7

 he fell into a sink hole filled deep with snow, a chamois jumps in and talks to him.  Later he is on the train at the rear and encounters the beautiful young reader who knows who he is, knows his work, she is reading some older work, she is the true reader for whom reading is essential to life.  Earlier there was the report of his dialogues with Raimund.  On the country estate of that literary figure, Ferdinand Raimund.  Who may or may not have actually existed.  In dreams he becomes lead to go find some place, in dreams we see the back side of places where we've never been, never seen.  

silentamazement   to see and walk among the houses on the back side of the hill  

flight with a good view down into his village and how it rests in the landscape  and then on the Old Road

into it where appearances were deceptive  the painter gesturing in front of his big canvas with nothing yet on it   

talks and walks with the poet devoted to poetry from birth now become a circus barker  his eyes darting around, demanding attention, representing poetry, even when he was alone for a change, in the men's room or whereever.  father and son poets 

they infected that person through their casual art of walking 

the sorts of walkers switched identities on the road  ---  

by activating sustained human breath

Our wanderer has people from every nation using the jew's harp by page 189.  Jaw harp, juice harp, mouth harp, instructors and performers on youtube use all these names.  This international conference at The Inn of the Unknown.   The wanderere became filled with feelings, more and more feelings of great and persistent happiness, gratitude, affection and love of life    a dream sound a threshold sound 

@xirtman posted this about one novel by Handke and one by Genet

All five works share this invariant structure: A solitary mind, cut off from social reality, recursively modeling a single obsession through a self-contained linguistic system, where emotion is displaced into structure and narrative collapses into cognition.  

That is the pattern.

Austic traits  --- cross-text pattern extraction   Mono-tropism, total cognitive fixation 

single-axis obsession  

Pierre   metaphysical identity collapse

Across   perceptual traversal / space consciousness

Beckett Trilogy  --- consciousness stripped to minimal recursion

Kafka Diaries  obsessive self-monitoring

Funeral Rites  --  death, ritual, erotic fixation 

• ierre → metaphysical identity collapse
• Across → perceptual traversal / space-consciousness
• Beckett Trilogy → consciousness stripped to minimal recursion
• Kafka Diaries → obsessive self-monitoring
• Funeral Rites → death, 

not at all sure why he posted this and what he was trying to say or illustrate  

is the list---given the bullets -- an AI generated response  ?

oh  it was his reply to Troy James Weaver listing these five books as ones everyone should read once in their lives 

xirtman seems to point out who are autistic e.g. he says Nietzsche is and Frank Lloyd Wright was a high-functioning autistic 

At this point in Moravian Night I would say he's on to something in Handke.  But/and does being a writer make one eventually into a sort of autistic performer or is one autistic and becomes a writer because not much else is open or possible?  Was Joe

Monninger a sort of autistic person?  

The Jews Harp convention is an interesting trope he's figured out---the dialectic between the individual's breath and the national and geological terrain that emerges from the breathed performance.  

and now we find that the watches on each person's wrist disturbs the storytelling and the harp performances  local time reminders destroy   time as prison destroys time of play and dreams 

only defiance is left as a way to counter the world  ---Balkans as artists of defiance --  chubby boy beams forth  everyone invited

to next year's convention in the Balkans by our wanderer 

what a strange book   ---  is he not novelizing his "politics" of the Balkans---treating them as an ancient whole rather than in the recent Serbian Croatian civil war dissolution of the fake Yugoslavia ?  

now in Genet's book we have a scene with a watch---the executioner unstraps Erik's watch, it falls to the ground and he feels purer  70  

Night in Night

Handke's people wander perfectly forgotten and empty parts of Spain.  Is Moravian Night a nightmare tale, we get a touch of wife beating in Chapter 4 and then by the end we get a brilliant masterpiece of writing about perfect union of the man and the woman (she now tells the tale on the boat, or at least part of it).  The two pages of writing about their climax is storytelling, fairy tale anti-fairy tale telling wondrousness with specific and words for them.  So is it a Dark Night of the Soul novel?  Spain and all. What if I had not become a successful writer, had been a failure and long to be released from the terrors of it, to be a former writer, would that not be pretty good?  On the boat we can have a constant shifting of who speaks, who tells the next tale or purported story.  Uncertainty, indefiniteness interlaced with what we know happens.  Marked a bunch of passages, too lazy to get the book and copy some of them.  To do so might violate the mission the book gives us.  Posted on X hey Handke has a Tunnel book, too!! 

