Monday August 3

Long talk with David this morning.  They are having trouble.  Each has been seeing a psychologist and together they are seeing one for marriage counseling.  Later Bela said she was not surprised; I said the same.  We could both tell something was amiss at least a year ago.  More, most likely.  David said the counselor gave them instructions on how to tell the kids something and listen to what they have to say.  They are trying to figure out when would be the best time to have that talk.  Bela said she didn't know why she felt guilty and wondered what we could do.  I seem to feel the same way.  Both of us sad.  Annie died only two years ago.  I emphasized how much of a shock that was for Cécile, how it takes five years.  Where did I hear that phrase?  

Heavy day atmospherically too.  Heavy gray skies, some rain, drizzle.  I went to have my blood test draw at 2.  Bought some milk on the way home.  Left over pizza from last night for lunch.  

Petie wrote early this morning, Ray now in hospital for liver trouble.  On the right medicine, going to a rehab place to get stronger again.

Wanting to get into Motley Stones and have it work.  Dick sent an essay from nyt by christopher nolan about the new odyssesy movie.  I'm glad I read it (gift article--it opened); clear insight and some hope about the chaos we are living through.  No---Christopher Nolan is the film director.  Times review written by Ezra Klein.  Dick has mentioned him before; highly regarded, big following.  Political blogger, author of great deal, including essay "The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting", as reflective of his approach in scrutinizing existing policies that run contrary to the goals of countering scarcity.  He is vegan. Vegan!!!!  

Sunday August 2

 Happy Birthday, Phil!   Really second your idea of joinging the UU's (as we call them here).  You will have a fine community to hang with,

find some chatter on a weekly basis, will give you that wee bit of contact each week that will help you moving forward into the continuum.

Our next door neighbor asked me to join the church here, Unitarians.  No one has ever asked that before.  He is about 87, one of about seven

or eight siblings all raised in Hyde Park, Chicago, at the Univ of Chicago Lab School, child of very famous (in the day) UChicago church historian

named Richard Grant.  A number of friends here go to this UU church.  One core element of the Democratic party in the state.  And Independents.

Maybe even some Libertarians?  

We went this morning to a heavily Irish-flavored wake for a friend who died last week.  Felt like a reunion of everyone we had known at the college.

Nice to see people, say hello, see how old we all now look, glad to be alive and waving greetings.  

Thanks for your nice  birthday wish for me, John,   I celebrated in a very unusual way for me.   On the advice of Peg’s brother, I attended a Sunday  service at a local Unitarian church.   I was impressed with the people and, despite being totally secular, may join the church just so I have some connection to local people.  Since Peg died, I have had almost no connection to local people…

Great to hear, Phil.  We've thought of doing the same but haven't yet come 'round. I hope you find it a congenial community.

Avanti!

let's see:  Annette and David, Dave Kent, Ken, George, Darlene, Pattie, George, Betty Jo, whose grandson, Liam Taffe a bright actor at USC, (Danny's son); Alma and Gloria, Gene.  We left after the speeches.  Took home some brownies.  Many other faces.  Barb's older sister recalled their high school days just like the movie.  Her dad bought them a white pontiac convertible, they drove endlessly around Geneva, NY. 

Our kids due any minute after a night at Mick's.  

Pacifico's short history of contemporary Italian literati politics very enjoyable.  He does not mention Handke, of course, but many Americans.  DeLillo and Pynchon and DFW hooray.  His explanation of Umberto Eco's success is delightful.  

17 "Every object is given weird personal significance, and the mystical power of insignificance is celebrated with unblinking candor."   "Moresco taps into something psychologically deep: the making of language as you go along discovering what life is and what it is trying to tell you. "

Maybe then this is when I should read Gary Lachman's newest Post.  "From Mythic to the Mental:  

"This was Thales, considered one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece. With him the tradition of ‘rational inquiry’ that we associate with the West began. Rather than accept the traditional mythological accounts of how the world came into existence, the stories of why the gods made it one way rather than another, Thales asked a simple question: what is the world made of? What is the basic ‘stuff’ out of which everything else is made? As far as we know, no one before him asked this.

yet this earlier, more intuitive way of understanding remained and is with us still, occupying a kind of shadow realm on the fringes of rational consciousness. It is what we call “the imagination.” Yet this is not imagination as we usually understand it, having to do with “make believe.” This imagination “makes real.”

