Sunday August 1
Giga and Mila hit the road for Nantucket. Mick and family arriving soon after weekend of camping in North Woodstock.
Monday Dream about Adam Driver, was walking down a hill in Plymouth. Chatted a bit, said after his upcoming two movies to make transformation would follow!! First day of day camp, theater camp. Family practiced their opening lines at dinner last night. Eliot and Emma gung ho. Bobby was urged not to be shy but he said he was shy, didn't want to be there, and wanted to go home. Cécile said she wanted to be as loud as possible. Cool again today, breezy. October in August. Or maybe September. I would have preferred to have been Pessoa much more than Lax. I now conflate the image of Professor T with Pessoa. Magritte-ish conflation. Hoping for news from Eloy about removal of the carport. Nothing yet. Making a daily practice of looking at the photos of Casa Alegre now online from pre-buy days. Preparing imaginary experiences of what the decorated version will look like. Preparing imaginary experiences of what it will feel like to be in the house, to get used to it, to sleep in it, to live there. "Who are you here, who are you here, who are you here?"—P Willow told Warren the piano is his to send forward now. Most of the carport is down and the photo shows the structure and how it is being dismantled. Reminder in the photo of the small skylight over the main bathroom. We will search vanities and sinks to see what height they are these days and whether we might replace what's there to free up some room for the shower. Sipping High Noon with the kids. David clarified that this brand does not use seltzer (salty) but vague flavor and sparkling water and small alcohol, same as beer. I bought a blueberry pie and the kids brought home four small pies from the local bakery. Great minds. They went up Rattlesnake for a hike, Jon, Dave and C. E and E are excited to have the scripts for their plays and a device of folded paper for telling the future. Em's told me I might travel to Cuba (in Spain). and El told me that I would break my leg on the 25th of October for Halloween. Hope he's not right about that one!! Last night we did talk to Dave about our big topics regarding health, death, the two houses and future plans and possibilities. Nothing clear emerged but at least we did it.
Basement almost dry. Rain tonight and tomorrow. "I'm the gap between what I'd like to be and what others have made me, / Or half the gap, since there's also life . . . " —-P Standard height twenty years ago probably "30-32". Today Comfort Height is 35-37". So we will want to put in a new vanity. Another 1.5k! +/- While David cooks pasta dinner, kids are practicing their lines.
"I pulled Endymion onto the bandwagon and he kicked me off at the Rose Parade." My tweet the other day. Originally said Andyman, meaning Aciman, but changed it to be more cowardly and not to hurt his feelings, as if he would ever see it. Anticipation for his review of Zenith. Expect it to show up in NYRB, super long, as though he's been a Pessoa devotee for years and not the rushed add-on he put into his Irrealis collection at the last minute after I woke him up to Pessoa. So his piece will be long and showy and he will use his languages to quibble about translations as he did fifteen years ago over Proust translations. Will he admire Zenith's achievement sufficiently?? With the honesty Toíbín shows, zeal and nuance. Real appreciation for both Pessoa and Zenith. Ha, me pretending I have a personal investment in all of it just because I've read the book and now enjoy the reviews from an imagined insider position. The imaginary connoisseur. Pessoa does with his imaginary friends what all of us do with our grab bags of cultural projects, appreciations, searches, fantasies, casual meetings, old friends, new friends, absent friends, longing, yearning, hoping, disappointments, etc etc.
Especially like Toíbín's paragraph on the intense and strange coherence of Book of Disquiet
"Zenith’s biography makes clear, in painstaking detail, how random and haphazard Pessoa’s thinking was. Some of his writing is close to outburst, as are some of the poems, especially the ones about Portugal or sex. But The Book of Disquiet is different from his other prose writing. No matter in what order the short sections appear, the book has a strange coherence. It centres on a single idea – that nothing is as it seems, that thinking is not thinking, being is not being, dreaming is not dreaming – and it pursues the implications of all this in a semi-logical way. Its tone is concentrated and engaging, managing to combine a po-faced melancholy with dark laughter.
