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 

Spring 2021 volume of Journal of Austrian Studies U Nebraska press

 In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Perhaps no other German-language author has received as much public attention over the past year as Peter Handke. The bestowal of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature upon Handke unleashed a storm of controversy related to his writings and comments on the Yugoslavian Wars of the 1990s, making Handke—who in the meantime continues to write at his usual frenetic pace, producing a short novel (Das zweite Schwert) and a play (Zdeněk Adamec) in the brief time since the award—a living symbol of the still-simmering tensions in the Balkans and an object lesson in the debates over the relationship between literary or aesthetic value and political judgment. While these debates are essential to any overall assessment of Handke's work, they have perhaps made more difficult a literary evaluation of his achievements as a writer.

The volume under consideration, which appeared shortly before the Nobel Award and its accompanying flareup, attempts just such an evaluation by examining Handke not simply as a writer but also as a reader. Thorsten Carstensen has assembled nineteen essays, including contributions by recognized Handke scholars, on "Handke als Leser." They take up a variety of themes under this heading: the role of reading and of readers within Handke's oeuvre; his reception of other authors, from canonical figures such as Goethe and Stifter to less celebrated writers, as well as work in other media; the place of reading in his understanding of the task of the author and the role of literature; the ways in which reading and writing are mutually constitutive acts that also help constitute readers and writers; and reading as a vehicle for experiencing place and creating new forms of ethical community. Collected under four general headings ("Lesestrategien," "Anrufung der Autoritäten," "Variierende Wiederholungen," and—the loosest of the four groupings—"Das Buch der Welt"), the essays are preceded by Carstensen's own outstanding introduction, a small tour de force in its own right, which in a mere twenty-five pages or so manages to touch on all the themes mentioned [End Page 154] above while drawing on an impressive portion of Handke's massive body of work.

The volume as a whole is very nicely done. While every reader will have his or her favorite essays, there is not a single contribution that I would single out as poor. Some highlights for this reviewer were the contributions by Peter Strasser, who sets Handke's work in a broad philosophical context as a confrontation with problems of modernity, expressing admiration for Handke's ability to help us see the world with gratitude but also closing, in one of the volume's few critical notes, with a refusal to follow his critique to its full conclusion; Birthe Hoffmann's superb examination of Handke's relation to Grillparzer, focusing especially on the former's productive engagement with Der arme Spielmann; Chiheb Mehtelli's exploration of the similarities and differences between Handke's experience of the world and the Islamic mysticism of Ibn 'Arabī, certainly not a figure with whom I had been familiar; Anna Montané Forasté's delightful tour of Handke's literary engagement with Spain and his reception, in turn, by various contemporary Spanish thinkers and writers, also unfamiliar territory for me; Christoph Parry's thoughtful analysis of the role of landscapes in Handke's work, culminating in some cautious but insightful suggestions about the relationship between Handke's Landschaft spoetik and his problematic writings on Yugoslavia; and, finally, Carstensen's own comparison of the surprisingly similar efforts of Handke and the westschweizer poet Philippe Jaccottet to find a language that can "do the world justice" ("Das Schreiben verstehen Handke und Jaccottet [ … ] als emphatische Suche nach einer 'gerechten' Versprachlichung des Gesehenen," 332). It is hard to imagine a reader who will not find at least a few essays in this volume useful prompts to further thought and to further reading.

"Handke als Leser" might at first glance seem a narrow focus for a collection of essays covering nearly four hundred pages. Not so, however. Indeed, one of the volume's most valuable qualities—perhaps precisely because reading and writing play such central roles in Handke's work—is that...

Strasser on H

 Based on scholarly analysis, Peter Strasser’s view that Peter Handke’s aesthetic provocations act as a mask for "latent conservatism" is a recognized interpretation, particularly in discussions of Handke's shift from avant-garde to more traditional narratives. However, this view is not universally supported, as critics are deeply divided, with some focusing on his linguistic innovation while others focus on his politics

Peter Strasser’s book on Peter Handke, 

"Der Freudenstoff: Zu Handke eine Philosophie"(Material of Joy: A Philosophy on Handke), explores the Austrian writer's work through the lens of joy and aesthetic experience. 

Here are the key points regarding the book:

• The Theme of Joy: Contrary to readings that focus solely on the alienation or melancholy in Handke's work, Strasser argues that Handke's prose is deeply infused with a sense of joy, which he terms Freudenstoff.
• A "Love Letter" to the Work: Strasser approaches the subject with profound admiration, declaring in his introduction that he "fell in love" with Handke’s work twice—first through a naive fascination and later with a more mature, alert understanding.
• Critical Objectivity: Despite his admiration, Strasser argues that this intense engagement with the work actually allows for "critical objectivity" rather than blind adoration.
• Context: The book is a philosophical examination of Handke's literary output, aimed at understanding the emotional and philosophical substance of his writing. 

