such a caress

 and finally the morning star alone moved through his innermost being with the slowness of the universe and penetrated it.  Such a caress the singer had never experienced before.  My Year  203

yesterday Matei Varga playing Chopin and Brahms  at Chatter 

hardback copy of My Year arrived.  Glad I bought it.  Yes, larger print, easier on the eyes but more than that the gone world of book culture it conveys.  Printed in 1998 (our S American year), Farrar, Straus, Giroux.  Great blurbs from German literary sources.  The old world.  Aeons from the guidance we get daily on X.  Remember when I wrote to the PSC library begging them to continue putting plastic covers on new books with the dust jackets because the jackets themselves conveyed so much to the reader both in information, context and cultural pleasure.  

year ago

 Wonder how close it might actually be?  Bright sunny day off Saturday.  I walk a bit near Piedras Marcads canyon without quite realizing it.  Lunch at Thai Boran while I read the new Andre Aciman book, from FF in UK, hardback $, "Stowaway."  It is a short story between boards.  Novella?  not quite enough?  Is he creating a box of chocolates, a cache of jewels, a tray of jellied sweets.  Each of his recent stories could be the basis of a screenplay.  He knows his audience so well, a savy, knowing YA fairy tale for the sentimental 60-70 year olds.  He comes up with quotable lines and easy to admire turns of phrase and thought.  Stowaway it turns out is code of sorts for closeted bi/gay married man who commits suicide never having realized his loves or his life.  The two figures who chat over coffee for a morning frame the fable, one the older woman, the other the clueless sort of handsome young lawyer the wonderful Paul was secretly in love with.  If I let myself criticize too much, it is pretty cloying.  Paul the great writer of brilliant journals, now available for discovery.  

After lunch I went back out Piedra Marcada canyon and walked to the first view.  I thought I was racking up footsteps but not nearly as many as I'd thought.  Still it was fun to see the basalt boulders and the glyphs and markings.  I wonder if Handke visited here?  He would have loved the whole landscape and written about it brilliantly.  

Aciman writes well about the nuances of feelings in relationships.  And yet now I would look backward into his work and claim that Harvard Square is his best novel, better even than Call Me ByYour Name, because in that one he has sold out or honed his product into a perfect glovetail with the market hand.  His memoir about the year in Rome is much more important.  Or at least substantial.  

Lobo Antunes

António Lobo Antunes died today at 83.  Born 1942. 

Caved and ordered new edition, 30 years, of Gass's The Tunnel.  He was born in 1924.  

sinus headache killing me this morning, felt like a new cold last night but that feeling as diminished

allergies?  

"This is one I I will never put in quotation marks.  157  End of chapter 1 Book Two in Handke.  He has survived his one day of madness in the suburb.  Still like him so much, speaks to me in so many ways. I guess I will give Gass a look but I remain skeptical about his big book.  As much as I did enjoy many books by Antunes, never as much as Handke's.  

We await Adriana's visit at 1 pm to see if she will be the one to take Va to swim once a week.  

Found I still have a medical appointment on March 25, so I will now keep that, get a new doctor here. 

Like learning about the petty prophet of Pontefontaine and all else in Bay.  His voice, his explorations of interior states, his personas for himself.  Personal  

First of all a new title for my book thrust itself upon me.  From "Prehistoric Forms" it was renamed "The Chimerical World."  167   of the Orinoco in the mountainous region of Guyana where my story continued to spin its spirals.  168   chimera  spirals  the writer storyteller at war with himself, expansive, free, contracted, anxious, obsessive,  he has used often before "felt balls of air swelling in my armpits."  the highest calling to be a storyteller 

Adrianna texted, not feeling well.   

groundlessly

 H   I even kept my forays, pushed further every day, a secret from my family, as if they were a vice, something pointless, at the very least selfish, unworthy of an adult responsible for himself and his kin. . . . If at home I was asked where I had been so long, I would lie, saying, for instance, that I had gone to a movie on the Right Bank, . . . . unnecessarily and inexplicably, as I have often lied in my life, groundlessly, without enjoyment, simply because of being asked and having to open my mouth.  124

for instance the Eiffel Tower, which, discovered outside the city, suddenly appeared as astonishing as it probably is.  126

Was that possible, for a person to be crazy about or infatuated with a place to live, . . . 127

at first that I liked the place only because, as usual, I wanted the opposite of everyone else;  I felt comfortable only in the role of the loner, the solitary understood by no one, wronged time and again . . . .