He goes on and the next paragraph ends in brilliance: "But its power comes from its cumulative effect, the idea that this demented bookkeeper simply will not stop wondering what reality does not mean. Every time Soares appears to have exhausted himself, he begins again, like a man walking in a city, turning corners, looking up at the sky, sitting on a bench, fondling a stray cat, setting off for home before thinking better of it. Reading The Book of Disquiet after reading Zenith’s biography allows us to see that the chaos and lassitude of Pessoa’s life had an undercurrent of discipline and rigour. He had no idea how to make a living; he talked too much, drank too much and wrote too much; his political ideas were often mad; but all the time The Book of Disquiet was emerging, holding a tight space between banality and comedy."
"The book is almost about philosophy; its tone is often casual and then deliberate. Pessoa loves aphorism, and enjoys long, loose ruminations. He writes beautifully about weather; it seems constantly to surprise him. He evokes the city of Lisbon with a nostalgia all the more intense because he has not lost it. Sometimes he is nearly a novelist, managing to make his own quotidian life almost credible and his voice, as he narrates ‘my factless autobiography, my lifeless history’, almost real. What he doesn’t do in ‘my haphazard book of musings’ is relax his control. He can be precise, exact and restrained – like a chess player or a mathematician. But the thinking in the book is almost light. At times, he can make Soares sound like Oscar Wilde (‘I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting’); at other times, like the J.M. Synge of The Aran Islands, utterly alone in strange weather, trying to make sense of his own solitary condition. Like Synge, he can write simple phrases that do nothing more than say something simple: ‘I love the stillness of early summer evenings downtown.’
I don't think Aciman will come close to Toíbín.
"The great thing is that the narrator goes on and on, sometimes in plain sentences, at other times using metaphor to describe his plight, or his non-plight, or the space in between:
I’m the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written. I’m no one, no one at all. I don’t know how to feel, how to think, how to want. I’m the character of an unwritten novel, wafting in the air, dispersed without having ever been, among the dreams of someone who did not know how to complete me.
"I would favour including the Guedes section, or the best bits of it, as an appendix. And then triumphantly beginning the book in 1930 with Zenith’s first sentence, though it’s slightly better in Jull Costa’s version: ‘I was born at a time when most young people had lost their belief in God for much the same reason that their elders had kept theirs – without knowing why.’"
Have to find Zenith's version—-why would Toíbín announce his quibble with this?? "I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it —- without knowing why."
Is it simply British ears versus American ears? Most likely. I sent the question to my review panel and will let you know. It seems pretty picky to have mentioned it, but maybe T and Jull C are friends? Or T just wants to score a nit against Zenith because he envies how magnificent a job he has done.
———
Ed Schwartz
Hi, Just revisiting your section of your Lax book. So interesting! Lax's verticality reminds me most of the slow panning of a movie camera that allows the viewer to see things "one inch at a time" fracturing a greater context (the usual cliches). And this can be such a great pleasure! And "one inch at a time" seems the way you did your Lax research.
And just to add: I think that Lax's sense of verticality can also be found in Williams, Olson
Ed
Hi Nice to hear from you. And enjoy all the linkages you're making. Been thinking about the Lax biography, you haven't read it have you? Pure Act by MacGregor? Been looking at all the reviews of the new Richard Zenith biography of Pessoa that are now coming out and wishing Lax could have had a biographer who wasn't a friend and assistant for the last fifteen years
of his life. McGregor's book is hagiography, alas, because he is too close to his subject and too protective. Not that Lax's poetry doesn't get good attention, by the human life seems too perfect and too unrevealed, after having read Zenith's reconstruction after many years later and sifting through the massive archive of loose pages! Distance needed to
do a real biography of a writer. (Tell Ben to get out there and carefully date and organize all your loose papers in that big trunk of yours!)
Our house is almost up for rental in a week or so, will send photos. Wish we were coming out sooner. Am So REady!!! Virginia will take a slower, longer time. Our Parisians are here, this afternoon both kids are in theater productions from the first week of theater day camp. Very exciting.
Bob
—-
Hoping for big news on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday from Eloy.
Delightful afternoon with the kids seeing their productions after the first week of camp. Eliot all fierce dance action as the Lion behind the dwarves story of Snow White. Who knew? And Emma had a costume change in her quiz show drama and was all ebullience and grace.
