Wrong Move

 Sunday 

We skipped Chatter but later admitted we were sorry to have done so.  Bela now watching Sophie's Choice.  I finished watching Wenders' "Wrong Move" 1975.  Peter Handke script.  Old man with harmonica, Wilhelm, blonde actress, brown haired teen who juggles, poet (bad), industrialist in the ruined chateau who hangs himself during the night. Wilhelm played by Rudiger Vogler who also stars in the second road trip film Kings of the Road.  Watch that next.  Key lines:  

I don't have the power of observation.  But I believe I have the gift of a sort of erotic view.  Suddenly I notice something that I have always missed, and not only do I see it, but I get a feeling for it.  That is what I call an erotic view.  Then I write not just an observation but an experience.  That's why I must go on being a writer.   at 1:13:37 in the film  

Being a parrot is humiliating.  The actress complains about being locked into other people's words for things.  

I want to be alone to live in my stupor.

At the end, on Germany's highest mountain, the Zugspitze (in the south) I felt I had missed out on something  and continued to miss out with every move.  Wrong move.  

----

Met the young woman who lives next door.  Jaylene?  degrees in business and public health.  Pulling up all the carpeting and putting in ceramic tile floors.  Charter high school in south Abq.  30s?  

Scanned much of Parry's book.  Helped situate Absence (note how similar it is to Wrong Move though in the sense of a group of odd characters, not in search of an author! but floating in absurd fairy tale.  

Landscape shows up for Handke to replace "meaning" of all sorts.  Becomes the armature and the mythos.  

Watch Kings of the Road next.  Bela wants to see winter olympics finale.  Hmm?  Sent off some cards to Emma and Eliot and the Hunnewells.  Happy to get their holiday letter and news news of their goings on.  

Cumberland pencils

The pencil lies diagonally across the book, in the small circle of light.  Its upper surface is imprinted, in block letters CUMBERLAND.  The writing beneath the pencil suggests several trains waiting on parallel tracks, the words being cars and the signs locomotives.  A whistle, as though to signal the trains' departure, is actually blown in the distance, prolonged by a whistle-blowing that fills the whole building. 

Peter Handke, Absence, page 9.  1990  1987 Die Abwesenheit   Also a movie 1992 The Absence 

my ideal had always been

 I couldn't be satisfied with a dissertation that would merely look for relationships in my field of inquiry--

my ideal had always been the gentle emphasis and appeasing flow of a narrative.    Handke Slow 189

For often, in reading and writing, , I had seen the truth of storytelling as a clarity in which one sentence calmly engenders another and in which the truth---the insight that came before the story---is perceptible only as a gentle something in the transitions between sentences.  Moreover, I knew that reason forgets, the imagination never.  190  

Then, in Grillparzer's The Poor Minstrel, I read "I trembled with a longing for unity."  A desire for the One in All was rekindled in me.  For I knew that unity is possible.  Every singled moment of my life hangs together with every other---without intermediate links.  I need only reconstitute that with the help of my imagination.  190  

some of my most favorite lines from Handke    

news late

 We had just seated ourselves Sunday in Los Cuates, the mariachi was singing.  My phone showed there were messages on Messenger from David and Scott Merrill.  Scott's message had been posted on Jan 1 (same day Joe died).  Phil died Dec 28.  I called Scott later that day.  He knew Phil had not been doing well for a while, was with him the night before and he was having trouble breathing, had been popping various old medicines over a few days.  A 911 call went out early Sunday morning, not clear how Scott learned about that later one, maybe from Phil's brother.  Later Ross and Scott made three visits to clear out the apartment and save some of Phil's papers and some momentos from themselves.  Ross Smart.  They talk about having a memorial get together later, maybe in May in Brattleboro.  

Quite a shock.  Felt sad all day, still.  Kim and Olen arrived that afternoon, wonderful visit with them.  They are at the Indian Cultural Center this morning.  Lou and B coming for lunch.  K and O will head back to Salida after they stop to say hello goodbye here.  Barry with them.  

Dennis excited about his move.  Has dates for the mover and for Skylar his neice to drive him to Philly.  

Finishing Handke's Child Story in Slow Homecoming.  Just ordered play he published year after that. 

Still astonished by the book, how he reconfigured the traditional material of the three "journeys" over landscape, geology and art, image and brushstroke, word choices, steps.  

