duration as discipline

Everyone’s who’s interested has already read this February précis of Infinite Jest’s scope and influence, but I wanted to echo that @hermionehoby's writing is fucking great, insightful and cleanly gymnastic: “not bigness as brag but duration as discipline.”  on X

about DFW but it gives me the phrase that works perfectly as I slowly finish Crossing the Sierra de Gredos

unlike anything you will ever have read either before or after

Infinite Jest and Crossing Sierra de Gredos could have much to say to one another

finished Sierra de Gredos at 5:10 today, after a long post lunch nap --- lunch at Thai Boran after swim day

gorgeous day, after yesterday's long rain in the late afternoon

Crossing the Sierra de Gredos is a strange book, magnificent in its own way, not for all readers;

is it too personal, too private? Is it "about" his mother and all the women in his life, in one's life? The

eternal feminine? He would hate that mythic labeling, but it seems to be so. An Odyssey tale about

a woman. Her biographer, at the end her lover reaches her, not quite "off-stage" but so obliquely he

cannot be seen. And all his life, their lives, he has never felt her equal, always felt inadquate for her?

That is an amazing passage, could quote some lines from that passage. Is it the way men and women feel toward each other in all of (western) history-literature?

It did give me lots of resonances personal because I am a bit familiar with the Spanish landscape and culture so I could tell how much of it Handke has studied, absorbed, explored, trekked around and been endlessly fascinated by. Gredos actually west of Madrid, southwest of Avila. But he allows his map to be plastic or fluid because I think he keeps mentioning Ciudad Real as being closer to Gredos than it is.

I never read the rest of the second part of Don Quixote, did Handke? perhaps so. He's putting his book into the company of many long books, long tales. Is it a "neo-medieval" meditation on storytelling? Perhaps. German scholars must be having much to say about it by now.

now here's an interesting quick find vie google search under "Infinite Jest and Crossing Sierra de Gredos could have much to say to one another "

WILD SPAIN (_ESPANA AGRESTE_) RECORDS OF SPORT WITH RIFLE, ROD, AND GUN, NATURAL HISTORY AND EXPLORATION BY ABEL CHAPMAN, F.Z.S. AUTHOR OF "BIRD-LIFE OF THE BORDERS" AND WALTER J. BUCK, C.M.Z.S., OF JEREZ _WITH 174 ILLUSTRATIONS, MOSTLY BY THE AUTHORS_ [Illustration] LONDON GURNEY AND JACKSON, 1, PATERNOSTER ROW (SUCCESSORS TO MR. VAN VOORST) 1893  

plenty about wild ibex and the landscape;  could easily be a few such in German of trekkers there around the same period---late 1900s.  

CHAPTER XII.

IBEX-SHOOTING IN SPAIN.

i. Sierra de Gredos (Old Castile)                                    140

Next book to finish before week's end is Genet---Funeral Rites 

and then which Handkes to take East?  Fruit Thief next in chronological order?