Decided to stop Forgotten Sister at the chapter when Agathe decides to commit suicide. Now want to dive into the main work and see how this incestuous love affair winds through it. I can see why Agee wanted to pull it out as a coherent novel in its own right. And yet . . . . What does Pessoa say? "‘Never read a book to the end,’ Pessoa tells us, ‘nor even in sequence and without skipping.’
Larry votes for Option 1 because of parallel style:: probably the strunk & white answer, on the money, and one I had not thought of thinking of!!!
I'd go with option #1. The parallelism works better in my humble opinion.
Zenith puts this morsel at the very end of &Co collection. "“It was in a bibliographical note for the December 1928 issue of Presença, a literary magazine published in Coimbra, that Pessoa dubbed his heteronymic enterprise a “drama divided into people instead of into acts.” The best survey of this enterprise, beginning with the literary companions of Pessoa’s childhood, has been made by Teresa Rita Lopes in her Pessoa por Conhecer, which identifies seventy-two fictional authors invented by Pessoa and examines more closely the “behind-the-scenes writing activity” lightly touched on here. The book’s second volume transcribes Pessoa’s note equating the “self-division of the I” to maturbation (p. 477) as well as the French essay on exhibitionism signed by Jean Seul (pp. 202-6).”
— Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
He seems to say he didn't see the note himself but is going on Lopes's transcription. Correct or not? I think, however, he actually uses it in the biography. Will check when I get the hardback copy, much easier to use an index than on a kindle.
Emma went upstairs long ago after ice cream to read Harry Potter in the spare bedroom. Her mom is watching the Olympics handball tournament.
R-P coached one or more of the players.
Ed suggested rejecting both versions of the Pessoa sentence! and says "Don't need Ben for organization. I have almost organized everything into books." Occurs to me that his whole notion of inch by inch from movies probably describes his creative methods.
Sitter has a worthy editorial suggestion—I slightly prefer #1, but in either case I think I'd replace "for much the same reason that" with "much as"
Edward savored the illusion that a new house would generate meaning. Better to have a specific illusion one could hold and pet than to keep casting about hoping to find one.
Crisis over the yellow accent in the kitchen. Eloy mentions in passing on zoom last evening "wallpaper." We ignored it until 3 am this morning and both said, no, no wallpaper. Texted him at 6 am and luckily he replied later that the work had not been done and easily canceled. Phew. His ac has broken and his dad had a stroke about a week ago. Plus Denesa wants a break. He still thinks he can get the photographer in and info up online. We both said just pull off the big mantle. He thinks it must not have been original with the house and I suspect that too. Someday we could ask Chris the previous owner but not now!
Super hot day again. Pods are at the beach with the vonmillers. Call from Katie that Eliot had a bump—wet his pants not getting out of his costume in time, Dave finally texted that he got my text. Luckily they have dry pants for him at the camp.
started into the Kendall book on Buber. did a quick search: What is Buber's I Thou relationship?
This type of meeting is what Buber described as an I–Thou relationship. The I–Thou relationship is characterized by mutuality, directness, presentness, intensity and ineffability. Buber described the between as a bold leap into the experience of the other while simultaneously being transparent, present and accessible.
could I dare suggest Pessoa fits the bill even though it seems he doesn't?
look at Toibin's passage again Zenith’s biography makes clear, in painstaking detail, how random and haphazard Pessoa’s thinking was. Some of his writing is close to outburst, as are some of the poems, especially the ones about Portugal or sex. But The Book of Disquiet is different from his other prose writing. No matter in what order the short sections appear, the book has a strange coherence. It centres on a single idea – that nothing is as it seems, that thinking is not thinking, being is not being, dreaming is not dreaming – and it pursues the implications of all this in a semi-logical way. Its tone is concentrated and engaging, managing to combine a po-faced melancholy with dark laughter.
“The beauty, the simplicity, the invaluable significance of Buber’s insightful response to this question fuels this book. The heart center of genuine dialogue cannot be found within one or the other of its participants. Neither does it equal the sum total of their input. Rather, it emerges from the oscillating sphere between and around them. Thereby, according to Buber, dialogue’s center is the immediate presence of reciprocal interhuman mutuality among dialogical partners, from which each person’s unique identity emerges.”
