last day in Abq

 

back into granite consciousness > June 7

 no longer in the shadow of the volcanoes.  Outside the rhododendrons blooming in the amazonian backyard, sunshine, sweet air.  

the fruit thief proceeds, for the first time in his narratives? (mmm?) at the leisurely pace previously found in the essays  slow and 

Sunday  Birthday wishes pouring in from all corners.  Still on Bill Stakem's list, alas.  Nicholas from Bogota and Cécile from Paris.  

Debating about whether to urge Phil to buy an EV immediately.  Probably not.  His nephew drove from WVa to help him get his computer to work once more.  Only an hour and fifteen minutes drive.  Phil wrote him a check for $13,000. so he could buy a house.  The two of them can figure out how to take care of Phil from here on out.  John's suggestions are higher end, get involved with charitable giving.  More like mine.  Phil won't do that either.  Can't teach an old dog new tricks.  

Here we have Carole and Ken coming at 2 which will be great.  Rainy day, heavy rains in the night.  

Been crafting my new signature-seal, having gone jealous over Bert's beautiful one he left on the invoice here on the table.  

Feels like we will sign on to that med cruise tomorrow if they have a cabin for us.  Might be too late.  

shuddering

Goethe's dictum "shuddering is humankind's best feature"  18 Thief 

here shows up the wild Spanish Sierra --  this from Gary Lachman's blog post on Jan Potocki 

Indeed, scenes and motifs of initiation and secret knowledge run through The Manuscript Found In Saragossa and one of its central figures - the great Sheik of the Gomelez family – is the head of a gigantic scheme that resembles the machinations of the Bavarian Illuminati. Potocki’s decision to set his bizarre novel against the wild beauty of the Spanish Sierra Morena may have been influenced by more than the fact that he passed through the area on his way back from Morocco.

. . .

I can only mention some of the many esoteric motifs that appear throughout the tales, as well as the encyclopedic philosophical discourses that accompany them. The gallows suggest the Tarot trump of the Hanged Man, a symbol of spiritual death and initiation; initiation rites and challenges appear in many forms throughout the book. The weird adventures and tales within tales, in which Alphonse is often unsure if he is awake, dreaming or under the influence of hashish, are a reminder of the ambiguous nature of “reality.” They also occupy the liminal space between sleep and consciousness, the hypnagogic realm of magic and the paranormal.

. . . .

Handke in his Sierra is not being an esoterist, but is using the Sierra to locate tales of the unreal, strange, dream-like, history and memory being as shifting as reality.

Lachman's post about this Count is excellent as always. And as always quite dizzying. Amazing that Lachman continues to trace all of these themes and topics, movements and cults. A helpful reminder about our troubles today in the sense that saying our present administrative cluster of idiots functions, indeed, like a cult, a crazed stream of anti-rationalists bent on being counter to as much as possible, in the name of loyalty to their golden performer.

Immer noch sturm,

 It is still storming, still storm, Storm Still   the translation published in India! in 2014, Seagull, in 2010

in German, Surhkamp Verlag.   Starting this, maybe a page or two a day, and re-starting The Fruit Thief.

For some reason have fixed on going to Tomasita's up on Pan American Highway if I can get there on Montaño only and avoid the Pan American.  From there some photos across the valley of the volcanoes. 

Gorgeous sunny day.  Stop somewhere along the way first for a first stroll to stride off the day.  Or not.  

Tomasita's was good-ok.  Big news of the day, however, was that along Unser early walkers and runners were out and sure enough there was a guy walking with purpose Backwards!  Handke would be so proud and happy.  As I was.  Too fast, driving, to get a snap of him.  Later in the afternoon took lots of snaps of the walls on Sevilla street and offshoots.  Image bank for my photo book on the Walls of West Albuquerque.  

Now in Fruit Thief he is talking about departure on a trip that feels it might be a final trip, looking over what his fruit trees yielded.  Closing up the house.  This time I am on purpose not going to underline anything, as a discipline in Duration!  

