November 2021

 November

Tuesday Nov 2   

Realized I had read Incognito.  got to page 78 and then looked through to find all  my markings.  "The unexpected is a gift of God."  "If I love the world as it is I am already changing it:  a first fragment of the world has been changed, and that is my own heart."  455

Donald called Sunday to tell us he will be made a Knight of Malta this week in New York.  So wonderful.  So perfect for him.  His life capstone.  When I first met him I thought he should be a Monsignor.  Surely a Knight might even be higher than a Cardinal!!??

I listened to Swimming in the Dark by Thomasz Jedrowski while driving today.  

What do you know about neck pain?  Showed up in my right  neck between shoulder and ear Sunday night and noticeable worse by Monday noon.  Have been trying Advil andthose hot-cold muscle patch things. Sometimes seems to go down into my torso but not the arm itself.  Trying to guess whether it is muscular or nerve or bone, vertebrae.  Whether to see a doctor or not.  Going on with ordinary routine activities and trying to ignore it.  But also don't want it to get worse.  Ignorance not so much bliss at the moment.  Have you ever had something like this?  No memory that any specific event triggered it, like a muscle pull.  Nurse I chatted with in the drugstore the other day said to take ibupro rather than acitomin, so have been doing that.  Advil.  Advil now has a PM variant and I took that last night.  Good sleep but then most of the morning that vague drugged feel, so probably will not take that any more.  Definitely colder out now, high 40s mid day. 

That was a good chat about the Bowies.  Had always wondered how the dad made his money.  Gordon.  Wonder if the house had an architect of any note. 

we're going through closets, boxes, sorting.  Va loves doing it.  I hate it.  Build cominghere to see about moving the washer and dryer up from the basement into a hall closet.Now that I think about it maybe I carried a canvas bag of laundry to the basement that was too heavy and strained my neck and shoulder??    Hurts to type, sit at the computer, maybe it is carpel tunnel neck??

someone in nyrb  if you read Musil "but it will change your life. It will teach you patience and relish and tolerance, give you a floaty gait and a long view and a permanent half-smile, and acquaint you with a gentle and rather superior form of suspense that you’ll wonder how you ever managed without. Truly, it’s huge fun and the recent translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is excellent.-- "    "floaty gait" is good

found a big website of links on Musil—-dare say the author is the V Garlitz of Musil studies!!  meanwhile she is looking at an article about V-I speaking at West Point in ? 1916

first box packed to ship to Barbara.  extra set of clothes to get us started the first week and the pink tablecloth for the party.  

Three Advil sleep last night seems to have knocked out the cold that was crippling my neck and shoulder.  Convinced it was an effect of the Covid booster taken too soon after the ordinary flu shot.  I'll keep my upcoming
doctor appointment to see if he agrees, to see if it returns, to ask about arthritis and knee pains.  

Back to that illusory project of . . . what?  reading only Musil for the next three years?  Why even fantasize about that?  Some vague desire to be overwhelmed, wholly absorbed, taken up into the space ship by an all-consuming project?  

Tuzzi  "It began to dawn on him that being the husband of a distinguished woman was a painful affliction that had to be carefully hidden from the world, much like an accidental castration."  362  He studied Arnheim's publications, and hated men who published their writings as the cause of his troubles."   "Writing is a particular form of chatter, and Tuzzi couldn't stand men who chatter."   "But why a man like Arnheim . . . should write so much was a problem . . .

If Musil wanted endlessness would he not have loved General Hospital?  Ongoing soap opera with no end in sight.  

Here we stand between two knighted dignitaries:  Nicholas with his MBE and Donald with his Knighthood of Malta.

Listened to opening chapters of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.  That will be enough.  No need to listen to more.  Still wonder if listening in the car is not a good idea.  Too intrusive, really.  

Musil wants beauty and excitement in the world.  Grill    

Just imagine how we can get Pessoa and Musil into conversation with each other.  A much better alignment and Proust and Musil, even with Monroe's book on them, novel as research instrument.  his book is 1978.  