The other way is slightly fuzzy, imprecise, and unrepeatable – at least on demand – but it penetrates deeper into the world, and reveals elements of it that the method of quantification cannot. These are the meanings that come through in poetry, music, art and other forms of the imagination we acknowledge as something more than “make believe”. These are the “tacit”, “implicit” meanings that the philosopher Michael Polanyi said cannot be expressed “explicitly,” in the way that mathematical “meaning” can, but which are nevertheless felt. This is why the philosopher Wittgenstein said that the truly meaningful things in the world cannot be said, but only shown. The explicit knowledge that enables our probes to reach into the unthinkable depths of space can tell us nothing about the awe we feel looking at a starry sky. But a poem or passage of music can give us some idea and even evoke a similar awe within us.

in my book Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, I look at how different individuals throughout western history have recognised the need for bread and for that elusive something else that all the precision in the world cannot provide. Since the rise of the reign of quantity, this elusive something else has increasingly been seen to be a mirage, and the appetite for the “vague” an unfortunate hangover from less rational times. And our means of embracing it, the “imagination,” has been reduced to the daydreams of romantics not able to face facts. This outlook may seem  disheartening but it need not be so. Whatever pushed the mind out of its mythological mode and into our rational one, may be at work today, preparing us for its next shift. There’s no reason to believe it can’t be one in which the two permanent needs of our nature enjoy an equal say.

gary-lachman.com

Pacifico ends by invoking "Seinfeld" Moresco is the Cosmo Kramer of contemporary literature. Doesn't work for me, alas. But if Pacifico thinks it makes him cool with American readers, what can we do?

Dave and kids just arrived. Pacifico spent pages talking about Moresco's love of the word "shucked." just now dave talked about how he and Mick shucked oysters for the big dinner they had. And they Did! go see Phish!

saturday evening

 5:58 pm  "snakes writhe on the rolled out carpet and in the fruit crate."   Last line of Quitt.  "They Are Dying Out."  Perfect portrait of Twump.  Published in 1973, performed in Zurich in 1974. 

Have now completed my Handke project, so far as I know.  Might re-read some at various times.  The most satisfying period of reading in my life?  Willing to say that, as pretentious as it might sound.  

Moresco's tome now sits on the table.  He was born in '47, some compare him to Pynchon and DeLillo.

Back cover says he "turns the stream-of-consciousness inside out and offers nothing interior.  Maybe I will hate it!  Before getting there, comfy 19th C stuff and older, in Motley Stones and Anton Reiser.  

Bela thrilled.  Her new fave writer, Maria Dueñas, has a tv series made in Morocco of her novel that Bela is now reading, La tiempo entre los costuras.  

Dave and the kids are at Mick's tonight, Cécile with Claire in NY for a few days.  NJ 

"so strong was the hand that cast me forth from the attic of that seminary"  omg, I'm in!  attic.  wasn't I dreaming last night about that fifth or sixth floor attic at Ammendale under which we sweltered in the summer heat in 1962 a few weeks after high school graduation.  Just looked at photos--four stories with super high ceilings like Rounds Hall to bright light and air into the building, faux Italianate style.  Since torn down.   Francesco Pacifico's introductory essay excellent.   

back to rice and fruit only

day off anxieties, if Rachel shows.  Or will it be an ice cream and pizza day to see the Last Chair and even sip a beer?  John Sitter having trouble with walking and standing once more, miracle drug not working. Gray day.  Bulldozers on the street endlessly leveling and leveling the dirt in prep we hope for the paving trucks.  Are they just filling out their time sheets for full payment?  Does the earth need that much compacting and leveling?  What are the engineers trying to do?  Trucks still bringing in good dirt.  

