looking for different things

 I looked again at Nicholas's review of Ghost-Eye and of course he gives it a generous and sympathetic review, none of my snooty literary concerns or such.  Never warped by English major studies.  Instead he likes the large views Ghosh is taking and weaving together.  Tempted now to paste in John S's talk about Ghosh.  Why not ---  have to find his message too where I learned that his family on his dad's side emigrated to Cumberland from Bavaria, never knew that.  So his dad was first generation here, I think.  

Impressed, too, Bob.  Especially interested in Ghosh. I'm very high on The Hungry Tide, which I taught a few times, and liked the sequel, Gun Island. Eager to hear what you think of this new one.. NYT reviewer complained it tries to do too much. That could just mean it's experimental in ways the reviewer doesn't like.

Apart from reading around in poetry to find what I might want to teach in my onerous once-a-month senior citizen gig, my long book of the moment is Michael Pollan's book on consciousness, A World Appears. Actually, listening to it. He's a good reader as well as writer.

Next Wed. is a big day for us: I do my poetry-and-memory thing in the afternoon (poems attached) and--bigger deal--Kate gives a poetry reading at a local bookstore.  Off on our voyage to Pittsburgh after that, and looking forward to seeing you, Phil, & a few others on the way home, on Aug. 3.

Bob, why don't you helicopter in, too?

         Happy trails,

                John

well here he is after all

189 Carl Jung preferred to use the term synchronicity, and they ten to occur in clusters 

Sunday 12 July 

190  Swatch of No Ground  :  Handke's No-Man's Land  obsession  --- in Handke Geology carries depth psychology, inner explorations, in Ghosh Meteorology carries depth psychology, exploration into interconnections like precognition and past lives remembered    in both the areas of the earth "forgotten" about, no-man's areas are where things happen--- places where ordinary life structures are not featured,

places where all is smudged, blurred, multivalent, contingency, open, undefined, 

203  five minutes after above  "encircled by a smudged green line in the distance." 

Jhorna----her native knowledge of fish ---  to geology and meteorology we have of course ichthyology 

221  goddess not geology controls the land and pond structures   Manasa Devi bit Isha/Varsha to save her

so Dinu finds he also has been reincarnated from an earlier life and Vishna and he knew one another some how 

cringe-worthy writing at various times throughout the book.  skipped some of the later cooking passages, sped ahead a bit to get to the reveal.  Tiru or Tipuru--Tipu's talk especially irritating.  Can't help but wonder if Ghosh's proposal was fleshed out by a team of ghostwriters for the publisher, smells of committee work.  Here's where we will say soon, gee, AI could have done this so much better. 

oh well.  Can easily see why Nicholas reviewed it on his blog.  A fresh experience in novels to have the main character discover not just his true nature psychologically or in terms of sexuality or gender or ethnic identity but as a new reincarnation of earlier spiritual or cosmic life.  The eco and planet ccrisis material seemed really weak, with the "irruption" of ancient, local divine beings and public outcry a sort of fairy tale with which to fight the billionaires in their bunkers counter fantasy-fear. 

A hodge-podge brew.  Perfect for some books clubs.  etc  oh well  grist for readers of the paranormal 

Manasa Devi

goddess of snakes  156 in Ghost-Eye.  4:02 pm  Earlier today in scrolling on Insta I saw weird sculpture of Hercules fighting massive snakes, created by an earlier Danish artist--can I now find that if I search?  after I added Danish it showed up among host of images on google---

Created by the accomplished Danish sculptor Rudolph Tegner, with first edition started in 1919, in plaster.

Over a decade later the artist proposed that it be recrafted in bronze. Duly done, in 1932 it was unveiled not far from the train station. Due to improvement works around the ferries, it was relocated to the water’s edge in 1994.

Like many works of art, it wasn’t universally liked when unveiled. A lovely aside is that apparently it has received the sobriquet of The Little Person Fighting Tax Administration.

this by Permia on Trip Advisor

"I was cautious and risk-averse, while she was given to tempting fate--and it was perhaps for these reasons that I was just as intriguing to her as she was to me." 157  Dinu talking about his romance with Durga.  Would fit me and Bela, if instead of political rhetoric it would be dramatic flare.  And incautious travel (most dangerous road in the world in Bolivia in 1998, the road between La Paz and .  . . the name will not come up now.  Maybe later.  

the figures in the Manasa Devi stories are archetypes "who have lives of their own.  They are presences that literally arise out of the land and inscribe their stories upon the world."  Bingo--what Handke is about, has searched for all his life and works.  In his way.  Avoiding the pre-formed variants in the air at the time.  Language about archetypes from F & Jung et al.  