Read a whole piece in today's New Yorker.  First time I've done that in a long, long while.  Benjamin Anastas, The Paper Tomb, about the famous or well-known prof at Bennington who is portrayed somewhat in The Secret History.  Donna Tart's 1992 novel.  Anastas makes me feel like I know nothing about literature, about what literary qualities are like, what qualities make a work true literature.  And he specifies clearly that Fredericks does not write well.  Convincingly.  And it sounds by the end that he regrets is two years of research at the Getty that resulted in this New Yorker piece.  Though he cannot regret two years of living in LA, can he?
He talks about the diarist's responsibility toward the people he writes about and I confess I have not idea what that is or should be.  How would my lifetime of scribblings measure up under the gaze of Anastas?   I recognized his name and took interest because I read or started to read is Diary of an Underachiever.  Did I finish it?  Would I like to read his memoir?  Would I enjoy listening in the car to even re-reading A Secret History?  Short video on amazon of him talking with the manhattan skyline behind me, 90 seconds of it, makes me think I'll pass.  This piece on Fredericks is superbly done.  Kind of haunting and moving and maybe sad.  

Hola hombre --
Beautiful day here today.  Slight touches of frost these past few nights and much colder days.  We will be in Albuquerque from Jan 6 to June 10.  Our place is on the western side of town, not far from the Petroglyphs where there is a hiking trail.  One site tells me there are twelve hiking trails in town (or close), town being stretched way over the landscape.  Our address is 3601 Ronda de Lechusas NW 87120.  We've sent out the first box to friends willing to store them in their garage until we get there.  Going crazy with anticipation but it helps that the Paris kids have booked their flight over for Christmas, so they will be here Dec 20-29! 

They live in the 15th Arr which is the old working class neighborhood to the right of the tower if you look at it from up on the Trocadero at the Palais de Chaillot.  Rue Vaugirard runs through the 15th, a street I firstlearned about when I was a member of the FSC,  frères des écoles chrétiennes, for a very short time a long time ago.  We had lunch with Virginia's French professor in Albuquerque near her place up in the 18th behind Sacre Coeur one day a few years ago.  It could be the basis of a whole educational curriculum to study the spiral map of Paris and the layout of the sections!!  So in which does your aunt live?  I looked up Beckett's house one time and was surprised how almost suburban it looked and felt for being inside the ring.
Very very interesting that you have in mind, have started, your own independent learning center.  Tell me all.  Did you pick up much in the way of strategy and organization from Jay Knower?  He bought the house right around the corner from us here a few years ago.  Big place for his tutoring school with rental apartments in the back.  Have not talked with him much.  Years ago when he first appeared in Reed house one day.Higher Ed both real and so-called will evolve quite a bit through your lifetime.  Already rumors here that psu headed for becoming a feeder stem of UNH.  World demographics apparently much bigger issue thanI had realized---recent piece on npr about that. 

We'll be back in Plymouth June to December again and no other travel plans so far.  I leased a new ev in Abq so look forward to puttering around town in that.  We've liked our hybrid toyota quite a bit.  Drove up the river and in through Landaff on one day off a few weeks ago.  Had to look up where Pike is again. 

Hope you have time to start poking around New Albany.  You can write a "Yankee Letter from Mississippi" for the New Yorker. 

abrazos,
B
——-

To some extent that prolific diarist reminded me of my Exeter classmate, Brian [Kelly], who just keeps pouring out novel after novel based on his own life.   He must be up to a dozen or so by now -  novel after novel. Even in the first novel I was put off by his attention to page after page of minute detail that didn't seem to have any importance, but it wasn't until I reviewed his third or fourth that I realized the guy had a sickness.   So I told him at that point that I was too busy to review his work any further and haven't heard from him since.   Brian went to Harvard, got into underground journalism in Boston, went to prison because cops found a couple of joints on him, moved to Russia, married a Russian woman and had a couple of kids while he took advantage of glasnost and started a business in which he televised things in Moscow for Russian TV -including a beauty contest.  At some point he started writing his novels and eventually moved back to New York city where he now lives.   Nice guy but....has a big problem - like the Bennington prof.