— Martin Buber’s Dialogue: Discovering Who We Really Are by Kenneth Paul Kramer
how much better the language of love in Plato---
save us from mechanistic inputs and oscillating spheres for goodness sake or it sounds like better living through electricity!!
I'm guessing Buber's move from Kabbalistic mysticism to dialogue replicates Jewish thought discovering Greek, from the decalogue to Plato's dialogues.
Kramer's lifelong excitement and vocational calling also replicates the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle narrative: the student who falls in love with the teacher, and the student's student who falls in love with the student of the teacher. I.E. the universal pattern found in all sorts of variants. And what we all are looking form in one form or another, over and over. But Kramer's language in this one passage to which I grumped suggests again that academics cannot be expected to write as well as poets.
this Buber passage I like much and it echoes Plato perfectly —- and lots more
"I do not accept any absolute formulas for living . . . No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a [person’s] life. As we live, we grow, and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we could live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience.”
— Martin Buber’s Dialogue: Discovering Who We Really Are by Kenneth Paul Kramer
Relief that we've had the second theater production. Emma thought the upper camp dance production was super. She's now reading Harry upstairs on the bed. Eliot and Emma watching baseball on Olympics. Dave out buying corn and scallops for dinner.
19 August Thursday
Heavy steady rain day from storm Fred. Everyone spread out through the house in lazy rainy day mode. After noon. Dave researching parking for the big Portland festival outing Saturday evening. Before that they can go for covid tests needed for the flight back.
27 August
Hanover today to see the dermatologist. Dropped shorts at Erin's and got to see the new Airedale, Hobbs. Pete needed a dog he would not be allergic to. $2300 from a breeder! Super cute. We lunched at the famous Stella's. Amazing quality of bread and croissants and cookie. Why have we waited so long to go there? Message from Crystal Luna that our car is on the lot. She sent a picture of it. I've chatted with the pharmacist at CVS about his blue Tesla, which he loves, has had for almost four years. Lives in Campton. The house is empty once more. Everyone is at Plessis. Sure sign of recovery is C wanted a photo of the label on the wine Mickey had given them. It is a special domaine and type of rosé. I called the seller on the label but they are a wholesale dealer only. Online searching revealed it sold for about 12-14 dollars, so it must be seasonal only but not that pricey.
I folded the plastic green cheque tablecloth a few more turns onto itself. Slow reconfiguring of the house after the visit. Erin and Pete and I Bonded over Lems shoes!!!! Major event of the day. Pete likes Ultra shoes too. Have to look them up. Looks like he means Altra—-zero drop running shoes with super wide toe box. I've used those once long ago in the past. Maybe he works on his feet a lot and likes the cushioning. Erin works in the house and around the barnyard, so Lems perfect. Just speculating. Getting more into Musil.
And now Iyer who uses "creative writing as spiritual exercise" as the subtitle of his zoom lectures. Listening now to one on Youtube and he will give another soon next week for Va Tech [!] He starts with a quote from Beckett in an interview for a French journal—-
—I never read philosophy.
—Why not?
—I don't understand it.
[. . . ]
—Why did you write your books?
—I don't know. I'm not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I'd been. I began then to write down the things I feel.
then he quotes an early 20th C French writer but I can't see the name—Pierre Adolph? and then David Kishik—-Autophilosophy and Marcus Aurelius—so spiritual exercise means activity as a form of life, a way of living. Pierre Hadot is the French philosopher. Stoics. Spiritual Exercises as living. Amor Fati—-Love of Fate. Skimming through his video it seems he is still too much under the influence of Nietzsche!! Still working through Nietzsche's hangover on him. His talk doesn't feel as light and humorous as the book itself did. Unless I was misreading it. Which I was, since all reading is misreading. etc.
If I were to read Aurelius then I should read Plotinus as well. “The purification of the Soul is simply to allow it to be alone; it is pure when it keeps no company.”
― Plotinus, The Enneads The Belgian tv drama about Professor T quoted Plotinus
My ignorance is unlimited so far as authors I've not read so why bother? They are all reinventing all of it over and over and I don't really need to keep tracking them around and around. Iyer seems to be overdoing what he's now doing. He had his burst of creative fire and the books resulting were delightful fun. At first. In the latest he got entangled and lost some mojo. It was no longer the fun of the books up to Wittgenstein. Nietzsche has done him in, as Nietzshe seems wont to do. Have never read him! That's probably a good thing. Even a great thing.