Nina Kalkus the youngest, 8 years younger than older brother, who has two children, is a clinical psychologist in private schools, did univ at St Andrews. Oldest brother is ? Evan? have not gotten their names straight.  He works as an emt, may try to do med school but can't get it together.  They worry about him and about Nina.  

Ladies lunched.  Lou took a photo of us with K & O.  They headed off to home, high winds now gusting, hope they don't encounter any trouble with them.  

Finished H's Child Story and the whole of Slow Homecoming.  Have I enjoyed a book so much?  Maybe I enjoyed Repetition a bit more?  Child Story ends with Greek quote from Menander about suffering in childhood, punishment.  Greek view.  Tragic forms of experience.  Handke experiments in that essay with the distancing effect of third person and impersonal semi-abstract tone and attitude.  Trying to place his six years raising his daughter alone into the larger geology, landscape, of timeless human experience.  She attended a Jewish school for a year or so.  He so carefully honors that and globalizes that or anthropologizes that as a school and community for "the people."  

Did I read Across just before Christmas?  Amazon says I bought the book then and I think I did read it but I will ask chatgpt to give me a detailed summary to refresh memory.  

Phil Hart

 Scott Merrill wrote this obituary for Phil   on legacy.com 

Philip (Phil) B. Hart, 80, who devoted much of his life to teaching and advocating for others, died at his home in Newport, New Hampshire, on December 28, 2025.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, and raised in Ansonia, Connecticut, Phil was the son of William B. Hart and Christine (Ballantyne) Hart. He is survived by his brothers William B. Hart Jr. and James F. Hart; his nephew James Hart; nieces Halliday and Hawthorne; and many friends.

As a boy, Phil and his brothers worked at Hart's "five and dime" store in Seymour, Connecticut, owned by their father, who had served in the FBI and later as director of Mowglis School of the Open in Hebron, NH, from the 1960s through the 1980s. Phil's appreciation for the outdoors was shaped at Mowglis, where he spent summers with his brothers Jim and Bill before becoming a counselor himself and a long-time assistant director with his father.

Phil began his career as a professor and congregational minister in the 1970s. After earning a Master of Divinity from Hartford Seminary, he was ordained in the United Church of Christ (UCC) and founded the United Campus Ministry at what was then Plymouth State College in Plymouth, NH.

In addition to his work as campus minister—which included counseling students, providing grief support during crises, campus speaking events, and a Thanksgiving food drive that continues today—Phil served as advisor to the student newspaper, The Clock.

Phil taught in the philosophy department at "PSC" for nearly four decades, offering courses that crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries. His subject matter and intimate teaching style occasionally drew disapproval from department chairs, but his courses were among the college's most popular. Titles included Sex and Death, Personal Mythology, Intro to God, Women in Religion, Religion in America, and Sexual Ethics.

As a professor, Phil showed genuine concern for the individual, encouraging others to think for themselves, always with a dry sense of humor. Whether in the basement of Mary Lyons or later in Hyde Hall, his office was open to those seeking advice or reassurance.

Phil devoured books, played piano, and knew the words to countless hymns, which he sometimes sang spontaneously. He was also a writer; his poetry and short stories were playful, transgressive, and marked by intimacy, compassion, and humor.

He loved meandering road trips across the United States and Mexico, as well as sitting quietly on his porch with a White Russian or iced tea on summer nights.

Those who knew and were loved by Phil knew they were listened to and cared for. He took deep interest in others' experiences and ideas and was a source of comfort and understanding in difficult times. He will be missed by many.

landscape inside me

 Has anyone ever written about landscape as a defining drama upon one's inner life as Handke does?  

"the dark cypresses of the summer of 1971 in Yugoslavia"  149  Taking Cezanne's relationship with Mont St Victoire as another doppelgänger effect upon him.  Earlier in the first section, the stranger on the train encounter is perfect.  Not a train but a bus.  They meet for lunch after they arrive in NYC.  They need each other, do not expect to get to know each other, simply experience the encounter as a necessary moment each has on their journey, their private inner journey.  

transformation and always intrinsic guilt 149  desire for reconciliation which comes from desiring another's desire  149  as the philosopher put it  a perfectly reasonable desire  which philosopher?  

well as it happens I do now have as a companion this book by Christoph Parry "Peter Handke's Landscapes of Discourse" and just glancing through he answers this and all related questions with the great detail and depth of superior academic scholarship.  Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 shows up! Whole chapter on Repetition (which I forget I did read out of order!) and much much more.  Way much more than I'd realized---did the German Romantics not indeed invent landscape and literary inner travel?  

the metaphorical relationship of landscape and writing  Parry  131 

feels so much like a culmination of all my years of "teaching" travel literature---something I did out of a desire to"for reconciliation which comes from desiring another's desire" "as the philosopher puts it" but which I really had no way of articulating beyond reading one book after another, one writer after another---Chatwin, Leigh Fermor   etc  

Parry was born in '51 in Cambridge, traveled in Singapore and Nigeria, studied in Edinburgh and Marburg, but Chatwin is not in the Index.  Wrote his dissertation on Celan and Mandelstam (neither of whom have I read! ) and settled into teaching in Finland.  