Phil

——-

I guess if Phil saw my blog or my notebooks he might say I have an illness.  And I suppose Benjamin Anastas would say I should not post raw emails from Phil and other friends on my blog without explicit permission.  At least he would recognize the psychosis of English majors—-that consuming so many books, writers, makes you ill, they infect you with their viruses and you want to write as they do or you can't help yourself trying to write just like they do because since you understand them so empathetically well that means you too can write as they do and they would understand you too.  The Company we keep.  Writing and reading as friendship offered and received.  Imp of the perverse wants me to read one of Brian Kelly's books to see if I think he is ill or if he is another hyper-wired English major, whereas Phil may have written five novels but he does not have a literary sensibility, or not the sort that gets intrigued and carried away with potential madness and real, or romantic, madness.  What would either of them say about the fact that I investigated more about BA to find the short piece he published on Granta's web site about the nude portrait of himself that his father had hanging in the stairway of his house?  It is such a slight piece of almost reflection that it doesn't make much of an impression.  If he wasn't going to say something more than that as a child he sided with both his father and his grandmother, who always wanted it taken down because it was lewd, in her opinion.  Musil could have included it in his work but he would have made more clear, more sharp, some more interesting possibility that the painting created in his consciousness as a child and later as a man and a writer.  I assume.  Assume might be code here for hope.  Well, as Musil would observe, Anastas makes clear that his father placed himself in some group of devotees of Freud, the complete works "arrayed, in full, on a bookshelf facing the foot of his bed."  He calls him a Sybarite too, another group membership.  And the weekend visits after a divorce are clear too.
Brother and sister as well.  Overall sense of victimhood by an abusive father.

10 Oct  
Visit to Phil and Orthotists.  Lunch at Panera.  Jim called, just as we got in the car after lunch.  His book is out, ordered it.  He told Virginia how much he enjoyed her book.  Asked me when I would come up with one.  

names:  Jeremiah Neptune, TIAA phone guy.  His mother has traced the name back to 820 AD in Scotland!!  

Hard to say if man's love of woman is like water flowing to the most acceptable spot or if love of a woman is the volcanic center of all life on earth  "A supreme degree of male vanity therefore feels more at ease in male rather than female company, . . .   415  part if the portrait of Arnheim

"the irresponsible margin of the conscious personality that breeds stories and poems"

listening to a Steve Taylor Extraordinary Awakenings podcast with Zak Kahn—the Clear Light   huge expansion, overwhelming freedom, body and identity dissolving, beyond feeling of liberation and expansion, moved but no aches or pains, no tightness, released from the body, dissolving of consciousness, on a cloud, through one cloud, onto another, inside a cocoon, in an environment without space and time, no breathing, free, no pain, no weariness, boundary line, cross, not scary darkness, really peaceful darkness, no going back yet, knowingness, if stay, won't be able to go  back, sharp voice pierces me from slumber, be careful, yes, ok, ok, I'll be mindful,
wave  of soothing compassion, embracing, wake in palm of hand of translucent light, a baby, tenderness, unconditional love seeps into the dna and rna of my being, every cell of my being, pure, untainted chemical love, know loving tenderness, weeping with gratitude, touched from inside out, knowing loved, other worldy movement of hand upwards, eventually feel pushed back into body, takes three weeks to come back into bodily consciousness, centering meditation prepares, calm and clear, surrendering to greater than self, this will unfold, reveal itself, conscious experience of death, died, death is an illusion, no longer real, belief not applicable, certainty, gift, not seeing, what given to me, what taken away, shift in perspective, new identity and boundaries, journey through, healing prayer, increase sensitivity to praying to another person, brain place of happiness, positivity, power to touch each other through prayer, never limit on that, infinite in that, going to better place, want to, comes through my heart, opportunity to be ready for it to happen, moment won't come again, infinite potential to be in this moment, precious, the shift most precious, changes way see yourself and everyone, love yourself, incredibly humbled, apart from all conditioning, knowing and not knowing, not being, differing levels,

high anxiety dream last night about today's appointment with Dr Fagan!
guilt that I was taking his time, held steady as I went for it.  As soon as he entered the room, though, it all felt good.  He is terrific.  Great visit even if my neck no longer felt as painful or difficult a case as I had thought for two days.  

