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
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.
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 inLA 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 therécitas 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.
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.
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.
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
Peter Handke, the Austrian author who received theon 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.”
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.