Just talked with Anne. They drove to Mobile today to get away from hurricane Ida.
Google you are divine! "What should I eat at night to burn fat?
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today feels so gray and hyper-calm, the penumbra of the hurricane hovering over. Ok, "penumbra" pretentious but what a fine word and how much fun it was to allow it in even if it ruins my true style.
The Present Alone is our Happiness—-Pierre Hadot Philosophical discourse as spiritual exercise.
Daniel Fraser's essay Force and Circumstance, on Bernhard—-Yorkshire person. Editor @readysteadybook. Writer @thequietus, @3ammagaine, @gorse_journal, @LAReviewofBooks + more. Communism, literature, philosophy.
John Sitter to Phil "he's not burdened by modesty"
Hi, Phil. I have to say I've sorta read it. I listened to it and then did what I sometimes to, borrowed the library copy long enough to look up a few parts that had interested me particularly. There were enough of those that I then listened to some of his Homo Deus, I was very impressed by his range and clarity. Have to say he is not burdened by modesty. But his assurance seems pretty well earned. Unfortunately, I don't have your commendable habit of keeping good reading notes. As I look back & find the one sentence I have, it's to the effect that Homo Deus would make a good oppositional pairing in a course with Bill McKibben's Falter, which is lot more skeptical regarding "progress" than Harari's book (HD, i.e.). I look forward to learning more about what you think of Sapiens.
—John
Hi Bob,
Yes, I want to read the Zenith biography of Pessoa. I've been an admirer of Pessoa since the early 90s, when Quartet brought out a great edition of the Book of Disquiet. May try writing something like that - or rather, editing what I've already written.
>I'm worried that Nietzsche has discombobulated you!! You seem unduly anxious? Missing the lightness of the three
earliest of your books. But talking/teaching is not writing . . . . Rich gathering of texts and voices, fully delightful.
Heidegger said that Nietzsche broke him ... I've been sent nearly mad by the last 18 months ... the next novel shows that near-madness even more than N +tBs. I don't anticipate a return to the lightness of the first three novels for the moment ...
Best,
Lars
found this "Bernhard as a reader of Musil. " website on Michael W Jennings at Princeton
he seems not to have written or published on this topic—-
from an article by Thomas McGonigle in the Chicago Tribune about B's last work, Extinction—which I have read, imbibed, but clearly I knew too little about German lit to get it all — Bernhard, through Murau, clearly establishes his ambition. First, he sets out to demolish Goethe, then Robert Musil and Thomas Mann:
" produced thoroughly lower-middle-class works, I told Gambetti, addressed to lower-middle-class readers who fall upon them with gusto. For at least a hundred years we've had nothing but . . . lower-middle-class bureaucratic writing, and the masters of this literature are Musil and Thomas Mann, to say nothing of the others. The one exception is of course Kafka, who actually was a bureaucrat, though he didn't write bureaucratic works, but none of the others could write anything else. Kafka, the bureaucrat, was the only one who produced not bureaucratic literature but great literature." By centering the novel so completely on Murau, Bernhard does perform one great sleight of hand: he endows Murau with the force of autobiographical pain, rant and authority, though from what is known of Bernhard's life, its outward circumstances bear little relation to those of his creation."
I guess Musil was not an INFP!—-"After the Enlightenment most of us lost courage. A minor failure was enough to turn us away from reason, and we allowed every barren enthusiast to inveigh against the intentions of a d'Alembert or a Diderot as mere rationalism. We beat the drums for feeling against intellect and forgot that without intellect... feeling is as dense as a blockhead (dick wie ein Mops ist)." wiki
Why then read him? He was born in 1880! Am I looking for my grandfather? Dad born in 1915 so his father could have been then 35 which is pretty old for those days? or not. Proust born in 1871, Kenneth Burke in 1897. Bernhard born in 1931, year after Musil's book published.
Maybe like reading Conrad, even Melville. Flight from the present chaos.
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