German kids called mica "cat silver."  Into first paragraph of Adalbert Stifter's Motley Stones.   

what today's day off yielded---after lunch at Dos Aguates in Ashland and middling ice cream in Holderness---

Dear Mike Zuppa

Really enjoyed seeing this amazing achievement today.  

  

 (Taught at PSU for many years---lived here since '72.)

The entrance feels so dangerous.   Coming from either direction, it just scares me.    yes, at 82 I am one of those

cautious drivers.  

Our 32 year-old helper, a woman from here, agreed when I mentioned it.  She worries about it as I do.  

I hope you can improve it.   Better signs, much wider roadway, drive way, DOT Slow signs, hidden entrance, etc

I visited St Bonaventure years ago to look at the Robert Lax archive there.  From Cumberland, Maryland.  School at Ammendale, grad of U Maryland, College Park.  

 

A wonderful business in a fantastic location.

All best wishes to you.  

-----

Last day of July.  that must be why I obsessed about doing the rice and fruit diet once more and worried about too much cheese giving my left middle side foot the calcium bump it gets --- is it every summer?  

maybe days off are just best for feeling how strange things are, no matter where you go or what you do.  skimming on through Handke's plays just feels like a logical continuation of all of that  And too the old familiar deja vu feeling; that whole letter to Mike Zuppa feels like a repeat of one I sent once before, at this same time of year too.  Eve of school anxiety dreams beginning tonight, or tomorrow night?

alarm set to wake at midnight to get entertainment seats on the Royal cruise!!!

Thursday afternoon

early morning blood draw went well, for Va 

Michelle called about cruise details, L'Speza port will use tenders to get us on land---drive to Florence, Bela said Yes full steam ahead, I will step up and step down and walk the steps necessary on the gangplanks

Finished Rock Crystals by Adalbert Stifter  so clear a storytelling  Jack London's To Build a Fire must have been direct descendant of Stifter's genius.  Am still in the Preface section of Motley Stones and still moving through the two Handke plays, while also wondering if I will be able to read Anton Reiser with pleasure.  Main question otherwise is whether tomorrow will be a day off; have to see if Rachel will show after having the stomach ache earlier in the week.  Cécile down with a toothache at the Jersey shore and worried about paying.  She will have three days visiting Claire.  Ian Von Miller has a new chair design to order, much better design than the earlier model, and bursting with color.  I still have not written a reply note to Kith.  

Sturm und Drang  The book Anton Reiser belongs to this movement in literature.  Have I not always been fascinated by the phrase and wondered just exactly what it was all about?   Storm and Stress!  Or Reiser is a work that sees the movement coming without knowing just what it will be like.  

Rachel on for tomorrow so I will have the day off!!  what to do, where to go?  The detail about the tenders and the ship and the trip into Fierenze give me just one more thing to worry over, but, hey, don't worry.  Maybe I should invest in some CBD gummies for the trip.  I have the Aswaganda pills but I'm not convinced I really like what they do.  They create a brain fog, if that is the term, as much as anything else without really calming in a way that is helpful.  Does anything?  Whatever happens happens and what will be will be.  Back to Quietism, forward to Zen.  The compactor out in the street deciding to shimmer the ground under the house just now for a few more minutes before 6 pm and the workers go home.  Worried this morning about flights to Abq in January and which airlines and routes to choose.  Time to take off and wander the countryside a tiny bit tomorrow.   

landscape collage

Black Hills  Karsten Creightney 2018    Video on Insta this morning about the opening of a new exhibit at Abqmuseum made me check and realize I have seen this painting a few times in the permanent collection and loved it.  Did not realize until today that it is a collage of a number of famous mountains including Sandia Crest, Everest and the Black Hills.  

