Got message from Allianz that 1k will deposit in bank account. Realized there is another policy with one day difference. Called them, spoke with agent (in Manila?). Filed a new claim on that other policy. Agent said it could pay 8k per person. Sure hope so.
Pulling up and out of my cold. Long sleep and sleep-in until 9. Without theta vibrations this time too. Canceled lunch with Ermelina and J until next Saturday. Headache has kicked in while filing this claim thing. Probably lie down in the recliner for a bit.
Sunday slept really late this morning. Now almost 2. Dave will call us tonight for his birthday greeting; he is out to dinner with a crew it seems.
Gray skies from the nor'easter which Kathy at the Cape says turned out to be not as terrible as predicted.
Trying to return to reading. Reading. What is reading?
quiz Chapter 4 Headlong They drive around the villages, setting up a baldachin and microphone so as to speak to rallies. Mostly at night, it is cold, the lake is near, they get water for the bucket to mix the glue for the posters. He goes back to the blind man's place to sleep for the night. Everyone there is blind; he can sense when some get up a feel their way around looking for the water tap, they find him on the bed, run their hands through his hair.
now how does AI put it? Alas, I did not find exactly what I was looking for. Instead I found Andrei's incredibly detailed and helpful, overly helpful, essay on his blog (on their blog if Andrei is a group or collective) theuntranslated. Here is one paragraph:
A 600-page novel totally devoid of character psychology and blatantly unforthcoming with the motives for their actions is an uncomfortable read, to say the least. It would be easier to accept the book if it was a slim nouveau-romanish exercise in form and style, instead of an epic narrative spanning more than 20 years of Italian history in which the minutiae of everyday life and surreal episodes of brain-searing intensity are recounted in the same dead-pan, unreflective tone. There is some affinity between The Beginnings and Mircea Cărtărescu’s latest novel Solenoid: both novels integrate the fantastic, bizarre and extraordinary into the mundane to a stunning effect. Both are ironic subversions of the Künstlerroman and both contain a heavy dose of autobiographical material. But Solenoid is all about the voice and attitude of its main character, who obviously serves as the mouthpiece for Cărtărescu’s own ideas. By shutting down this “channel” for his characters, Moresco heavily sacrifices the readability of his book: it’s as if he had chosen to show a sound film without the sound. Out of the two novels, Solenoid is by far more enjoyable, whereas The Beginnings is more iconoclastic in the uncompromising pursuit of its artistic principles to the detriment of readerly comfort."
with this sort of cliff notes help will I bother to keep reading any of Moresco? Why? Why not just read the blog summation and evaluation? Am I loving the experience of reading the Beginnings on my own? A difficult question. Am I trying to be in the chosen company of those rare readers who "have done it". Like climbing Everest? Posting it on X as a boast for the month? What pleasure or experience am I getting by reading the remaining 2j-300 pages exept the passing of time, the distancing curiosity of doing something, anything, while sitting alone with a book in my hand. ? What is reading; what do we want from it? With it? Is Moresco worth it? Should I shift to DFW or someone else. Oh, and of course, I am waiting for the greatest of great new books, the disappearers, which, I already know, given the hype cloud around it, will disappoint me even more than The Beginnings is disappointing.
Ah, but is it disappointing? There it is. One admission is that on the blog, looking forward into the next hug volumn, the Songs of Chaos, Andrei's exclamations about the unimaginable weirdness of the next book makes one want to read it, maybe, and therefore to have experienced what went before just to be ready for what comes after. Why do we submit ourselves to writers in the first place; why invite them into our minds and homes? Is Booth's "friendship" not too gentle and genteel, midwestern and relentlessly upbeat? These writers horrify on purpose. What purpose? They waste their time and they waste our time. They assume and presume. We wish and wonder and take a chance. Gambling all the way. Desperately finding what we want no matter what.
We find ways to admire the performance because it is unlike any other. "I felt myself being brushed against on all sides by soft elbows, by tender knees. There was a feeling of sweetness no longer controllable, of memorable mush." 300 yes, bravo! we say. I'm getting it. Keep going,
"the shutters falling thunderously" just like that, we were there, in Santiago, Chile, when the water canons came out into the riotous streets, the shopkeepers dropped their metal curtain doors. The feathered ones breaking bones of faces and shoulders with the butts of their rifles.
now by 303 we are in surreal dreamscape. interesting, or same old same old??? the black nun, all black hair, the Italian catholic seminarian's nightmare figures
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