Haunted now, as Handke climbs Mt St-Victoire, that I did read this book a long time ago, tried to read it as one for my travel lit course, and didn't know what to make of it, had no idea what Handke was doing in it.

Lunch with Steph and Louise at Thai Boran went well.  We all wondered quietly how we had missed getting together last year.  They went on to Sandia Casion resort for an overnight spa treat.  

shimmering

 I've been keeping my eye on how often Handke likes to use the word shimmering.  One could indeed write a whole book on it, on him, under the aegis of this term. I say this with confidence now, more confidence than when I was a few earlier books back, because of the extraordinary passage on pages 94-95 where looking at the beauty of the woman's face he enacts a whole drama of receiving "the happendings in someone else's face" and this "overpoweringly gentle manipulation had incorporated his limited personal life into the face of mankind, in whose openness it would go on forever."  94

how well that all could be read, re-read, mis-read, deconstructed, or reconstructed etc etc.  His search for the forms---why does he not use "archetype"?  He has a conversation with these friends as strangers that takes place in an archetypal space or realm of juxtaposition, contradiction---he wants to speak strongly aloud, he wants to be nothing.  Then he thanks them for a bite of strudel and the evening sitting with them under their lampshade.  

He flies to Denver, rides in a bus out into the snow.  Radiant daydreams, the journey within himself.  

{the late morning sinus? headache--an advil, dark chocolate and touch more of coffee.  Waiting for Pablo and piano midday.  If.  Deep wiki gossip search into the story behind last night's gold medal couples figure skating story, French won, American couple dashed.  Quite a long complex tale therein.  The precious inner world of ultra competitions.  I could easily imagine wandering as Sorger is doing, in fact I did do some of that.  That trip to Haight Ashbery, driving from Chicago to Pueblo, Colorado with Doris/Isa.  Driving with Mark years later all the way out to Bemidji, MN and flying back to NH.  Another drive when I stayed in Michigan with Dick and Sherri, Lansing.  Handke's way of describing it all as wholly inward travel "longing for an invented world that would permeate the real world and incorporate it in one vast invention."  105  Have never read any writer who does this.  Brilliant.  Perfect.  Is he writing solely for other INFPs!!!??? silly ideas

why should I be reading a few pages and then writing some comments about it?  

"No ecstasy! (Never again). To conjure up ecstasy, he looked for a landmark.  In the snow-covered, sunlit gully he distinguished a shimmering furrow--the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  Involuntarily he cried out, and a faint echo came back at him from a bush.  He was overcome with melancholy and lust." 107  

He had found out his old ski instructor friend had just died, visited the funeral home where the body lay.  

"Fervid expectation . . . everything is (perfectly) possible, and just as an earthquake gave rise to a human dance, meaningless being alive engendered a meaningless game." 

Feb 10

Liberty Mutual bot makes this memorable because email overnight arrives this morning and makes it sound like if I don't pay (already on auto-pay but could they note that ?) they will cancel  my whole life.  

By the end of the day the auto-pay should have posted.  Fingers crossed.  

Bela seems mostly over her bout with the cold.  We talked with Roy yesterday, he called on his new number.  Jonah there but do not know his number.  They seem fine.  He sounds like himself but barely recalls just who he is talking with, agrees to vague idea of getting together.  

Is that how Burgo will sound if I call him?  Fingers crossed.

Good news---Dennis got the go ahead and expects to move Feb 20.  Fingers crossed.

Other good news the media play bad bunny's superbowl show is getting as the best resistence to the regime we've seen yet at that level of money and power.  Fingers crossed.  

After Handke:  I grew up on the hills of shale along the banks of the Potomac River in MD.  I've lived most of my life on the granite ledges along the Pemigewasset River in NH.  I've retired to the volcanic lava beds and desert escarpment overlooking the Rio Grande in NM. 

pp 72-73  in slow homecoming  "in any countryside whatever characteristic forms reveal themselves . . .inconspicuous elements no scientific insight can lay bare    on the next page  the feeling of being at home

Pablo replies, can we do it Thursday, now 11:29  if/when we go to the store should I buy some sort of sinus pressure relief concoction or leave it to chance, aspirin here or there ?  

