for the sentimental 60-70 year olds.  He comes up with quotable lines and easy to admire turns of phrase and thought.  Stowaway it turns out is code of sorts for closeted bi/gay married man who commits suicide never having realized his loves or his life.  The two figures who chat over coffee for a morning frame the fable, one the older woman, the other the clueless sort of handsome young lawyer the wonderful Paul was secretly in love with.  If I let myself criticize too much, it is pretty cloying.  Paul the great writer of brilliant journals, now available for discovery.  

After lunch I went back out Piedra Marcada canyon and walked to the first view.  I thought I was racking up footsteps but not nearly as many as I'd thought.  Still it was fun to see the basalt boulders and the glyphs and markings.  I wonder if Handke visited here?  He would have loved the whole landscape and written about it brilliantly.  

Aciman writes well about the nuances of feelings in relationships.  And yet now I would look backward into his work and claim that Harvard Square is his best novel, better even than Call Me ByYour Name, because in that one he has sold out or honed his product into a perfect glovetail with the market hand.  His memoir about the year in Rome is much more important.  Or at least substantial.  

Lobo Antunes

António Lobo Antunes died today at 83.  Born 1942. 

Caved and ordered new edition, 30 years, of Gass's The Tunnel.  He was born in 1924.  

sinus headache killing me this morning, felt like a new cold last night but that feeling as diminished

allergies?  

"This is one I I will never put in quotation marks.  157  End of chapter 1 Book Two in Handke.  He has survived his one day of madness in the suburb.  Still like him so much, speaks to me in so many ways. I guess I will give Gass a look but I remain skeptical about his big book.  As much as I did enjoy many books by Antunes, never as much as Handke's.  

We await Adriana's visit at 1 pm to see if she will be the one to take Va to swim once a week.  

Found I still have a medical appointment on March 25, so I will now keep that, get a new doctor here. 

Like learning about the petty prophet of Pontefontaine and all else in Bay.  His voice, his explorations of interior states, his personas for himself.  Personal  

First of all a new title for my book thrust itself upon me.  From "Prehistoric Forms" it was renamed "The Chimerical World."  167   of the Orinoco in the mountainous region of Guyana where my story continued to spin its spirals.  168   chimera  spirals  the writer storyteller at war with himself, expansive, free, contracted, anxious, obsessive,  he has used often before "felt balls of air swelling in my armpits."  the highest calling to be a storyteller 

Adrianna texted, not feeling well.   

groundlessly

 H   I even kept my forays, pushed further every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. . . . If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, . . . . unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.  124

for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is.  126

Was that possible, for a person to be crazy about or infatuated with a place to live, . . . 127

at first that I liked the place only because, as usual, I wanted the opposite of everyone else;  I felt comfortable only in the role of the loner, the solitary understood by no one, wronged time and again . . . .

the falling out (Handke again 102)

I see its origin in myself.  Even when we were of one mind, I had an ulterior thought: to be alone and on my own again.  Back in my family period I was already leading a double life.  In hours of harmony I was still on the lookout for something else---the wind in the leaves over there, the quivering rain puddle far off in the light of the night---and considered my being with the others a mere episode, thought it might last for decades; afterward I would be able to go my way as never before.  . . . inside me something was turning in a different direction, away from closeness, away from fulfillment, away from the present.  That counterdirection within me often became so powerful . . . that I could not stand being . . . in harmony. 102

three windows

 called Dennis to be sure of his phone number.  His place is larger than the western one and has six windows, pairs, facing three directions out into the courtyard.  East, west and north.  Asked him to send some photos.  

Sunday.  Strange chatter, flutist and singer.  Her father from Iran (as the US bombs Iran this weekend).  Mother from here.  Amazing voice, very strange new piece, young composers.  We went to Thai Boran for lunch then drove around the Delyne streets with the views of the crest.

Handke One set of passages about his reader.  "I went so far as to copy out sentences from his letters: 'I exist in order to read.'" "I saw the reader on his way to founding a sect, a sect of readers.  And thus he claimed for himself and his followers exclusivity, infallibility, singularity vis-à-vis the mere crowd."

exactly how social media works!!!  this he wrote in 1992--?     

Social media began with early networking sites in the 

mid-to-late 1990s, with SixDegrees.com (1997) widely considered the first, allowing profiles and friend lists. It gained mainstream traction in the early 2000s with platforms like Friendster (2002), LinkedIn (2003), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

few pages before he had noted that his Japanese architect friend lives almost exclusively on rice and fruit

"I have no choice but to use an undifferentiated  'I' as the subject of my active and passive experiences, no matter how fale it rings to me."

"Onward. Through." 83

Now---to send these pens, fountain pens, to Kirsten or not?  They sit here and I do not take them up, clean them, use them.  She write beautifully with a fountain pen.  She would care for them.  Or keep them and pass them on eventually to other real pen appreciators.  Or would she?  Does it really matter to me or not?