"But while contemporary man has in money . . . the surest control of society, a means as tough and precise as a guillotine, it can also be as vulnerable  as an arthritic---how painfully the money market limps and aches all over at the slightest draft!--and is most delicately involved with everything it controls."   ---Musil
Finally saw the doctor today for twenty minutes.  No disc or nerve problem.  Advil if it recurs.  Has been quiet of course for a while already.  Must be my money sense ebbing and flowing arthritically.  

"Discovering the great poem of life, knowing their own part in it, restores to them the courage of the dilettante they had lost when they burned their own poems."  420

"No one really knows what life depends on." 389

Gass on Musil  in NYRB Jan 11, 1996   "The Hovering Life"

The essay is to other forms of writing as the Man Without Qualities is to other forms of men. “… An essay is…the unique and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought.” The essayist occupies that middle ground between the scholar who says he seeks the truth, and the novelist, for instance, whose aim is to freely exercise his subjectivity. Musil’s odd novel, and Ulrich’s odd mind, reject both certainty and subjectivity, as each believes the essay does. “Nothing is more foreign” to the essay than the irresponsible and half-baked quality of thought known as subjectivism. Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable.
The essayist is “a master of the inner hovering life.”
What can we say that will be adequate to Musil’s slow, meditative style, writing which is both analytic and lyrical, witty and sensuous? For it is not the novel’s situation; it is not the richly realized characters; it is not even its observations and ideas that makes The Man Without Qualities a masterpiece. In it Musil’s mind meditates on Ulrich’s mind while Ulrich’s mind is meditating on that, say, of his mistress or Paul Arnheim or Diotima. Musil thinks through, weighs and evaluates, Clarisse’s ardent consciousness while accurately rendering her more limited awareness of herself and the world. Ulrich explains Clarisse to himself while Musil explains both of them by means of Ulrich’s explanation.
In many ways, in taste, temperament, and ambition, Musil is a nineteenth-century novelist, viewing Joyce with the same distaste as Virginia Woolf did. He is vain and competitive, too, especially regarding his rival, Hermann Broch, whose generosity of character he could not match.
Yet Musil’s style is as antagonistic to narration, plot, and action as any modernist’s, and only Proust can give us an equally mentalized slow-motion world. Even if Ulrich repeatedly complains (in the manner of Hamlet) that thought inhibits action, such concern is not permitted to inhibit the slow honeyed spread of Musil’s prose.

We are now in the realm of unfinished versions, however, and critical opinion is sharply divided about what Musil intended or would have ultimately done. For what it’s worth, I favor the view that Ulrich and Agatha remain forever on the verge. Ulrich is finally able to live the intuitive, emotional, and “feminine” in himself because his “femininity” now loves him.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that the possibility of acting as a real and free self in society, of remaining whole while joining the whole, a unity which Ulrich seeks, has been present all along, because even in a narrative which is picturing the problem, there is the presence, in the prose itself, of the solution: the formal and the sensuous, the abstract and the factual, the mental and the emotional, the analytic and the mystical, brought together in lines which resolutely avoid the conventional and continually discover the strange ambiguous indefinability of things.