Does this overview help you understand the focus of Peter Strasser’s analysis? I can look for specific examples of "joy" mentioned in the book if that would be useful.

• The "Success in Failure" Thesis: Strasser argues that Handke's characters and narratives often fail to mask a darker, chaotic reality (a "hell") within the "paradise" or utopian, joyful vision they are trying to create, suggesting the work is deeply ambivalent.
• Contextualized Appreciation: Strasser is cited for placing Handke's work within a broad philosophical context, exploring his ability to help readers see the world with gratitude (a form of "joy").
• A "Critical Note": Among reviewers, Strasser is noted for including one of the few critical notes in scholarly volumes regarding Handke, specifically by refusing to follow Handke’s critique to its full, potentially extreme, conclusion. 

While Strasser’s perspective is considered "very interesting" (fort interessante) in, for instance, French academic analysis of Handke's critics, it exists alongside many other interpretations of Handke's complex, often contradictory, thematic focus on joy, alienation, and language.

-------

Margaret Franklin  in the New Yorker  March 14, 2022    He got the Nobel Prize Dec 10, 2019

(I was amazed that she wrote in the margin after getting three-fourths of the way into the essay---and that she would admit to That --- surely she would have caught on way before that ----)

At this point—around three-quarters of the way through this nearly hundred-page essay—I wrote in the margin, “I’m starting to wonder whether this is really about mushrooms.” I was beginning to see echoes of Handke’s obsession with Serbia. The mushroom hunter is a lawyer whose work exonerates war criminals, and the account ends with something like an acknowledgment of error: “Mushroom seeking, and seeking of any kind, caused one’s field of vision to shrink. . . . And how one’s eyes weighed down one’s head when they remained fixed on the ground, and became dulled.”

But Handke has shown no remorse for his own error, no recognition that his single-minded line of inquiry might have shrunk his perspective. He continues to assert that he has done nothing wrong, that the questions he has asked—about the motivations for the Srebrenica massacre, which he considers unexplained; about the bias he perceives among Western journalists who reported Serb aggression and Bosnian suffering—serve the goal of “justice.” His defenders have argued that, since he writes “dialectically,” it is easy for individual sentences, taken out of context, to be misunderstood. When I began reading “A Journey to the Rivers,” I was prepared to believe that Handke had been misinterpreted, but the book was even more maddening than I could have imagined. Handke states outright that he rarely asks questions of people he encounters, relying instead on his imagination and assumptions.

Some erstwhile Handke admirers have tried to explain his obsession with Serbia as driven by dismay over the breakup of the “great Yugoslavia” that his mother’s stories had primed him to cherish. “After 1991, Handke needed a new myth, and he discovered it in Serbia,” J. S. Marcus wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2000. Handke prefers to identify with the underdog, as he perceived Serbia to be in the face of the West. And he has said that when Slovenia declared independence it was “as if I had lost my home, which became a state, where there was really only a people and a landscape.”

In a way, however, “A Journey to the Rivers” is no more maddening than Handke’s fiction, which relies on a similar dialectic of push and pull, denying resolution or reality for a world that appears to be willed into being through language. And as such it forms a logical, if regrettable, end point for Handke’s ideas. As Eugenides has pointed out, American postmodernism, as practiced by writers such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover, was political in nature: these writers’ distrust of narrative omniscience was linked to their distrust of the U.S. government. By contrast, Handke’s fiction, though similar in appearance—the circling and recircling style, the rejection of literary conventions—was always centered on language rather than on politics. “The American postmodernists gave up on traditional storytelling out of an essentially playful, optimistic, revolutionary urge,” Eugenides writes. “Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer despair.”

In Handke’s literary universe, only the self can be the final arbiter of meaning. The eye gazes from the window and records what it sees, while acknowledging that another observer might see something different. When some music plays in “The Fruit Thief,” we are told, “It did not really matter what music it was. Everyone who reads this is welcome to imagine any music that seems to fit.” But the idea that the facts of a situation can be whatever we say they are sounds different now from the way it may have thirty or forty years ago. Some realities—the mass graves at Srebrenica, or, more recently, the outcome of an election legally conducted—cannot be treated “dialectically.” Another line from Wittgenstein comes to mind, one often invoked to express the dangers of trying to describe the enormity of the Holocaust: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” ♦

so if we Strasserize Eugenides . . . "Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer joy."  Trying too hard, too much ??  Without knowing more AI seems to say Strasser somehow didn't stay long with his joy readings?