April 2022

 1 April 2022

Quest for Quest Diagnostics early this morning.  Up on Golf drive, Lovelace hilltop.  Beautiful morning.  Clouds covering the crest.  

Another attempt to get into the permitting process.  Going to Jemez Springs tomorrow with Ed.  

Remember the opening chapters of Solid Mandela.  I think I made it about seventy pages in before.  Did I read the whole book?  Don't think so.  

Remember the Forgotten Sister opening of vol 2 of MwQ as well.  I read about half of the version put out by Joel Agee. 

Sunday 3 April  

Great music at Chatter this morning.  Emanuele Arciuli pianist and Peter Gilbert, composer, American premier of his sonata "New Scenes from an Old World."  Duckworth and Debussy framed the event.  

Good talk with Jim.  He sounded perfectly fine.  Snow storm blowing around outside his window.  Gave me the mission to look up Marty Helldorfer and give him a big bear hug.  Marty opened the door at Ammendale when Jim first went there for an interview with Erminus Joseph.  Reminded him of our sixtieth anniversary this year.  Asked him about the boy who had skin of fur and could sing beautifully.  He said he had a great time writing that book.  Feels quite attached from years ago to Wind in the Willows.  

Took a short walk,  hips aching.  Too much sitting yesterday, day's trip with Ed to Jemez Springs.  Delightful time but exhausting to talk for three hours.

Ed is 83!!!! never realized that.  

Jim told me he has his brothers' habit packed away in a trunk somewhere.  Am amazed at that.  Wonder if I will meet Marty Helldorfer.  He opened the door at Ammendale when Jim first went there for an interview with Erminus Joseph.  Sent Marty an email via his website but that might be old and something he doesn't use.  

Got a reply!!  But next morning this—-

Bob,

Thank you.  I’ve a little problem, temporary as far as I can see.  These days and likely for the next few weeks, I’m dealing with the symptoms of Parkinson Disease compounded by treatment for Prostrate problems.  Therefore I’ve had to cut back on many actives…not so easy for me to do.  So keep me involved and inform about your project with the memory of Brother E Joseph. While disappointed, let’s put off meeting for lunch until a later date.  

Best wishes,

Marty

——-

Jemez Springs yesterday.  Beautiful day trip.  Specimen drop at Quest/Lovelace on the way.  Today super windy.  Wind yesterday too.  Might

go over to the Green Side Cafe today, just because Lou mentioned it.  I guess.  My business shows up as Registered with the City but can't tell if I do have a License and how to secure the STR permit.  This time last year we were buying the house.  We should have an annual Closing Day celebration each year.  

Winds all day and now into night.  

8 April  From White's Mandela:  "Most of what he did he did secretly, as though making a secret of his acts gave them a special importance.  It was only too bad that more people were not in the secret, for in the circumstances he could only appear important to himself."  81 

"And so it must have been from outside that they received the double possibility of a giving and a receiving vision, as a dual aspect of nature, and somehow all this is far older than the difference of gender, on which the sexes later drew to fill out their psychological wardrobe . . . ."  748 MwQ

in today's world this line is shocking: "At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein's nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory.  The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze."  136 Mandela  

to compete with that! we have this passage from Musil:  "Perhaps it also resembled some harmless form of vampire passion, which sucks the desired being into itself, except that this infant male did not want to draw that infant female into himself but wanted to take her place entirely, and this happened with that dazzling tenderness present only in the first intimations of sexuality."   

If only White could have borrowed this for his novel about twins—-wouldn't that be a doubling of the doubling?  

White: 158  "This giant incubator hoped she was her own infallible investment.  But she would not suck him in.  Imagining to hatch him out." 

"His life was his book, until at some point in age and detachment it wrote itself logically into the words with which his mind and notebooks were encrusted."  162

"To submit himself to the ephemeral, the superficial relationships might damage the crystal core holding itself in reserve for some imminent moment of higher idealism.  Just as he had avoided fleshly love—-while understanding its algebra, of course—-the better to convey eventually its essence."  183

209  "But Arthur was determined Waldo should receive."  

How White and Musil would have understood each other.  Collaborationists, even.  

After finishing Waldo's section in Mandala I realized I had indeed read it some years ago, and felt disappointed at exactly the same place.  I will finish it, about fifty more pages.  This time I read more carefully.  Enjoyed it, but still not able to make White my favorite writer of all or recent times.

