here's a good reminder that Handke, thank heavens, is not concerned with the artist and society --
"No theme unites these texts more than an idea Mann returned to again and again: What is the relationship between the artist and society?" Morten Høi Jensen on Thomas Mann’s writing for The Yale Review.
the bus driver faints and the woman adventurer takes over driving the bus down the southern slope of the mountain
such slow loving detail, Handke must have trekked this more than once himself
"I have made my way through all these parts of the world where I was consistently filled with ecstatic feelings---no, not with illusory ecstasy but rather with a state of love, yes, of love, and of which I have only fond memories afterward. " 224
Puerto del Pico caught once in blinding wet snow Escorial to the east, Plaza of Salamanca to the west
she laughs and says to her listener and her author, "I am the one you commissioned." "The idiot at the wheel, laughed and did not stop laughing . . . " 229
Pablo was here for a piano session. He lives with his blind teen aged son and his twenty-five year old daughter. He flies to Mexico tomorrow for a week to see his 92 year old mother, Mercedes. His first university classes were in a small arts school attached to the museum of anthropology and that neighborhood was his initial university campus. Later he got injected in the butt with Marxism by the Jesuits at the large university. Maybe not the Jesuits, they are in the story somehow but exactly where we are not sure. He will be back on the 28th.
went to Optum to draw the blood but they could not send results outside of optum so we drove in the afternoon to Quest on Golf Course aka the other street name. Got the blood drawn. Later looked up TriCore and they have a place right here on Atrisco. So . . . next visit we'll see if using TriCore will work for both or all labs, will they hold hands with Optum and vice versa?
Not much work on Handke today, but did squiggle to the end of Chapter 15 and now ready to start 16
praised fellow on X for saying he is reading Handke, Modiano and Patrick White for the rest of the year. Should I try White once more. I did like Chariot but somehow not enough to say I must read every word. Big essay by Merve _ on Magic Mountain in new ten-year old translation. Again, do I really want to give that another try? Or glance at The Tunnel after all? Bela in last tv episode of The House of the Spirits. Glimpses I've had make me not at all interested; as she says Latin American history not much fun.
She's worried not to be planning her birthday party for herself. Lou's plans are set for Tuesday evening dinner party. Bela wants to host Beckie and her husband at Cuates so we can hear mariachi with them.
Her eye is clearing up well. What has caused it? Will the doctor at Eye Associates really be able to tell from the blood tests?
19 ! days until we fly East! how will it feel to go back much earlier this year?
Tues 12 Got an appointment for early this afternoon to have second look. Telephone number for the place in Rio Rancho is for a Chinese name, Charles Chiang. Put my finger on it at last, same name as the cowboy boots doctor we saw for cataract consult few years back. "If it were my mother, this is what I would advise." He must own a number of practices around town, website for this one has about eight people, none of them him.
Charged $860. by Defined Fitness. Twice $430. Looking into that. Canceling Pablo today, Jen tomorrow.
NM for winter sunshine. NH for health care. Dennis sent a blurb in response to my forwarding USA Today piece, Philly #1 for art murals, Abq #3. "There are murals everywhere. There's a school a few blocks away that I think gears itself for Muslims (Based on the activities listed on its events sign) that has wonderful mandalas and some twisting thing that has arms with golden lady bugs (my interpretation) crawling on it. The performing arts school has the front covered in scale like images in white shaded with purples, subtle blues and mauves. Just stunning. Very Japanese. There are some pretty bad ones too but most of them are fun."
Will we cross the Sierra de Gredos? Will Godot show?
Maria did and we talked about where to plant the hollyhocks, the Spanish broom, a few daffodils and the desert prickly pear that Bela wants. Her boy is 11, daughter 9.
Eye doctor seems to think not pink eye but some other sort of inflammation. Prescribed steroid drops and they are working rapidly. Now 7:40 pm
Handke says, have I read Berhard, well, yes, of course I have and here's my response to him and tons of others, I'm calling it Crossing the Sierra de Gredos!! Starting into Chapter 14. In 13 the Lone Star Cafe glass tent and Nuevo Bazar and much else.
In 14 we open in a hostel with a courtyard surrounded by sleeping chambers. The mother protects her daughter. The adolescent girl vanishes one day any way. Mother undertakes a long search, finds her on an island in the south Atlantic. Much happiness but later sychronicity reverses and the child longs for rescue by the mother and later disappears again.
Chatter this past Sunday had Robert Schumann's 1853 piece Fairy Tales Märchenerzählungen and
a contemporary re-working (somehow?) of this notion by Jörg Widmann (b. 1973) Es war einmal 2015
Once Upon a Time. Ahh, I thought through the whole concert Handke!! and Fairy Tales and Folk Tales. Even the Spoken Word by Ken Arkind chimed into all of it---a great piece about his father. Arkind back after teaching schools in New Zealand for ten or fifteen years.
so storytelling on and on no wonder Lentz allowed Handke to inspire him to write his Schattenfroh
in the one film in which she had starred the character portrayed under heavy white linen sheets had "imperceptibly dissolved into the white of the bed linens." Notice how when I underline one or two lines and type them up here I am ruining the whole page, the chapter, the book but assuming I can outline it, condense it, select "key" elements that unlock it, provide the pre-analysis that will support a later comprehensive analysis and even a critique. In other words I withdraw from the experience of reading, detach from it, and try to create for myself alone, a space from which I can look back onto it, into it, from this removed position as observer of the reader, of the reading. Reading is too absorptive, I fear being subsumed into the reading, sucked into reading, and lost forever in reading the book. The book will claim me and I will never be able to notice every detail with sufficient attention and certainly never be able to remember enough of it to really experience it to the full, once and forever. No matter what I can do, a second or third reading will always be possible, even more desirable than the first reading, no matter how slowly I go, no matter how many notes and underlinings I make and take.
Larry sent this about Merton and Lax. Does it mean that Merton took thirty or forty years to realize who he really was? Was he also an otrovert like Lax? Or was his mimicry of Lax, if Larry is right, something else within his psyche?
our heroine will be in constant argument with the famous author she wants to write her story and that will make the book long and dense or in great danger of being tedious or at least as formidable as an everest trek, or a passage across the sierra de gredos. Is Handke sort of saying ok Derrida et al you want the logos deconstructed, the narrative no longer to follow the ancient and newly endorsed forms, let's go, let's do that, follow me. First we will walk backwards to the airport to see if we can even get the journey started.
Porous And at the same time they were porous . . . in the direction of both day and night between awake and the clarity of a dream
didn't rhythm have to be the main seasoning for a chef? 98
was something he could do only completely alone and unobserved. 99 says the chef and of course, we think, the writer,
now into chapter 9 What was he thinking as he wrote this book? Write a book crazier than any other book that has ever been published? Have the thinnest possible narrative thread or "thread"? and with that then invent as many topics to string along it as you can and word them as wildly as you can, as dream-like, as anti-novel as possible, as richly weird as you want (but no cheap horrors or sex tricks or lazy stealings).
111 she strikes him in the throat bit like the child on the plane hitting the woman in the throat
glowing, shimmering, shining a sphere, a dome discovery as a way of keeping possibilities open 112