"And in their parting, in their separation, reality appeared, blossomed." 149

"an earring rang" 147

his inveterate avoidance reflex 

maybe a bit like Theroux's novel called My Other Life where he imagines his life and career going in totally different ways than it had gone

he gets a guardian angel who helps him walk the slippery rios of Galicia   hey, I've been there!!  did not try to walk the rocky fissures but I know what that rias bajas  looks and feels like   Valle landscape

who otherwise in life so often fell into the grip, if not of social phobia at least of a fear of the unknown that caused him to hesitate unduly on the threshold of a new experience  143

let things take their course

how did it happen on this particular day he knew his intuition to be infallible 138 

Actually he believed more in mutual enthusiasm than in love, or at least he avoided using that word 136

257/280

 on the otrovert test this evening.  St James Tea Room at 11 this morning.  Before that changed the air tickets to give us the three hour layover in MNSP.  

Loving Moavian Night now.  almost midway.  Got the swing of it.  Love the section on the Carthusian who left because the silence in the monastery was fake.  Could only find the other silence in the kitchen or in lavatory clean up duty.  94 

great passage on 119 how his reveries help him stop writing, help him get out of himself and into the world.  "All's well when I do nothing but live them, and keep them to myself--not well when I wish to impart them to all of you, . . . . "  This after the great sequence about hanging out with idiots when they are out on their walks.  

a guest storyteller takes over so we can see the former writer behaving strangely at the closed train station on the Galician coast  He sees him in a funeral procession.  Reminder that I read some more of Genet earlier, a funeral procession in there too.  At last I appreciate Genet, every word, every shock and surprise.  

meander, walk, zig zag 

been a while

 "I’m not really sure who I am but I love reading books."

Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1941-1996

ok, who was he ? Polish film director and screenwriter

into Moravian Night, a bit. Reading it as a devoted fan reads it. It falls into the group we call "strange" for want of a better term. Handke being lazy? or bored? or trying out this and that, moving forward, no matter what? All of his books are travel books in some sense, the path forward, through landscape. This uses a river boat.

Weds swim day Moravian one of those books we must permit our author to have written. What is he exposing or exploring, emptying out, moving on beyond? A strange book. I suppose much later on we can analyze his whole ouevre and in deep hindsight we will see what we cannot see right now. Just like a trip down a river. Or sort of. He puts a Carthusian monk together with Apaches and Navajos. Why not. Noise is the enemy experience. Noise and sound pollution of every sort. Noise sufferers at borders and thresholds, especially noise from motorcycles and motorbikes. "Another man flinched at the slightest breeze." 91

A dystopian tale of course. The Carthusian who left because the silence in the monastery was fake.

"In the current noise I have come close to losing my soul. . . . A single lovable sound, and my soul will be healed. Secrecy: show me the place where you are hidden." 98

the failed prose writer against the town-talk poet, outsider vs locked up mental case

meanwhile Eric J told me about his great bro trip to see Dawson in Spain and today about the 16th C Jesuit wisdom book of Bathasar Gracian and a Spanish film maker named Saura, film called The Hunt

Sierra de Gredos

this arrived and I realized it was published years before The Fruit Thief so I dropped that (few pages in)

and picked up this.  Unusual in many ways, hmm, what was he thinking that prompted this one?  Main character a woman, a banker, to boot!  What's up?  But still, a wanderer.  Character and her author, a hired biographer.  Story, no myth.  