Musil's attack on Mann on page 377 of the Diaries is amazing:  "wrong" in some ways and yet superbly astute and accurate and so "right" in the essential ways.  "And what does his problem child, Castorp, do in all that time on the Magic Mountain?  Obviously he masturbated!  But M. removes the private parts from his characters as if they were plaster-of-Paris statues."    He sees "self-abuse" as emblem of the "knowledge of immorality" unfortunately and of a mode that went with the times.  The immorality seems to be that the boy who knew immorality went on to become the head of a family.  Is there a commentator who unpacks this passage?  I could question the scholar who is on twitter.  Maybe she does.  Genese Grill?  have to get her name accurately.  Mann's removal of sexuality was done to keep his closet door firmly closed.  Was Musil saying this in code or did he really not know?  Suspected but didn't discuss openly?   A simple google search will not yield this info.  Musil's great line shows up—-"Art peels kitsch off of life."

Short visit with the kids yesterday for Easter.  They were at Plessis and had found hidden eggs.  After dinner they were watching uncle Flo play beach volleyball down in Spain on the computer.  Beautiful day there.  We had a great Schutzer octet at chatter and then lunch at M'Tucci's with a pricey Piedmontese wine, Amarone del something—their email about these fine wines snagged me.  

Met with Juanita J about the taxes on Saturday.  Bit surprised in lots of ways.  Have I mismanaged things?  We'll see how it all plays out.  Over the next ten years.  Juanita had nothing Juanitaesque about her!! Can see why Eloy has moved his business to a larger firm, however.  He wants to go to twenty properties.  Will that be too many for him to handle well?  

April 18  Already feels like we need to start packing for going back East.  Not liking that feeling.  Donald's visit to look forward to later this week.

Warmer temperatures and sun.  Ozark spooking me/us about money things.  Moving it around what life is all about.  Make looking at Zillow

values every week part of same ritual as checking TIAC.  

Basile has problems with his cataract surgery.  They won't make it to Charlotte in early June.  Guess we will go ahead with that plan.  

All that caffeinated worrying last night for nought.  Day went off smoothly.  University VW even called and we went over and got our car back.  Donald says exactly what I thought he would about the spirits needed for his visit—-he will be bringing a wee flask or some such with him.  The experienced traveler.  

Here is Genese Grill in LARB interview—-Sitter and Jones would not approve, one suspects, given their current discussion about population sustainability on the globe—-

Burton Pike influenced my thinking here, as well, by clarifying the Modernist project, not as a wholesale rejection of meaning, but a much subtler attempt to find formal strategies (metaphor, fragmentation, syntactical experiments) to approach the new consciousnesses of relativity, subconscious processes, psychology, and perspectivism. Meaning(s) and truth(s), while much more complex than had formerly been conceived, were still worth scrambling for. One was called upon to approximate, approach, and attempt, as aesthetic-ethical imperative. In my own essayistic work, this developed into a study of the ways in which the material world is and is not created or changed by the spiritual processes of thought, imagination, or constructs. I maintain that our most life-affirming approach to existence is one which honors the reality of the material world — beauty, gravity, death, change — and empowers what Nietzsche called “creative subjects” — i.e., all human beings — to be agents of necessary reality-renewal.

—-

Everything !   "As to Emerson and Thoreau, yes, they are important influences in my essay writing. Musil, of course, esteemed Emerson, and seems to have read some Thoreau. I also include Walter Pater and Yeats as my inspirations, writers who complexified and digressed in their own sumptuously ornate, nonlinear ways. While I delight in the light touch of Walser, I am afraid I have a hard time keeping my mind trained on small discrete subjects or momentary haiku-like glimpses. I am always making connections and also divisions, and I am always tempted to include everything in every piece. Form and content, as for Musil, are one here. The fact that the world is made up of so many interconnected, yet invariably divaricating and distinct singularities, that no one thing can be understood without seeing it in relation to all other things — moving and changing even as we observers move and change our perspectives — is itself at the heart of the delightful and frightful matter. "

here hear!!!

"This essay, part of a collection exploring the tension between Spirit and Matter, was written in response to the deleterious contemporary moralistic trend toward devaluing the material — in this case, physical beauty and sexual pleasure. The material world is denigrated today in favor of the so-called spiritual, which may be exemplified by the virtual, on the one hand, or by a pious emphasis on allegedly more important internal beauty, on the other. In all cases, there is a denial of the meaningful connection between externalities and internalities. Like all of the essays, this one was searching out correspondences between surface and depth, beauty and truth, nature and culture, aesthetics and ethics.