'No, no, Dinu!' she protested.  'Trust me: it's not we who choose the myths that guide our lives; it's they who choose us.  But once you've been chosen, beware, because they'll always be with you.'  161 Shoma to Dinu

came sooner  4:38  the road to Coroico  

His peculiar gift:

a magnetic needle blindly recording invisible storms.   Isabel Fargo Cole

Gurnah:  winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature!  so we guess Ghosh is soon . . . 

Friday the 10th

better part of the afternoon reading Amitav Ghosh's Ghost-Eye.  Missing Handke and Stifter, but this is something amazing.  Dozing too.  Intense headache in the morning.  Colin and Bela played the piano.  Now up to page 111 where Shoma and Husna are in the fish market preparing to fix fish to serve to Varsha. Laced into this story thread have been a number of other stories, cannot keep the family and frienship relationships clear, don't suppose you are supposed to, at least not in the Western realistic fiction way.  

Reserved wheelchair for trip.  Transport chair carry bag delivered today.  

Narrator living in Brooklyn is Dinu.  

prophecy

Handke's short early play as secular liturgical litany with non-surprise ending:  Every day will be like every other day.  Next in the volume Call for Help.  Finished Shapland's A Room Above a Shop.  Moments but.  

Call for Help gem of early Handke:  No.  Perfect for Burke's theory of the negative.  

Years and years of study of Jung, MBTI and Enneagram prepared him to embrace the explanation of Otroversion as the explanation of explanations, subsuming all others, clarifying more than any other, providing the lifelong arc of insight that had taken him through all eighty-two years.  No. 

oh my goodness.  4:16 pm delightful, restful visit to the dentist earlier, big lunch now, reading about the troubled life and strange writings of Adalbert Stifter, Amitav Ghosh mentioned in the Introduction and the newest novel by Ghosh just delivered to the doorstep.  Nicholas writes about the novel on his blog, that's why I ordered it.  Even though it is hardback.  The other hardback that arrived as well is the very most recent work by Peter Handke,  The Ballad of the Last Guest.  Who is Ghosh and will he be the writer to succeed Handke once I've finished Stifter, and? Reiser?  Isabel Fargo Cole posits Ghosh's essay The Great Derangement against Stifter and she brings in Ursula LeGuin saying the novel is a medicine bag or bundle, "holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us." Now who is Amitav Ghosh.  I've seen his name.  Ok, his birthday is in two days! born 11 July 1956)^[1] is an American^[2] writer. wiki and his stature is enormous.  No wonder I need to know about him as soon as possible.  And he passes Handke's test because his interests are not simply historical but geographical, concerning landscape: "It was not intentional, but sometimes things are intentional without being intentional. Though it was never part of a planned venture and did not begin as a conscious project, I realise in hindsight that this is really what always interested me most: the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the connections and the cross-connections between these regions.^[19] 

^{By reading Ghost-Eye I will be on the edge of tomorrow as well as of today. Looking at the table right now I seem to be back into reading five or six books at a time rather than one book at a time.}  

lightbound

 part 2 of My Day in the Other Land

152  Lightbound all around and in the interstices of my soul.  

eyes  "selflessly empathetic, friendly   My heart stood still, and resumed beating a moment later, stronger than ever."   the Good Observer   a form of looking and listening   yawning as only newborns yawn

155  "No one had ever called me his friend that way. "  "and eventually he became my sweetheart" -sister

157 "yonder shore (you read that right, 'yonder')"  "flickering and fluttering on the keyboard of the waves"

5:16 pm finished My Day in the Other Land: A Tale of Demons    was he imagining his own death?  what death might be like if he had been the teller of it as a tale, a gathering of tales?  gentle and lovely story at the lake of being called away from being possessed by demons by a friend, The Observer

reviewers didn't know what to say ----

from Library Journal  

FICTION

The Second Sword: Two Novellas

by Peter Handke

Farrar. Feb. 2024. 192p. tr. from German by Krishna Winston. ISBN 9780374601447. $27. F

COPY ISBN

Nobel Prize winner Handke (The Fruit Thief) offers two novellas here. In the first, the narrator arrives home after several weeks of travel but leaves shortly after to avenge an insult made to his mother years earlier. What follows is a meandering and idiosyncratic daylong journey through the outskirts of Paris. The narrator encounters neighbors, shares bottles of wine with strangers, and engages children in staring matches, all the while becoming more and more intent on vengeance. In the second novella the narrator, a fruit farmer, has a psychotic breakdown, abandons his farm, and lives in a tent in a cemetery outside of town. His sister keeps an eye on him, and the townspeople view him with equanimity. When he recovers, he travels to a war-torn land across the lake. Mythological and religious imagery abound. Both stories are presented as interior monologues and have a hallucinogenic quality. The unpleasant personalities of the narrators may require persistence on the part of readers. Handke describes grim times but still manages to end on an encouraging note. 

VERDICT The most recent work by a writer who’s celebrated, influential, and controversial in Europe.