Without reading, he said, he could not see the day in a day.  The work that suited him was, and remained, reading and deciphering things.  And wasn't writing an invention that to this day held a secret power?  78

  

Friday 27th

"Meanwhile it is almost March here in the bay, and finally snow has come, too.  

as I get older, I like waiting 

this phenomenon that had once leaped out at me, a chimerical world 

the image of another person who had once been close to me

this man had been a reader for years 

he enjoyed life every day, especially the parts without deep significance

with his immortality on the horizon 

Whom have I ever needed? 

and instead I took refuge in my writing 

learned from me to go walking 

Yet I was not leading a double life, but rather a two-fold one, each part in harmony with the other

Since I was someone to whom people confessed things, I knew the most secret lives of many 

he seized me around the midsection, hoisted me in the air 

but he was not my angel, not then, not since

always taken refuge in such sheltering images 

No, for now I am not going home 

a labyrinth with no way out 

dreaming in times in almost unmutilated forms 

a readiness for fallings-out 

a bright surge of feelings 

so

 repetition it is.  swirling around in the Handke rabbit hole like ten years reading "every word" Kenneth Burke published and assuming naively thereby that we can figure out what happened and what to say about some or all of it or a tiny portion of it  

why not watch Kings of the Road instead 

watched off and on about half, maybe rest this afternoon, now Thursday

love this line in No-Man's   ​"The faces of strangers, the most reliable source of pleasure."   ---Handke  21 

As soon as the new Aciman novel arrives I will read it as a break, but otherwise the Handke immersion tsunamis onward 

somewhat resemble an ancient tribe on the only remaining reservation  32  

Observation, absorption, abstraction: my daily bread.  34

to drift away from the person I was with . . . to disappear into myself to the point of no longer being present 

shimmering  . . . glimmering  . . . shifting  in one long passage on p 35

noticing favorite words, words repeated, phrases repeated, the reader becomes more and more famiiiar with the writer's pet themes, habits, obsessions, patterns, the comfortable furnishings of his sensibility, the pointers his consciousness uses over and over to keep secure while exploring onward ----  is it friendship or something like it? is it stalking?  is it imprisonment?  is it expansive resonance, embracing emotion, outflowing willingness, openness 

Spring 2021 volume of Journal of Austrian Studies U Nebraska press

 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Perhaps no other German-language author has received as much public attention over the past year as Peter Handke. The bestowal of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature upon Handke unleashed a storm of controversy related to his writings and comments on the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990s, making Handke—who in the meantime continues to write at his usual frenetic pace, producing a short novel (Das zweite Schwert) and a play (Zdeněk Adamec) in the brief time since the award—a living symbol of the still-simmering tensions in the Balkans and an object lesson in the debates over the relationship between literary or aesthetic value and political judgment. While these debates are essential to any overall assessment of Handke's work, they have perhaps made more difficult a literary evaluation of his achievements as a writer.

The volume under consideration, which appeared shortly before the Nobel Award and its accompanying flareup, attempts just such an evaluation by examining Handke not simply as a writer but also as a reader. Thorsten Carstensen has assembled nineteen essays, including contributions by recognized Handke scholars, on "Handke als Leser." They take up a variety of themes under this heading: the role of reading and of readers within Handke's oeuvre; his reception of other authors, from canonical figures such as Goethe and Stifter to less celebrated writers, as well as work in other media; the place of reading in his understanding of the task of the author and the role of literature; the ways in which reading and writing are mutually constitutive acts that also help constitute readers and writers; and reading as a vehicle for experiencing place and creating new forms of ethical community. Collected under four general headings ("Lesestrategien," "Anrufung der Autoritäten," "Variierende Wiederholungen," and—the loosest of the four groupings—"Das Buch der Welt"), the essays are preceded by Carstensen's own outstanding introduction, a small tour de force in its own right, which in a mere twenty-five pages or so manages to touch on all the themes mentioned [End Page 154] above while drawing on an impressive portion of Handke's massive body of work.

The volume as a whole is very nicely done. While every reader will have his or her favorite essays, there is not a single contribution that I would single out as poor. Some highlights for this reviewer were the contributions by Peter Strasser, who sets Handke's work in a broad philosophical context as a confrontation with problems of modernity, expressing admiration for Handke's ability to help us see the world with gratitude but also closing, in one of the volume's few critical notes, with a refusal to follow his critique to its full conclusion; Birthe Hoffmann's superb examination of Handke's relation to Grillparzer, focusing especially on the former's productive engagement with Der arme Spielmann; Chiheb Mehtelli's exploration of the similarities and differences between Handke's experience of the world and the Islamic mysticism of Ibn 'Arabī, certainly not a figure with whom I had been familiar; Anna Montané Forasté's delightful tour of Handke's literary engagement with Spain and his reception, in turn, by various contemporary Spanish thinkers and writers, also unfamiliar territory for me; Christoph Parry's thoughtful analysis of the role of landscapes in Handke's work, culminating in some cautious but insightful suggestions about the relationship between Handke's Landschaft spoetik and his problematic writings on Yugoslavia; and, finally, Carstensen's own comparison of the surprisingly similar efforts of Handke and the westschweizer poet Philippe Jaccottet to find a language that can "do the world justice" ("Das Schreiben verstehen Handke und Jaccottet [ … ] als emphatische Suche nach einer 'gerechten' Versprachlichung des Gesehenen," 332). It is hard to imagine a reader who will not find at least a few essays in this volume useful prompts to further thought and to further reading.

"Handke als Leser" might at first glance seem a narrow focus for a collection of essays covering nearly four hundred pages. Not so, however. Indeed, one of the volume's most valuable qualities—perhaps precisely because reading and writing play such central roles in Handke's work—is that...