Basically, I do not believe that spirit exists without matter or matter without spirit, but I wanted to tease out the “spiritual” dimensions of matter, the difference between some materiality — art, nature, bodies — and other, shallower, materialism. I began the collection with an investigation of the history of books as objects and of current theories of virtuality, contending that when we remove the materiality from a book, we are severing its essential magical role as conduit between ideas and the world, between imagination and reality, thought and action. I further tested this conjecture by creating, over the course of five years, a gigantic room-sized accordion book (each of its 10 panels is four feet by eight feet), which I illuminated and inscribed, letter by letter, with the essay, thus experiencing firsthand the tribulations that matter is heir to — peeling paint, cumbersome panels, painstaking inscription work, gravity, breakage — as well as its pleasures and ritual potency.

The world, even in 2020, is rife with richly spiritual materiality, but this rare aesthetic and ethical aspect of human life is increasingly drowned out by the pervasive roar of hollow, vulgar consumerism, on the one hand, and, on the other, by those voices that deny the inherent value of physical reality, beauty, art, and nature. Such a nihilistic perspective leaves an aching abyss in our lives, all-too-easily filled by the peddlers of dissipating, violating virtuality. My work is fueled, thus, in good part by opposition to these latter dangers; but, also, it is fueled by what I love. In the wake of a rising tide of anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic, moralistic de-materialization, I am impelled — compelled? repelled? — by the hate that I feel for that which threatens what I love. Yet the work is, I hope, more of a yay- than a nay-saying."

—-

exchange with Genese Grill   21 April

p 137 in Musil's Diaries

A critic like Kenneth Burke could find a way to argue that Musil in his prescience was using "masturbation" as code for "homosexuality (closeted)" to give us an incredibly perfect reading of Mann's whole work/life.  A kind of prophesying before the fact. 

Hello Again, Robert.

I had forgotten this hilarious passage. I am not sure, however, what your question is.  My thoughts about it are, again, that Musil is comparing Mann to himself. While Musil dealt with sexuality, including homosexuality, bestiality, sadism, masochism, and adultery in his many works, Mann avoided direct confrontation with it (except in Death in Venice, even though even there it is handled poetically, not explicitly).

Thanks for sharing!

Genese

29 April 

two days ago from Nicholas

Dear Bob,

I was still hoping to visit as of last week - but this week has completely upended my schedule so very sadly I won’t be able to. The return of travel has been like letting cows out of a barn in Switzerland in Spring, so much pent up work demand for meetings, this first half of year has become a little crazy (as well hosting a flow of exiled Russians through my house around the edges)!

So, sorry to miss you and Va. I am coming to the US in first weeks of September, will you be in NH or NM?

Sorry about this again - I wonder whether we will ever get back to some kind of normality! Whatever that is. 

Love, Nicholas

——

Donald departed today around 1.  Drove him to the airport at 11 and then we walked briefly at Walmart before having lunch and a nap and then our soaps.  

He told Virginia at one point that he is left-brained and I am right-brained. 

Our two visitors, then, a balanced set of opposites:  Dennis, right-brained artist, Donald, left-brained super-church member.  Knight of Malta and defender of the Church.  He complains about prices and money but pays 1700$ for daily Times in paper format, plus subscriptions to the New Yorker and The Economist.  He is still a character.  As is Dennis.  

As aren't we all.  

Near the end of White's Solid Mandala he brings in his revelatory fragments about mandalas and the twins.  He has been developing them all along, Arthur the right-brained wandering visionary artist, Waldo, the left-brained sensible fellow, not understanding much about his twin at all.  Then a text Arthur finds in an old book in the library, vaguely Jungian? about the hermaphroditic Adam who appears in the form of a male but always carries within him his wife Eve, hidden in his body.  To which Arthur agrees and adds why not two or three wives.  281 i.e. all the women in the book.  "Love , he had found, is more acceptable to some when twisted out of its true shape."  280  Earlier Arthur had danced a mandala, 265, for Mrs Poulter.  He carries his glass marbles, gives the knotted one to Waldo, who does not value it.  He tries to read Brothers Karamazov but prefers Alice.  "While in the present the dogs sat licking their pads or, jacked on their sterns, lavished respectful tongues on the blue perfection of their balls.  Arthur laughed, for all roundnesses.  He took out the marble and looked at it."  288

google search—-

soon as I glanced I recalled some of the comments from before, especially Tomlinson's which I am happy to second.  Relieved to see it again.  Will not, this time, plow on through to the end.  Disconcerted that I read  the whole book over again.  Almost all.  Dang.  Not worth it, except maybe for the final passage quoted.  