When the fog lifts in St. Louis, when I return home, I mean to look up Hölderlin’s epigraph to Hyperion—the Hermit in Greece because I think it may suit this matchless novel.
And I do. It does.
Non coerceri maximo, contineri minimo, divinum est.
Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.
——
letter published June 20, 1996
Next to Ulrich, Agathe is the most important character in the novel. She is the only non-caricature in the motley cast besides Ulrich himself. Her insights, her naive challenges, her active courage that draws her into “improper,” even illegal areas where Ulrich fears to tread, provide the ideal supplement and corrective to his clever but maddeningly timid ramblings. Ulrich returns the favor by introducing Agathe to a down-to-earth, responsible sense of precision that her judgments had heretofore lacked. Musil weaves their thoughts, feelings, and borderline taboo experience into a multilayered fabric unmatched in the modern literature of love.
It’s too bad we harried denizens of the Nineties have so little time for truly rewarding tasks, like reading the MWQ through to its ephemeral “end.” But since that is so, here’s a tip for impatient readers who may have bogged down in the Collateral Campaign. Rather than lay the book aside, go straight to Section III, where thanks to Agathe things really start to crackle for Ulrich and for us. Or if that still leaves too many pages to tackle, jump to the final section, i.e. Musil’s withdrawn galley proofs and other drafts translated by Burton Pike alone, and read them with their 1940-1942 “alternate draft versions” through Chapter 52. Chapters 45-48 of the galley proofs, then 49-52 of the “alternate drafts,” contain passages among the most provocative, evocative of Musil’s entire prose opus. Knopf and Burton Pike have done their part by rescuing them from sad obscurity. The rest—the reading, the savoring—is up to us.
Philip H. Beard
Professor of German
Sonoma State University
—-
J. P. Jones
jpjones33@hotmail.com
(301) 921-0440 • Work

Jim's book arrived this afternoon, and I've started reading it - and really enjoying it.   Jim is satirizing Catholic attitudes about saints, but humorously and it's obvious he has a soft spot in his heart for all those Catholics who still believe in their saints.   So thank you so much for the enjoyable book, and I really look forward to reading the rest of it.   

I forget how you know Jim.   Was he a novice Christian Bro with you?

——
So glad you are enjoying it.  He has a lovely wicked and warm sense of humor.  A friend who read it in ms said he thought it got too bitter or harsh in some places.  I've not yet read all of it. Saw a few pages about three years ago.  Jim is about 83 now, four or five years older.  My first summer at Ammendale he was the assistant novice director and director of the choir.  He tried to teach us Gregorian chant, mostly succeeded, but I remember him looking at me at one point and realizing my singing was not so great.  His second wife just died last spring.  He's had Parkinsons for about 7-10 years now.  After Anne died, I did meet her a few times but did not know his first wife, he moved into a home in Cooperstown.  He was an administrator at Anne Arundle Cmty College for most of his career. He stayed in the brothers less than ten years.  Native of Annapolis. Taught high school English and a few years of teaching at AACC before becoming a dean.  Forget why he moved to Cooperstown---maybe his first wife had family or property there.  After that first year at Ammendale we lost touch and only got back in touch thirty-five years later.   At the beginning of the internet some brother collected the addresses and emails of everyone who had ever passed through their doors and sent out xeroxed copies of the directory to everyone.  Something that today I suppose couldn't be done.  
I just finished Jim's book.  It's a bit stranger than I thought at first.  His attitude toward religion - especially Catholicism - seems  ambiguous.  Of course, he doesn't like pompous prelates, nuns, and monks, but still seems to like nuns and clergy who are trying to love god and others simply.   The book also made me go online to find out what Protestants think of saints.  They view saints quite differently from the way Catholics do.  Years ago, I read that Christianity insisted there was only one god,  then replaced all those pagan divinities with an endless list of saints who operate just like pagan gods.   It's amazing to me that people today follow a Jewish god based on a prehistoric middle eastern  ethnic tyrant, and Christians believe in that god plus a structure based on the  Roman empire.

Again, thanks for the book.  It's certainly different.

 Phil


 






That confirms my sense that it is not a book that will charm and heartwarm just anyone, and that the warmth of humor found in many places is counterbalanced by somebitterness or harshness one doesn't expect in standard piety about God and saints.  My copy arrives tomorrow so I'll read it over the weekend. 

Suffice to say I think Jim was looking back over his life and creating tales and figures who stood for events and people he could not have addressed directly or in any sortof factual or autobiographical manner.  Remember he was a dean for years so not hard to suspect that those who were in the know could figure out which saint wasfaculty member x or y or z in the college who he had to deal with, figure out what to do with.  He mentioned vaguely one time that getting rid of deadwood wasa perplexing problem for administrators.  So maybe he's settling old scores, working out in therapy for himself bugaboos and crotchets and demons of one sort or another. 