Reviewed by Jacqueline Snider , Dec 01, 2023

and in Kirkus Reviews  Dec 15, 2023  this does clarify a few details I didn't get or forgot about 

Whereas in his nonfiction Handke can be polemical and strident, in his fiction he is rather more subtle—at least to a point. This brace of novellas is no exception. In the first, he opens with a never quite fully defined man who addresses himself in the mirror, saying, “So this is the face of an avenger!” He’s not a superhero, but instead a man who roams the streets of his adopted Paris in search of a journalist who’s landed a roundabout insult upon him by suggesting that his mother once rejoiced at the Anschluss by which Nazi Germany absorbed Austria into the Reich, “which made her a supporter, a Party member.” Not so subtle among the narrator’s wanderings are the encouragements he receives from an Arab shopkeeper: “‘Kill! With a sword. Mah al-saif. Off with his head!’ He didn’t ask for details; in his eyes, insulting a mother deserved nothing less than death.” One wonders, too, at Handke’s characterization of an African cook: “Back to Africa? Didn’t they need magicians there who practiced a different kind of juju, magicians like him?” Questionable racial asides notwithstanding, Handke’s protagonist is all talk and no action: The metaphorical sword he carries is one that merely carves the offender from memory. In the second novella, as if a German-language rejoinder to Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, an orchard keeper endures a period of madness profound enough to scare the neighbors: “…now and then there was something distinctly odd, uncanny, even sinister about me.” After pondering his demons at considerable length, he makes his way across a lake that divides his country from the next, only to find it apparently devoid of people—a commentary, one might suppose, on the recent pandemic. Improbably, in the ruins, he finds something approaching happiness, even if he still terrifies even his own children.

Enigmatic and sometimes troubling, and so trademark Handke.

----not very favorable considerations, but then they've got the official narrative on Handke so they don't need anything else  

---dissertation idea---the works writers do when they know their lives are almost over   

157 what Goethe called oceanic stillness   ancient Greek word for calm, tranquillity "galênê"

those reviews so worthless

after reading all of his novels I can see his motifs and obsessions limned in these novellas more faintly, more gently, softened with age and silence, if not masterpieces then perfect stones washed in rains and streams and rivers in a lifetime of contemplation and wonder 

Sat the 4th

 Handke uses a great ancient line as epigraph for My Day in the Other Land:  "

"I, the idiot [Gk for private person], setting sail on my own course for the common good.

        ---Pindar, Olympian, XIII, line 49 

life by a thousand epiphanies 

My Day in the Other Land 

143  public space as a sort of fountain of youth 

transformation by a thousand gentle moments / gentle acts / reassurances

145  my oracular pronouncements    the idiot with the gentle gaze  community-enhancing demonic jolts 

to trail a stranger

 I love the fact that Handke has said more than once how he enjoys trailing a stranger.  Here he describes it in The Second Sword, 84.  "Over the years it had become a kind of sport for me to trail a stranger, out of more than mere curiosity, on a hunch, and also--the decisive factor?--a sense of duty, from Métro line to Métro line, on metropolitan buses to the outskirts and then on the regional bus, and each of those sorties had afforded me richly satisfying hours or half-days, free of interactions or confrontations, and had stayed with me as a source of stories, always ready to be explored anew, far more than a mere pastime."  

the family

Finished Wallace's Broom.  Kaminski:  you don't suppose he would choose the books as the family story, do you?  Mother: Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own; Father: Sartre's Nausea; Child: Wallace's Broom.   Well, who knows?  Should I read Sartre at last?  Have never read anything by him.  Do I want to browse into Nausea or do I know enough "about" it already?  

starting again into Handke's The Second Sword   avenging  rhythm  place-pleasure 

28 My desire, if I have one at all:  to become aware of something by chance, yet, as described above, incorporate it fully into my imagination, once and for all, and then, under the spell of its image, drift off into a waking dream, awake to a degree unmatched by any other kind of wakefulness. 

glow, glimmer, gleam, even gray! differently  

29 "Could it be Eternal Recurrence?"  --- "No! What I saw, as a term and a thing, was the continuation." --"Eternal?" --- "No, just the continuation.  Onward to the continuation."

30  And I was filled with nameless delight in my current inactivity, and in the prospect of remaining inactive and letting things take their course, and on and on, et cetera and so forth.  

30 June  evening

great visit with Kim today, up from Newburyport and siblings, Olen in CO overseeing the kitchen renov.

How much I am enjoying every line of Handke---

47 And finally I, who usually couldn't bring myself to eat so much as a bite from early in the day until late morning or even early afternoon, actually felt hungry, and under the linden out in the yard consumed an apple, with intense enjoyment, an Ontario, as well as a piece of toasted pain festif from the local bakery, with each smack of my lips (that was how tasty this breakfast was) throwing my head back to gaze into the sky, as if I were enjoying the food of the gods.  I ate the apple as you sometimes eat pears, core and all.