There is much grace and beauty here and plenty of laughs, but in places I felt overwhelmed by the sadness that effuses the story, the sense of loss and regret and the inability to escape the past and to truly grasp life by the horns. And the near-perfect ending, I have to say, came as somewhat of a shock, so much so it’s taken me a month to write this review, because I wanted to think about this book before I put pen to paper.

 The feel of the narrative is almost claustrophobic, certainly psychological. What we learn of both brothers is complemented by their different narratives; their dependency on each other is suffocatingly established. The numbers two (for the principal characters) and four (for the number of chapters) become clear in the telling. Hatred seems to be the glue that binds the first part of this structural system.

from rob-tomlinson.com 

… lowering his head he read out loud, pushing the words well forward with his lips, because he almost doubted he would be able to form them, he was so excited: “The mandala is a symbol of totality. It is believed to be the ‘dwelling of the god’. Its protective circle is a pattern of order super-imposed on — psychic — chaos. Sometimes its geometric form is seen as a vision (either waking or in a dream) or -“ His voice had fallen to the most elaborate hush. “Or danced,” Arthur read.
(The Solid Mandala, p. 237-8)

From this point onwards, Arthur’s marbles become his ‘solid mandalas’, talismanic objects of peculiar value to him. White’s adoption of the term ‘mandala’ for Arthur’s marbles stemmed from his interest in the work of the psychologist Carl Jung who encouraged his patients to draw and paint circle drawings that represented “the Self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well is harmonious”. That White has Arthur as the keeper of the mandalas, when Waldo’s personality is — in contrast — fragmented and chaotic, is key to the novel’s form and meaning.

Arthur accumulates instances of mandalic associations. He considers “the world is another mandala” (p. 245). By revolving a marble in his pocket, he is able to make “Dulcie’s lake with the crystal-studded castle to re-appear” (p. 247), invoking the postcard she had sent him years earlier. Of all the rugs that Leonard Saporta shows Arthur, he likes the Turkish one that “has the mandala in the centre” (p. 251). He also sees the Star of David as being yet another mandala (p. 251).

This association — even, obsession — takes a personal form when Arthur identifies that each of the four marbles he carries must be gifted to specific individuals. To Dulcie Feinstein, Arthur gives the solid blue taw mandala. “He had always known the blue mandala would be the one for Dulcie. Her beauty would not evaporate again” (p. 255). Despite the childish origin of the marble, “the blue taw which Norm Croucher had traded for liquorice straps”, the gift binds them to each other at a spiritual level. To Mrs Poulter, Arthur gives the gold mandala, “the gold one, in which the sparks glinted, and from which the rays shot upwards whenever the perfect sphere was struck by its counterpart” (p. 276). Her genuine acceptance of the gift, not as a loan, but as a gift for keeps, contains no hint of ridicule. Arthur wanted to give the colourless, knotted mandala to his twin Waldo because he “was born with his innards twisted” (p. 32). Offering it, “while half sensing that Waldo would never untie the knot” (p. 273), his gesture is rebuffed: “so my reply, Arthur, is not shit, but shit!” Brutal though this rejection is, it comes as no surprise. Arthur solves the riddle by keeping the marble until after Waldo’s death when he symbolically loses it. The fourth mandala, the double spiral, he keeps for himself. It was the one “in which the double spiral knit and unknit so reasonably” (p. 281). With the rejected marble Arthur had thought Waldo might accept, both mandalas would occupy the same pocket for the rest of the novel.

David Marr, to whom one turns for reliably authoritative views of the writer, is clear that White was always searching for “wholeness”. “He always saw himself as a shattered personality — not one man but a cast of characters and Jung offered him fresh hope of making sense of this jumble” (Marr, p. 452). Memorably, he wrote:

The Browns of Sarsaparilla seemed two halves of his own nature: it was as if he had taken a scalpel to himself and excised the innocent Arthur, leaving the monster Waldo behind. Memory and imagination gave him all he needed to make the twins real and separate characters, but at heart they are Patrick White: an expression of the best hopes and worst fears he held for himself. (Patrick White, a life by David Marr, p. 448)

One is left with the impression that White felt compelled to write The Solid Mandala, that its birth was a kind of … if not expiation, then therapy — for him. As reader, one is left feeling as if the process was voyeuristic, that we have been looking in on something that we were never meant to see. I can’t say that I enjoyed very much about Mandala, though I did learn more about the complexity of White’s personality. Where the journey (with a mileage expressed here in page numbers) from Tree (499) to Voss (428) to Riders (552) and on to The Vivisector (617), The Eye of the Storm (589) and A Fringe of Leaves (365) is a sustained literary pilgrimage of distinctive power, The Solid Mandala is, for me, an oddity left by the wayside, worth stopping for but not re-visiting. That it is the shortest of the seven of White’s novels mentioned here, at 318 pages, makes the stop either easy or high in value, depending on one’s viewpoint.