Valentin Sorger after a concert in Berkeley, a large man, want to know who that might have been (Burl Ives? Johnny Cash? but point is not to know but to read Handke's words about it, about how the experience worked for Sorger at that moment.  

here it is --- starts at the bottom of page 45  "The man who rose from the ground was not ecstatic, only appeased.  He no longer expected illuminations, only measure and duration."   This is right after his "first intimation of the river landscape.  "My face is an unfinished sketch---when will it be complete?"  

"(And then there was even a kind of hope---disguised as a feeling that he knew something.)" 46 

Knowing (T mode?) disguised as a feeling (F mode).  

The art works in the museum, the two big exhibits, disappointed after they wowed.  Such scale, determination, money, polish, savy market/audience-wise, right in the bullseyes of the zeitgeist targets, identity vengeance.  

The singer   "He didn't sing with feeling but searched frantically for a feeling which was as puzzling to him as to anyone else."  82

quiet Sunday

We skipped Chatter, slept in.  Trying to get over my cough/cold once and for all.  Trying to make sure Bela has not really caught it.  She walked lots yesterday, 4k? I walked lots too, around Old Town.  Still had coughing bout around 2 am.  Feels good though to chill today.  Strange visit to the dentist at Salud on Atrisco.  Indian dentist and assistant.  Showed me it would cost $990.00 for the "deep clean" that Va's teeth clearly needed. After asking me politely if she were demented.  Said no and we left.  

So loving Handke's Slow Homecoming.  Exciting and thrilling.  Not so much Fosse.  I dutifully read to the end, and carefully,  The Other Name.  The death of the boy was the unexpected point of danger, the car ride with the bald old man too predictable and somehow unconvincing, or maybe unmoving.  Maybe the Latin prayers obstruct my view.  The darkness shining and shining darkness are fine.  Why could he not have been happy with that, stayed with that, left it at that.  Modian and Handke are born in the "correct" years!  Fosse I would group with "boomers" but then I would have to allow that Lentz falls into that chronological nonsense too.  

Neighbor over the back wall removed the big blue and black plastic tarps from his patio yesterday.  Sure sign of Spring?  Feels nice and warm these days.  Wrote various messages to Jonah Stephenson, hoping to hear from him about Roy.  Paper card in mail, email and facebook message.  Marilyn's cardiac inversion on Friday went well.  Bela now enjoying book about Julia Child.  

Back to Handke for me.  Do I need to skim some 2-3 star comments in goodreads about Fosse?  Had forgotten that Knausgaard was Fosse's student in writing course(s).  Fosse's plays widely produced where silence does what stream repetition does in the narratives.  

Ok, I read this one, and I read the Melancholy I.  I can let him go.  No need to read more even though in anticipatory enthusiasm, or anxiety hyped proto-enthusiasm, I bought copies of other titles.  

Now sipping the newest ceremonial cacao to arrive in the house, this from Embue, Moses Draper who started the company in Brattleboro before moving to Costa Rica.  Must be a lucrative cacao scam just like the others!!  One email said he was sending me the new version of the golden spoon, but it wasn't in this first package.  Do like the cacao in mixable form rather than the chunks provided by the other company.  But the golden frother is not gold and has a three step power button that easily makes a big mess.  The Zylo frother is just fine.  Zulo, Pacho, ? all no doubt made in same shop in China.  

Back to Handke.  And in celebration I broke my chronological discipline by starting in on the collection of essays published much later in career than Slow Homecoming.  Quiet Places.  Opening essay about the crucial importance of time in the toilet to get away from people and listen to silence.  At once I think of the toilet in the basement of the Grand Avenue store.  First the low ceiling of the basement, almost everyone had to duck to avoid hitting one's head on the pipes and floor joists above.  The toilet you had to step up into, two steps? it was up on the edge of the outer wall of the basement, also low ceiling, so you had to find a way to step up and stoop down, double over, and push your rear back onto the ring seat without falling over.  Seated you could then squat comfortably and think in perfect embodiment of Rodin's muscled hero.  

Handke lived in Berkeley 1978-79.  There is no Northern Lights boulevard there, I wonder if he tweaked City Lights bookstore into that street name.