The show is about black artists and landscape.  Could easily turn all of that on its side (in another twenty years) and align it with landscape in Stifter and Handke as well as many others who still work in landscape: Aho and Molly Marshall, Zaintz. Note how every local arts shop like Artistic Roots features local landscape artists of all sorts, landscape has never left the art world but gone and come back like aquifers themselves.  Fallen and risen.  Vernal ponds every where.

Looks like Creightney is more printmaker than painter (faculty unm) but I like the paintings most. His website very rich, probably like the prints in person much more.  Texture.  McFarlane has not done landscape but he might demur about that and show us all of his street findings, photographs, and talk about his paintings differently than we would.  For visual artists is it possible to deny, expel, ignore, suppress, destroy, evade landscape altogether?  Frank Bowling? Rothko's department store window shades?  

Town Visit to Office

Visited the Town office about street vibrating cracking the foundation of the house.  David St-Pierre will call me about this.  Director of streets.

Rachel canceled, stomach bug, but not the national horrible one, she hopes.  

Judith and Jim cleaned the house.  I had them down for Friday but Judith was sure I'd chosen today, Tuesday.  Worked out well.  

Hotter and muggier day.  Muggier maybe not quite as hot as I think.  Muggy.   Gray

Reading Rock Crystal.  Kids are walking into the snow storm.  Word "death" has appeared at least once so far in the text.  

Ordered Moresco and later saw a video and can see how big the volume is!  Yikes.  Still have that old Antunes sitting on the den shelf.  

41  wan nothingness   leaden striations  42  a wall of Cyclopean debris -- just like the street outside !

maybe the trees Mary Taylor planted around the house, the two pines by the driveway, the oak in back, maybe their roots are holding the earth and granite shelf and cushioning the house from this construction,

earth, granite under the house, shakes, vibrates as if being dug into with a jack hammer but in fact, looking out the window, the bulldozer is leveling the earth, scraping it, and the big roller is shimmy-packing it down

today will be, will have been, a no wheat day.  To what point??  Who knows.  Whoop Dee Do!  well, this is at 1:01 pm  See if we make that gold star target!  Stay tuned.  

Read that Volvo is struggling.  Models though to be old-style.  Sales low.  Scratch Volvo from the list.  

Great conversation with Steve St. Pierre from town highway department.  He explained that the deep vibration caused by the rolling earth compactor actually happens because of the underground water content of the earth.  I mentioned our vernal pond and he said yes that would be a big factor here.  The water being compressed in the earth, it's density, resists the vibrations more solidly than the earth particles themselves.  The town did do similar work on Emerson thirty years ago.  This time they are doing it right! So at least my memory was correct about that.  He has never heard of this sort of work damaging a foundation.  

Feels somehow a deep resonance with all that Handke has been talking about in all of his books this year!

geology and narrative discontents 

reading more of Ride Across Lake Constance   act of will of sorts to keep reading it   it makes no sense, of course and am not interested in enjoying one bit after another bit and seeing if they connect or disconnect in some interesting and funny ways    Much a period piece---post-Beckett, Pinter et al---writers competing, oh, I could do that too, I could do that and do it this way rather than your way(s)  ?  having fun at everyone's expense and enjoyment  122 "People began to socialize with one another and it became the rule."  

Having second cup of cacao today.  Only Ora.  Seems at first more bitter than Embue but I also just ate one of those sweetish Bobo mocha things.  The Belize Ora definitely more bitter, more raw tasting.

Let's quit Constance for a while and look at They are Dying Out, see how Quitt is doing.  

I went out this morning, went to the town hall, walked a tiny bit.  Rest of the day, except for lunch, we read.  Get up to go to the bathroom.  Read, that is it.  I get to move about with laundry.  Dishes, kitchen stuff.  Bela reads all day.  We turn to tv in the afternoon and then in the evening.  She is hesitant, afraid, reluctant to try any more standing than is necessary to pivot between chairs.  The vibrating roller is shaking the house right now.  

Quitt's speech on 210-211 could be on tv in Trump's mouth today!!  "A tragedy of business life and I will be the survivor."  A tragedy of political life and I will be the survivor.  