He published another short book a while back about a boy who was isolated and rejected because his skin had fur like a cat's.  Forget now how it turned out but I think there was a mother figure who saw his true value.  I didn't know what to say about it, really.  An old style Freudian lit critic would have had a field day with it is all I could come up with and I couldn't say that to him!!

The scale worldwide of Catholicism remains remarkable in terms of artistic/historical achievement.  My take now is that it encapsulates or distills the whole structure of Europe, that Europe, including England, which shaped itself by way of families, kingdoms, and wealth and the library of stories around that feature father-kings and mother-queens, salvific sons, and success success success, in various forms like promise of paradise, forgiveness of crimes, and above all membership in the winingest of teams/families—the monarchs of the West who conquered the world with force and ideas.  Fairy tales, myths.  Lukacs says somewhere that the world is now ruled by two elected monarchs and one old-style legacy monarch---the pope, the US president and Queen Elizabeth.  All in symbolic forms.  Roman C takes the Roman structures and adds in a lot ofcandy-floss monasticism and princeliness and medievalism.  Did I tell you our friend in St Louis called two weeks ago thrilled to announce that he was invited to become a Knight of Malta!!  He went through the rituals in NYC last week.  Special robe, medals, regalia, ritual.  A knightly order that was started in 1060 ad and still under the rule of the pope.  And that stuff means a lot to him. !!  Parallel to our British friend who became an OBE, order of the british empire and received his honor in the palace from Charles.I remember when Rich was in the Eagle scouts briefly and I heard about how you had to do things to get a badge on your sash and remember thinking who in the heck would want those dumb little sewn badges on your shirt?  Just wasn't born with that gene!!

——-
Self-acceptance is key, says von Lob. High sensitivity is innate, and not something to be diagnosed or “treated”, though people can learn coping mechanisms for when life becomes overwhelming. “I can’t emphasise enough how much you need unstructured downtime – plenty of sleep and rest,” says von Lob. The highly sensitive “need to pace themselves. Because they take in so much more and they have more intense emotions, they need time to process the emotions in their body, so movement can be really helpful – walks, or kickboxing or dance or yoga, whatever type of movement they enjoy. Because they’re people who are deep thinkers, they’ve got very rich inner worlds, and it’s really important for them to have those sort of meaningful, deeper connections in relationships.”
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Time spent in nature can be helpful, she adds. “And simplifying life, so having less clutter around, less of a busy schedule. That’s why they work well with self-employment or being able to structure their own work day.” It is important, she says, not to compare yourself with other people, “because if you’re comparing yourself with the mainstream world of the non-sensitive, you’re never going to be able to do what they do, but you’ve got your unique strengths”.
Because being highly sensitive is a strength – or a “superpower”, as more than one respondent put it. “The advantages are that it makes me a really good listener, good at conversation,” says Samira. “I’m able to find underlying meanings easily, I’m very intuitive and I have a rich inner life with a strong emotional vocabulary.” Others report hearing nuances in music that the average person might miss, or being deeply empathetic with friends. Highly sensitive people tend to notice things in the environment that may pass others by, and get more from the arts.
Louise, a researcher, grew up believing it was “wrong” to be so sensitive. It was only in her 30s, when she was unhappy in her job, that she went on a sculpture holiday and reconnected with her love of art. “That holiday completely changed me – I met similarly sensitive people and for the first time realised that being sensitive was OK. The people I met there didn’t think being ‘soft’ was bad, and were comfortable discussing their own sensitivity, their ability to find joy in beautiful things, to feel deeply about the world around them,” she says. “Meeting people who embraced their quiet, joyful natures was transforming and I came back embracing my own sensitivity. I started reading and creating again and thought carefully about my career and how it failed to nurture me. I gave myself permission to be the sensitive person I really was.”