March 2022

 March 1  2022 

Tuesday  64 at 6 pm.  First day when no jacket needed.  Long sleeve shirt all day.  We went to the Sunport Optum to meet the cardiologist, then lunched at Thai Cuisine.  Finished the Murder in Angoulême episode.  Just got the 1099 from Vida Grande for the year, a little over 10k.  !  One of Eloy's men came at 9:30 to replace the filter in the hvac and then he took the time to fix the chain pull on the fan in the main bedroom.  Tomorrow is the big swim/gym day.  I just opened another box and it was filled with the swim suits.  And Dennis's quilt.  He is anxious to get here.  Hope the weather holds for him.  

Surprise call to have nails done at once!!  Ouray and I-40 Walmart.  Hands will look good for tomorrow's luncheon.  Get us out of going up to Academy Hills Park.  Wasn't in the mood for that, not sure why.  Musil's Diaries are more interesting than I would have imagined.  His thinking and writing are strange in unusual ways.  Or I imagine that they are.  

Mochi ice cream day. Earlier nails at Regal Nails (thanks to Marianne) at "Little Saigon" in our local Ouray Walmart.  Nice and warm now by 4:45.

Cloudy most of the day. 

Postcard from June Kelly Gallery, Victor Kord.  I like the painting, "Hand Over."  48 x 48  $20k (emailed to get the prices).  I've admired his work before and looked him up on wiki.  Fine life and work as a New York painter and painting/art teacher.  Could I not have painted such pieces?  But then when I look at Tim McFarlane's work I still prefer that.  Much more vitality and dynamism of movement and color.  Classicism vs Romanticism most likely once more.  Kord arrives at a form almost a glyph (or finds it first and then sets it onto/into a two or three layered ground.  McFarlane works in a similar fashion but with much more discovery, wandering and exploration evident in the final palimpsest.  The foregrounded glyph much less Classical in composure and repose.  Kord goes for that.  Even if the image seems to be dynamic.  Search for perfection of shape and color.  Tim searches for expression of mood and feeling, color and vibration, tensions and expansions.  On Insta Tim is looking back at his work.  In '99 he was using lots of circles!  comme moi at one time.  Heavy textures too. Shellac, rustoleum!  

Musil in 1904 suffered "a nervous condition of the heart brought on by overwork."  Hmm, maybe that's what I experienced at Elkins Park?  What would have been a nervous condition of the heart?  "What was neurasthenia How was it diagnosed?  The modern CCMD classifies it as a persistent mental disorder diagnosed with three of these five symptoms: "'weakness' symptoms, 'emotional' symptoms, 'excitement' symptoms, tension-induced pain, and sleep disturbances" not caused by other conditions.

Eloy brought Gerry at 9:30 to look over our list of small jobs, plus the wall removal for after we're gone.  Nice guy, 60s? volunteered his wife (Jamilla) is from Buffalo and after Willow said hello in Spanish that he is from Puerto Rico.  NM's melting pot (so active because of the air base and the tech labs, my assumptions.  And location, location, location—-crossroads of I-40/66

and all points north and south.  What is the I- that comes from Colorado, 25?  yes CO and WY.  

nice long letter from Ken and Carole:  we are still clueless about Wordle.  

Hi Bob and Virginia,

Well, after a very cool first month in Florida, we have now been enjoying warm sunny weather for the last three weeks.  It makes it very nice for going to the beach.   Life is certainly different this year.  We miss going to our cultural activities.  But recently we have been able to do outdoor dining which is very nice.  Condo dwellers gather most days at 4:00 for Happy Hour.  Since it is outdoors, we feel comfortable going down for it.  We are having to walk earlier now because of the warm weather.  We are still doing our grocery shopping at 7:00 a.m.  We have remained Covid free -so far. 

We hope you are doing well, Virginia, and have recovered from your injuries.  It must have been very frustrating for you to have to be off your feet.