"I have always hoped for a commission like this: not a work but a product to deliver.  An order.'  A man of rhythms?  What kind of rhythms? "Above all the rhythms of understanding, that most inclusive of feelings, hand in hand with the rhythm of remaining silent, and leaving things unspoken."  9  

this copy very heavy, an ingram printing product, maybe ten years old?  very heavy paper, unlike those other recent copies printed in texas two weeks ago.   

ok this will be a wild wandering like the Walked Out One Night.  Banker, woman, instead of a pharmacist, and she will realize and transform in various ways.  No names, no specific landscape, but landscape as dreamscape.  

for going to texas I'll take the small book, two novellas, tale of demons and merry month of may unusual in that they are novellas with titles and sub-titles

stroll around Netherwood the other day interesting, depressing.  The refined famous house degraded right and left by junky houses built next to it and by the whole neighborhood.  Lechusas now has the look and feel of a village.  almost   even more pleased with and proud of the whole west side 

successful day

have done a poor job of reading this essay yesterday but at the point I am at there's this: "Thus, he reflected later, in an attempt at a successful day, everything, at least in moments of misfortune, of pain, of failure, when things were going wrong--the essential was to summon up the presence of mind needed for a different variety of this moment and thus to transform it, by a liberating act of awareness or reflection, whereby the day--as though this were the prerequisite for its success--would acquire it élan and its wings." 271 

what follows is worth noting because it goes with the previous post about Lacey and Repetti 

"You make it sound as though your successful day were child's play.

No answer."  

---

ecstasy meant panic 

amazed at the size and emptiness of the toilets in the American Express Company near Opéra 

this whole long passage about his day  pp 277-278  so wonderful  

Day, let everything in you ripen something for me.  281

Unexpectedly, still in the dark, the thrust of joy in carrying on.

this essay on the successful day is Handke's prose poem prayer, his faith in writing, in the day, yes he does quote St Paul but it is the St Paul of "bring me that cloak I left with Carpus at Troas."

See how the snow falls past the empty bird's nest.  Arise to transubstantiation. To the next dream?

must re-read the essay some time because I miffed missed reading well the early part of it  the second part was successful!!!  

now to take up The Fruit Thief    back to the dream of story, of narrative flow  

tomorrow I can stroll in the Netherwood Park area and see the designated modernist house by Arthur Dekker, built just five years after Milner Mansion on Mackland but a generation apart in mindset. Maybe even two generations if we put Wright in there to buffer Gaw Meem from Mies.  2271 sq ft, 10k sq ft lot 4 bedrooms 2 baths  1961 vs 1966  4 beds 3 (2/12 baths)  2966 sq ft  10+k sq ft lot 

how would Handke respond? (Lacey -- Repetti)

 someone posted this so I can't resist pasting up a closing segment just to see how it flies 

I might suggest  for him, hmm, well, what have I been doing for the past fifty years?  breakthrough, backthrough, breakbefore 

If the writing of fiction is a treatment, what else could that treatment be but a cathartic, a purgative? The things purged in Lacey’s writing are not only strong emotions but also—and more often—ideas, images, phrases associated with those emotions that previously had a merely private and inchoate existence. Their significance remains uninterrogated until they appear on the page, written by her own hand but coming as if from elsewhere. The drama of the memoir side is most palpable in the moments when these purgings happen without conscious effort or warning—when we catch the author surprising herself, when she describes how the act of putting a particular idea, phrase, or feeling in the head, mouth, or body of a character allows her to suddenly recognize that that very thing has always been present in herself, concealed or disavowed. The fiction, likewise, is deepened and intensified upon rereading (like a Möbius strip, you have to go all the way around twice to complete the circuit), when we are compelled to imagine Lacey writing the text and arriving at such moments of spontaneous insight.

This constant return to the scene of writing—this demand that we grasp the text not just as a written thing (this being the demand of classical postmodernism, with its delight in self-reflexive textual play) but also as a writing, as the product of a writer struggling with her material, encoding that struggle into the text itself, and producing some unaccountable hybridity in excess of the “real”—is Lacey’s great breakthrough. Coupled with that is the refusal of the conflation of the person writing (the author-as-mere-author) with the act of writing itself. To write is to pass the material of one’s life through an inscrutable matrix that somehow defies the laws of physics by yielding something more than what went in. In this mysterious sense, something happens when a person writes that is profoundly impersonal. If there is a primal scene of contemporary autofiction, it is this passage through writing from the merely personal to the impersonal—and Lacey has pointed the way there precisely by refusing to write a properly autofictional work.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Jon Repetti is a writer and critic living in New York City. He has a PhD from Princeton University and works in publishing.