Sudden wind outside slamming branches onto the windows and the porch roof.   Right next on 211 (There is thunder.)  His wife speaks of ammonite . . . and some other words.  "this and that  . . . and autumn . . ."

ammonites   extinct 66 million years ago, tightly coiled spiral shells  

omnium gatherum

Handke's final chapter in the Last Guest is yet again a brilliant collection of lines from his whole life, his whole stream of books and writings, old familiar phrases, images, words, notions (not ideas? yes, ideas but not idea ideas), thoughts, remembrances, nods to places in The Odyssey over and over.  A song of songs, a reprise and continuation, recombinations, future imaginings, to the left, to the right, joys there, sorrows here, old paths re-tread, old paths renewed, new paths.  Nature rejected as the enemy, of what? of birth? 

Fascinating.  Did he write this as he "final writing?"  Would seem so.  And yet we await news to the contrary.  Is he ill?  Does not feel like it but I suppose we do not know.  Dementia?  again, we do not know.  Is this final chapter an enactment of dementia, of the struggle against memory loss?  It does not feel like it, it feels like a final performance of the finest sort.  A final rumination about sifting through the whole collection of ruminations.  Dreams, memories, tags retagged.  

Have I completed all of Handke (available)?  Well, can still continue in the books of plays;  the narratives are at an end.  Already I think I will re-read Left Handed Woman, for one.  And maybe these last two books, Last Guest and The Second Sword and My Day in the Other Land.  

What a wonderful year of reading!!  3/4s of the year.  Began after Shattenfroh in September?  

Sunday 26th noon sunlight

 big rains in Abq past few days, photos on Instagram.  Today, Saturday, sleepy day.  Hallmark movie on screen this evening, early.  

that was yesterday  today is Sunday, bright sun this morning 

tweet from Karun Pal  "Modern luxury is the ability to live quietly. No drama. No noise. No pretending to be someone you are not. Just living low-key. Reading. Thinking. Listening to music. Staring at walls. Going for walks. Watching old movies. Being bored. Working on your purpose. And feeling life deeply. That is peace." today Close enough to Lukacs saying in the future aristocrats will be those who enjoy privacy.

Earlier in the night or wee morning I got a thing about how I needed to go to Cold Spring with the new wheelchair to make sure it will fit through the doorway into the dressing room. For Rachel on Tuesday. I imagined going today but too many people around on a Sunday. Tomorrow I will go to the dump but both trash and wheelchair will not really fit into the car so I don't want to make two trips. Then I thought, after measuring upstairs bedroom doorway, you know I'm sure the opening is fine and Rachel is quite capable for handling any thing that arises. Let it go, let it be. Look out the window, go back to Handke's wandering prose wanderings. They were written just for me and only for me, no one else, no matter what the Nobel committee says. Should I order Moresco's first volume today or wait a week or so?

Handke brings in a tag from his seminary years in complaining about earworms--"At last I can be an innkeeper again!"? Thank goodness, that doesn't lend itself to becoming an earworm, unlike Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" or "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General"; it's as unsuitable, for instance, as "Simon of Cyrene Helps Jesus Bear the Cross." 135 a joke I'll bet very few contemporary readers would get Could send it to Burgo but he wouldn't pay it enough attention. Our Knight of Malta!!! Pretty remarkable, really, in terms of the people our paths have crossed with over the years. 82 now, pretty amazing in its own right.

my breakfast seemed too big this morning If I want to do one meal a day could I possibly make it be breakfast? Doubt that. Mid-day-ish? Or should I stay with grazing as primary mode? Ate a matcha mocha at breakfast, Can you tell? Caffeine rush brain all morning, even with Ashwaganda last night. Might take one of those now to taper down the matcha, even though I get the sense that I will not like two Ashwagandas a day, in the morning or one early, one later. The homeless in France usually answer it asked where did you spend the night: To the right, and to the left; to the left and to the right.