oh dear

8:40 pm  I decided to ask Chat about the relationship between The Cat and our narrator.  Poking around after a decent enough answer, I popped open a review on LARB.  Only at the last paragraph did I find that it is written by Josh Billings in Farmington, ME.  I had run across him before and liked his reviews and essays a lot. He loved Schattenfroh a year ago.   He has his own lit mag now too.  Rustica.  He is living off the grid, sort of, in Farmington, going for the Wendell Berry award for his generation.  His comments about Moresco are ringing awfully true and direct.  And look at how even as I did read many pages of it today with something like pleasure, in my other hearts I can't wait for Disappearers to arrive even as I dread it will be too violent and angry, as previews suggest.  Here is Billings and he is very astute and convincing through his whole piece:  July 20, this year, "Doing It Wrong:"  "

(Max really got there, you’ll feel the language laugh at you in English as well.)

Reader, you will not. Again, I admit this without relish, through gritted teeth—as someone who embarked on The Beginnings in good faith, in the hope of gaining some sort of aesthetic experience out of it. But in order to have an experience, we have to feel something—to believe that we are submitting ourselves to a singular vision, even if it is a frustrating, negative, or outright perverse one. Of all the mysteries that The Beginnings leaves us with at the end of its 500 pages, the one that really holds our attention is its failure to convince. Moresco is a legend of underground Italian fiction; Lawton is a genius supertranslator who has already performed at least one miracle, and will no doubt perform more. But the proof is on the page. There, despite all our best wishes, a legible toggle of translatorial self-assertion and self-effacement has not been achieved, and The Beginnings has been stranded in the dead middle ground with all the other “masterpieces.” The water has stayed water and the loaves refused to replicate. Our feast is a fiasco. And this really is a pity.

so have I stopped with the book where the bookmark is tonight?  in the convent of the celestine father where the organ is booming ?   253 paragraph opens "The autumn wind had arrived."   That was indeed true today, beautiful wind when I walked a bit while Bela was in PT.  Should I allow one strong hearted fellow like Billings bully me into stopping?  Or is he not bullying but lamenting, sadly, truly, deeply?