the falling out (Handke again 102)

I see its origin in myself.  Even when we were of one mind, I had an ulterior thought: to be alone and on my own again.  Back in my family period I was already leading a double life.  In hours of harmony I was still on the lookout for something else---the wind in the leaves over there, the quivering rain puddle far off in the light of the night---and considered my being with the others a mere episode, thought it might last for decades; afterward I would be able to go my way as never before.  . . . inside me something was turning in a different direction, away from closeness, away from fulfillment, away from the present.  That counterdirection within me often became so powerful . . . that I could not stand being . . . in harmony. 102

three windows

 called Dennis to be sure of his phone number.  His place is larger than the western one and has six windows, pairs, facing three directions out into the courtyard.  East, west and north.  Asked him to send some photos.  

Sunday.  Strange chatter, flutist and singer.  Her father from Iran (as the US bombs Iran this weekend).  Mother from here.  Amazing voice, very strange new piece, young composers.  We went to Thai Boran for lunch then drove around the Delyne streets with the views of the crest.

Handke One set of passages about his reader.  "I went so far as to copy out sentences from his letters: 'I exist in order to read.'" "I saw the reader on his way to founding a sect, a sect of readers.  And thus he claimed for himself and his followers exclusivity, infallibility, singularity vis-à-vis the mere crowd."

exactly how social media works!!!  this he wrote in 1992--?     

Social media began with early networking sites in the 

mid-to-late 1990s, with SixDegrees.com (1997) widely considered the first, allowing profiles and friend lists. It gained mainstream traction in the early 2000s with platforms like Friendster (2002), LinkedIn (2003), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

few pages before he had noted that his Japanese architect friend lives almost exclusively on rice and fruit

"I have no choice but to use an undifferentiated  'I' as the subject of my active and passive experiences, no matter how fale it rings to me."

"Onward. Through." 83

Now---to send these pens, fountain pens, to Kirsten or not?  They sit here and I do not take them up, clean them, use them.  She write beautifully with a fountain pen.  She would care for them.  Or keep them and pass them on eventually to other real pen appreciators.  Or would she?  Does it really matter to me or not?

Without reading, he said, he could not see the day in a day.  The work that suited him was, and remained, reading and deciphering things.  And wasn't writing an invention that to this day held a secret power?  78

  

Friday 27th

"Meanwhile it is almost March here in the bay, and finally snow has come, too.  

as I get older, I like waiting 

this phenomenon that had once leaped out at me, a chimerical world 

the image of another person who had once been close to me

this man had been a reader for years 

he enjoyed life every day, especially the parts without deep significance

with his immortality on the horizon 

Whom have I ever needed? 

and instead I took refuge in my writing 

learned from me to go walking 

Yet I was not leading a double life, but rather a two-fold one, each part in harmony with the other

Since I was someone to whom people confessed things, I knew the most secret lives of many 

he seized me around the midsection, hoisted me in the air 

but he was not my angel, not then, not since

always taken refuge in such sheltering images 

No, for now I am not going home 

a labyrinth with no way out 

dreaming in times in almost unmutilated forms 

a readiness for fallings-out 

a bright surge of feelings 

so

 repetition it is.  swirling around in the Handke rabbit hole like ten years reading "every word" Kenneth Burke published and assuming naively thereby that we can figure out what happened and what to say about some or all of it or a tiny portion of it  

why not watch Kings of the Road instead 

watched off and on about half, maybe rest this afternoon, now Thursday

love this line in No-Man's   ​"The faces of strangers, the most reliable source of pleasure."   ---Handke  21 

As soon as the new Aciman novel arrives I will read it as a break, but otherwise the Handke immersion tsunamis onward 

somewhat resemble an ancient tribe on the only remaining reservation  32  

Observation, absorption, abstraction: my daily bread.  34

to drift away from the person I was with . . . to disappear into myself to the point of no longer being present 

shimmering  . . . glimmering  . . . shifting  in one long passage on p 35

noticing favorite words, words repeated, phrases repeated, the reader becomes more and more famiiiar with the writer's pet themes, habits, obsessions, patterns, the comfortable furnishings of his sensibility, the pointers his consciousness uses over and over to keep secure while exploring onward ----  is it friendship or something like it? is it stalking?  is it imprisonment?  is it expansive resonance, embracing emotion, outflowing willingness, openness