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Tiredness

 a key essay   first published in about 1990   If only I had read it before reading Don Juan because in this essay he gives his whole interpretation of Don Juan as a tale of tiredness, a hero of tiredness

"Tiredness is greater than the self.  Everything becomes extraordinary in the tranquillity of tiredness . . . . "

"despite the typically mystical stammering in your way of expressing it"   note how stammering would go with shimmering in Handke's dictionary 

remember too how was it in jukebox? that he mentioned in passing how St Teresa was of the school of relaxation into quiet surrender versus those who held one should tighten all the muscles of the body to experience God most directly

last image of mankind reconciled in its last moments in cosmic tiredness 

holy

 For the first time to my knowledge Handke uses the word holy and says I believe in that sort of transfiguration.  In the essay on Tiredness after the detailed remembering of the whole village helping to thresh and store the hay into the barn.  we-tiredness, the past transfigures 

this telling is a pure picture  equals in shared tiredness united purified   carpenters putting up roofs  a people of tiredness  the music of clairaudient tiredness  

(he decided he wanted to be a writer around age 13, at 23 or 24 he published The Hornets and dropped out of university) 

there is no picturable tiredness among the middle class  they regard it as a misbehavior like going barefoot (Kim Jones in Madrid as nanny for Pedro and Marga!) 

Ray Davies sang I'm Not Like Everybody Else   The Kinks  godfather of british pop  now 82 also knighted

how did I miss The Kinks?  and miss this song---is it a pre-anthem for Otroverts ?  his face in the b&w photo does look familiar 

8,025,200 views Feb 24, 2011 on YouTube

I won't take all that they hand me down, And make out a smile, though I wear a frown, And I'm not gonna take it all lying down, 'Cause once I get started I go to town. 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, Oh no... I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else, no.. I'm not like everybody eeelse. And I don't want to live my life like everybody else, And I don't want to be destroyed like everybody else, And I don't wanna get a job, like everybody else, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else. You see... Darling, you know that I love you true, And i'll do anything that you want me to, I'll even, Confess all my sins like you want me to, But there's one thing that I can't do for you, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, (What did i say ?...) I'm not like everybody else. (How did i say it ?...) I'm not like everybody else, (One more time..) I'm not like everybody else. Like everybody else.. And I don't want to live my life like everybody else, And I won't wanna be destroyed like everybody else, And I don't wanna get a job, like everybody else, 'Cause I'm not like everybody else, What did i say ?.. I'm not like everybody else. Like everybody else. Everybody else, Everybody else, Like everybody else. Everybody... Everybody else...

Kinks Anthology 1964-1971

another ending

 Finished Thucydides Once Again yesterday.  Love how in the final epic our traveler argues with himself, scolds himself for being annoying, for falling into the trap of looking for big meanings once again, for allowing established arcs of imagery to take over the telling.  And he manages to end the wonderful small book of observations on a poignant note because he has been back to Mt St Victoire to wander part that has been recently destroyed by fire and the paths are all gone.  "But if resignation,  why, then, "additional"?  . . . He ends with questions."  

Wonder if he wrote these, culled them from his notebooks into a gathering as a counter-statement to the long, rambling essays.  Just to do it.  Just to show his skill and gifts in a manner opposite the other books.

Now to read the two essays remaining in the Quiet Places.  Tiredness and Successful Day.  Waiting for the Sierra Gredos volume to show so I can stay with the chronology.  

In Tiredness already a line that reminds me of when I lived out in Bethesda or Silver Spring in the house of a woman who rented me a room, what semester or year, the last? at Maryland.  "the tiredness of being alone in a rented room on the outskirts; solitary tiredness." 157