Said good-bye to Beckie.  She liked her flowers and put her card in her book to read later.  She and Bela at Cottonwood earlier with Janeese concocted a plan for next year to rent two or three cats from Janeese for our visit.  Wonder if that will happen!  I can see them tearing up the chairs.  Janeese has four or five dogs and eighteen more or less cats.  

We started Rosellini's Stromboli at Handke's insistence last night.  Berman beautiful.  Read up on the big scandal back story.  1950s black and white movie.  Have seen it before or at least the opening part.  Vintage in every way.  

how to live on my last day off in Abq?

 what to do on the last Saturday here?  

"Trembling and faltering, she and the author went on to the next sentence.  In between they both shuddered.  But without this shuddering the journey would not have deseerved the name.  That alone was what validated a journey."  461

I could drive down Isleta and back up Broadway.  I could spend the whole day walking the Andalucia circle.  I could drive up

and down Golf Course and Taylor Ranch roads.  Drive Unser up and down and Coors.  Where should I eat? Snack? 

What book to read next?  Missing Gredos, given that it is Spain, I could have read it as Bela's love affair with Spain.  

Today the farewell Friday.  Victoria brought us two pieces of carrot cake.  Walmart  ---- Rose did the toes but both forgot the finger nails.  

The Ergo cane did arrive from Florida.  Connected to a Dutch medican equipment company.  Made in Taiwan.  

Read Handke's 2009 monologue, Til Day You Do Part, Or a Question of Light, an answer or reply from the woman present but silent in Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape.  This copy printed in India, Mike Mitchell translation into English with texts also in German and French.  

That 510 Central art show is still up but I am resisting the notion of going to it.  Images from it on Insta show just why one doesn't want to see the whole room of those paintings.  

Finished Genet's Funeral Rites last night.  A difficult book to read and re-read because his hallucinatory approach confuses even if it is the second or third time you've read it.  A perfect aesthetic experience and achievement given his time and moment.  A good remembrance of Phil, in its ways.  I wondered if this was the book I read on the streets in Buenos Aires, tearing off one page at a time as I read it, as I started to do on that trip, "to save space and cut down on weight" given the huge and heavy suitcases we had then.  An amazing, remarkable trip that was, for sure.  A true journey.  What did Handke say about the shudder and vibration that make a journey?  

Saw a brief homage video about him on YouTube.  Produced by an Italian company.  He still lives in Chaville, sw of Paris.  For over thirty years now.  

I will re-start The Fruit Thief.  He mentions that phrase a number of times in Sierra, and even before that.  So it's a thing he's had on his mind for a good while.  Another tale about a woman?  No, main character is man who goes on a journey after a bee stings him, reminding him it is time to undertake a journey once more.  

Forgot to mention to Dennis that the best thing about now is that last year at this time Bela stopped being able to walk!!  Thank goodness that is not happening again.  I don't know what I would do.  The anxiety about needing hip surgery seems much more quiet now too.  

Correction---I was right the first time,  yes, the narrator is a man but the fruit thief he is looking for is a woman, one he has glimpsed before.  One time she asked him directly What's wrong, sir?  What worries you so? Qu'est-ce qu'il vous manque, monsieur? C'est quoi, souci?"  What are you missing, sir?  What is the problem? 

Handke's books in chronological order

 

• 2002 Der Bildverlust oder Durch die Sierra de Gredos (Crossing the Sierra de Gredos), novel
• 2004 Don Juan (erzählt von ihm selbst) (Don Juan: His Own Version)
• 2008 Die morawische Nacht (The Moravian Night), novel
• 2009 Bis dass der Tag euch scheidet oder Eine Frage des Lichts: ein Monolog (Till Day You Do Part or A Question of Light)
• 2010 Immer noch Sturm (Storm Still)
• 2011 Der Große Fall (The Great Fall)
• 2017 Die Obstdiebin oder Einfache Fahrt ins Landesinnere (The Fruit Thief or One-Way Journey into the Interior)
• 2020 Das zweite Schwert (The Second Sword)
• 2021 Mein Tag im anderen Land (My Day in the Other Land)
• 2023 Die Ballade des letzten Gastes (The Ballad of the Last Guest)

in 2011 The Great Fall  about an actor  and Storm Still and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez 