——
Just fixed a collagen green superfood drink before dinner soup.  Craziness.
The anti-vaxers are counterbalanced by the powdered supplement shakeologists

Talk with Juanita Johnson in Abq yesterday.  Hired her as tax advisor and when we meet her she will explain how to set ourselves up a wee LLC and handle our money better.  Just now reading Musil's chapter 92 on the rules governing the lives of the rich.  We are not rich.  We are, however, rich compared with what we expected of our lives fifty years ago.  I think all of our friends from the college have been feeling the same way, more or less. And none of us had a clue it would be like this fifty years ago.  What has happened, how did poor literature profs at an underfunded state college end up in the percentile in which we now find ourselves?  

Lunch at the Bistro yesterday with D & P.  Bookends, I decided this morning, with K & C.  Opposites.  Similars.  
from Ethan
Hola amigo,

Please give my thanks to Virginia for sending me a copy of her book. I've got it on the coffee table! I am eager to see whose stories get told and yes, I'm sure I'll know some of the names.

You're lucky to have a place in NM. I've hiked in the southern part of that state, near places like Ruidoso, Tularosa, and Alamogordo. I liked those towns and my hike of Lookout Mountain (11,500') is probably the windiest hike I've ever done in the US. I've actually not investigated the usual suspect types of places in NM and perhaps someday I will.

Last year I set up a skeleton for a "learning pod" but it never got off the ground for many reasons. I may resurrect it down here if and when homeschooling booms, as I suspect it might. I wouldn't call it a Knower-esque kind of thing although, sure, I'm sure my time there allowed me to see there's a market for tutoring / individualized and small group instruction / etc. Mine would be more of a homeschooling support in humanities and tutoring in humanities plus bonus classes for students interested in open dialogue about interesting topics.

I hope you are set to have a nice Thanksgiving. We'll have Christmas in NH so I'll be up and let you know I'm there.

Peace,
Ethan

——

Musil  "between trance and dream" 462  Why is it, anyway, that a man is admired and loved?  Isn't it an almost unfathomable mystery, rounded and fragile as an egg?"  457

Wish someone would randomly collect papers in the Lax archive and publish them in the spirit of Pessoa's Disquiet.  Since McCarthy focused on the Pure Act surely we could have a biography counter to that featuring Lax's life of impure thoughts or nitty gritty everyday boredom and discontent.  Too much of the merely human is left out of that biography.  

McCarthy is the wrong last name.  

"hardly anyone reads anymore today; everyone just uses the writer to work off his own excess on him, in some perverse fashion, whether by agreeing or disagreeing."  453

"why does he write at all? It boils down to the naïve question Why do professional storytellers write?  They write about something that never happened, obviously.  Does this mean that they admire life as a beggar admires the rich, whose indifference to him he never tires of describing?  Or is it a form of chewing the cud?  Or a way of stealing a little happiness by creating in imagination what cannot be attained or endured in reality?"  453

"Just as the eye does not register the ultraviolet rays of the spectrum, so this rationalist would never notice certain emotional realities of the inner life."  463

Hovering is the great key word as that reviewer noted.  " These days she normally never gave him a thought, but his peculiar remarks about wanting to abolish reality, while Arnheim overestimated it, had a mysterious overtone, a hovering note Diotima had ignored at the time, only to have it surface in her mind during these night watches of hers."  464

Diotima's night thoughts is a beautiful passage  464-465

"At night thoughts keep flowing through alternately bright and dark patches, like water in high mountains . . . .   All that was left now were the ultimate mysteries, the soul's eternal longings.  . . .  Kingdoms may be won or lost while the soul does not stir, and one can do nothing to attain one's destiny; in its own time it grows out of the depths of one's being, serene and everyday, like the music of the spheres."   . . . "Like a velvety vision, she felt her love fusing with the infinite darkness that reaches out beyond the stars, inseparable from herself . . . immune to all schemes and set purposes.  . . .
sank into the silence of unconscious being."   

"the ecstatic thirst for love that had been driven out of her . . . could have been nothing other than an incarnation . . . a manifestation in the flesh. . . a meaning, a mission, a destiny, such as is written in the stars for the elect." 481

"her body . . . all harbored the marvelous feeling that goes with love: the sense that every movement is of mysterious importance."  

"she could be said to be more inwardly present than ever, inside some deep inner space somehow contained inside the space her body occupies in the world  

"So Clarisse enjoys intimations and forebodings as other people pride themselves on their memory or on their strong stomach when they say they could eat splintered glass."  

"it was more like having that sense, split between torment and bliss, of serving as a sacrifice for something.  
"something had to be done to tear him out of himself, at any cost.  483
She would have to wrestle with him for his soul.  

26 Friday   Finished typing Va's '93 summer trip to Spain diary-letter to Daddy Dee.  Princess switch movies on.  

Night blooming cereus  and the century plant,  

Amorphophallus titanum, the titan arum, is a flowering plant in the family Araceae. It has the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world. The inflorescence of the talipot palm, Corypha umbraculifera, is larger, but it is branched rather than unbranched. Amorphophallus titanum is endemic to Sumatra.

What I really wanted was to be hungry, really hungry.  Remarkably difficult to achieve.  
"a fastidious soul takes its time in making such a choice" —Musil  
the tale of Aunt Jane who marries and then is abandoned, raises the child on her own, "a life given over to passion is not an easy one, or easy to talk about."    I like how Musil has these short summaries of a life, lots of them, again, the born story teller, part gossip, part epic poet, part raconteur, stand-up comic, lie down moaner, cartwheeling performer, tranquil hermit
what if we get to CasaA and Omicron forces another semi-lockdown—-what if, what if, what if,  
Aunt Jane's love left behind "only the eternal form of love and inspiration, so that at a great remove in time her experience had become indistinguishable from a truly earthshaking kind of emotion.  497
"Aunt Jane lived on tea, black coffee, and two cups of beef bouillon a day, but no one in that little town stopped and stared after her . . . ."  there is the answer to my desire to be hungry!!
"You're jealous by nature, and you have a chip on your shoulder, you're against everything."  511  "There you go again making a mountain out of a molehill."  

Brilliant idea last night in the middle of the night:  go randomly over my blogspot blog, pull out passages, collect them into a small volume of pieces.
No rhyme or reason beyond random snippets from my own archive.  Put Evan-Lavender's book into the last box to ship to NM.  See what he has done.  But this idea or lame notion springs from my imagining what would happen if some earnest fellow went to the Lax archive in St Bonaventure's and did that with the boxes and boxes of Lax's papers—-a random selection as a way of revealing the Lax that none of us know.  
Hi, Phil.

    Well, my wise-ass reply was going to be, "All that's just your opinion, Jones."  Going to be, I say, because I would never formulate, let alone send, such a juvenile response.

    I don't assume I can fully grasp your situation, Phil, but I think I get it at least partly. For me, it's just that so much of the fiction seems so damn young.

    Did I mention my wholly unlikely non-fiction recommendation: Entangled Life? All about fungi and the "wood wide web" of natural connectedness. I know, I know. I would never have read it except for wanting to keep up with a book group I'm in, but it is truly amazing. The author's name is also unlikely, Merlin Sheldrake. A plant biologist who writes and thinks metaphorically, often meta-metaphorically.

    But I want to return to an earlier email, one from which I'm still reeling. There are blasphemies and there are blasphemies.  But questioning the superiority of Fats Domino?!? 

    I am too traumatized, too triggered, too micro-aggressed-upon to continue...

                        --Anguished in Atlanta    ———

 today is the 30th—-last day of the month  

the cancelation at Casa Alegre has been replaced by another booking

quote from Daily Musil—-“Ideas and feelings – they’re more for people who have nothing to do.” - The Man Without Qualities    

thank goodness now that I'm 513 pages in I know how to discount such a line ripped as I'm sure it is out of context—-still fun to have it though

Sitter mentioned Merlin Sheldrake and this morning on twitter Nicholas is retweeting a Guardian piece by him about fungi  

Ulrich: "I'll tell you under what conditions I might be so seraphic—seraphic is probably not too grand a term for not merely enduring another person but feeling that person if I may put it like this—-under his psychological loincloth, without a shudder."  514