2012 the essay on the Quiet Place  --- a late work, then, not an early one  

2013  Days and Works   and a new English version of Repetition

2014  Storm Still   epic about his Slovene roots 

2015  in German, The Innocent, Me and the Unknown Woman"

2016  English version of The Moravian Night 2008 

2017  The Fruit Thief  Or, One-Way Journey into the Interior

2018  The Great Fall  and Til Day You Do Part  Seagull Books 

2019  The Great Fall in English  Seagull Books   Nobel Prize 

2020  The Second Sword

2021  My Day in the Other Country 

2022 in German  The Ballad of the Last Guest  

reminder   in 2000 it was On A Dark Night I Left My Silent House

• 2010 Immer noch Sturm (Storm Still), a play about the Slovenian uprising against Hitler in 1945, ISBN 978-3-518-42131-4; first performance: Salzburg Festival 2011
• 2018 Peter Handke Bibliothek. I. Prose, Poetry, Plays (Vol. 1–9), ISBN 978-3-518-42781-1; II. Essays (Vol. 10–11), ISBN 978-3-518-42782-8; III Diaries (Vol. 13–14), ISBN 978-3-518-42783-5
• 2021 Handke, Peter; Winston, Krishna (2022). The fruit thief, or, One-way journey into the interior. New York. ISBN 978-0-374-90650-4. OCLC 1276901930.

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?  

the greatest gift

 ELIZABETH HARDWICK The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.

Otrovertist post this morning from Karun Pal 

I live a lowkey private life. Alone. Observing more than speaking. Thinking more than showing. I get rarely bored by solitude. A quiet room, a book, a long walk, my own thoughts. That’s all I need. What exhausts me is people. The small talk. The noise. The constant performing. The pressure to always be “on.” Too many conversations with no depth. Too many masks. So I disappear for a while. Just to breathe again. To hear my own thoughts. To feel my own emotions. To reconnect with myself beneath all the noise of the world. And honestly, it feels like therapy for the soul.

he seems to have his own book for sale

world premier May 24 Albuquerque

Gredos page 352  "the sound rent his heart, because it made him realize: Never shall I return to my home.  But if music from afar was heard here in the Pleasant Plantation, it 'hartened' one and strengthened one in one's resolve to stick it out in these foreign parts . . . 

earlier this morning Lei Liang (b. 1972) at Chatter with Mongolian Suite Number 2  commisioned by family of cellist Felix Fan   

also Mongolian Suite Number 1 (2022) and Gobi Canticle  (2005)

someone took our cane at Chatter!  we went straight to Walmart on the way home and also ordered another of our ergo model from a place in Salt Lake City--see if it gets here before we fly 

Lian and Peter Gilbert, music dept here at unm, were in grad school at Harvard.  Looked at Gilbert's Burned into Orange on YouTube.  

I am a character in Handke.  I dread going back East.  I want to go back and see it all again.  

end of chapter 25

 now that I've come to the end of chapter 25 I can say such things as --- Handke is the Herman Melville of walking through landscapes, the Sierra de Gredos is the Moby Dick of the Sierra de Gredos.  Not a good

example, though, because not at all the obsessive, destructive violence and the whale search.   I merely had in mind the great detail of flora and fauna.  At the end we learn of the tiny birds and of the inner sweetness of red rowan berries.  We had such a tree in our back yard in NH but I never though to try tasting the berries.  If I see such a tree somewhere this summer, I should try the berries.  

"after the initial off-putting bitterness, a taste that was more than mere "sweetness": an inwardness (did that exist, an "inward taste"?) all the more inward because the initial bitterness remained present in it."

(Was it appropriate for her, the heroine, to stand on tiptoe? Yes.) 

and before that the great passage on blue, blue sky like the blue of workmens' clothes hanging to dry 

great passages about walking walking walking    Makes me feel good because I can remember years of 

walking, if  not across the Sierra de Gredos, around Plymouth town