Because of our Blink camera and our bulls from Dead River, we know it has been a cold and snowy winter in Plymouth.  We plan to be home by Easter so hopefully there will be an early spring.

Natalie arrives on Sunday for five days.  It will be fun to catch up.  Poor Ken will find it hard to get in a word since we talk so much.

Are you playing Wordle like the rest of the world?  Some days are very frustrating.  It is the talk of Happy Hour.

We don’t have much Plymouth news.  I did read in the Concord Monitor today that our state senator, Bob Guidase, is or was a member of Oath Keepers.  He said that he withdrew his membership many years ago, but what does it say about him to be a member.

We had a good trip to Wellington to see Christa and family.  Since Asher never asks for gifts, I asked him if there was anything he wanted and he said- since you asked, there is a new cymbal I would like.  So Grandma got her checkbook and wrote a check for $400.  He was very pleased.  Kerim is still working from home four days a week.  I am not sure how long that will last.

Hope all is well in Albuquerque.  Have you found any new tv shows you like?  We are still enjoying Seaside Hotel from Denmark.  We are now in Season six.

Already looking forward to seeing you in June.

Love, Carole and Ken

——-

Being home by Easter seems way too early for us.  We'll see.  

Botanical Garden this morning a fine walk.  Weather got warmer by the time I reached Sumner and Dene.  Nice chat with the owner, inhis 43rd year there.  Learned about Frank McCulloch, retrospective opens this afternoon.  Taught for years at Highland High and I think later UNM. 

Alastair McIntyre (clouds) and Frank Hulebak two of his most successful students.  Owner suggested taco stand in the food court on the corner and they were really good.  Stopped at the Garden coffee shop for a cookie, then drove to Corrales road Flying star for the pink cheesecake.  And extra coffee!      Roy Sumner Johnson is the owner.  

Dear Carole and Ken---

We may be the only people in our peer stratum who have barely heard of Worldle, let alone seen it or played it.  Google revealed to me that it was invented by Wardle. 

Couldn't put that in even a wacky novel!  

Tomorrow we go to our second Chatter Sunday morning.  These start at 10:30 am in a warehouse made over to be a performance venue.  Probably hold 200 people.  You

buy tickets, $15 each.  Live music, some sort of reading and two minutes of silence and maybe some other event. They last about 90 minutes.  Tomorrow will be brass

ensemble doing what seems to suggest mardi gras sort of theme.  Last week featured Gisburg's famous poem Howl, but in a version which a composer created music

for, strings, and a six person group chanting, reading, reciting.  Not something I would suggest crossing the street for to hear again but we enjoyed seeing one couple

who live a few blocks away, old friends, and seeing the whole event.  

Sure you will enjoy Natalie's visit.  Our first visitor arrives Tuesday for a week, Dennis coming from western PA.  He'll be here a week.  He hasn't flown for about thirty

years so I am hoping he will make his connection ok in Atlanta.  Today I went on my day off morning to the Botanical Garden to see if visitors would like it.  It is

quite nice, about twenty years old I think.  Even has a large model train working in one part of a garden area, very delightful.  Five or six lines, model villages, all

on western themes.  Beautiful Spanish-Moorish garden, rose garden, Japanese garden, and large glass building to house a high desert collection and a Mediterranean collection of plants.  

We will take Dennis to Santa Fe to see museum hill and probably the O'Keefe museum.  We really want him to see the incredible toy collection housed in a huge wing of the

art museum.  Some wealthy fellow traveled the world for years buying every possible toy he could find. We say it about ten years ago.  Fills a huge warehouse building.  

Va's friend Louella has become her savior-helper with swimming every week at the Defined Fitness pool nearby.  They go in on the transport chair we now have and use the motor lift

to get into and out of the heated pool.  Lou had knee surgery a few months ago and likes the warm water exercise so it seems to be working out fine.  I spent an hour of so

on the treadmill and think that in future weeks I will stroll around the outside strip of shops and apartments.  

We both got signed up with a pcp doctor in the Optum health system, liked him a lot in our first visit.  He has sent Va for checkups with cardiology and nuerology.  Main thing is

we got through and into the portal and can use it in the future if needed.  

Va's cousin Roy came for an overnight a few weeks ago, from Santa Fe.  Cousin Nancy in Seattle will come the first week of May.  

Still getting used to the house.  Concrete feels so different from wood!  So glad I had a new heating system put in because it has been a cold winter here too.  Today

is very windy, won't get above 46!  I don't think we've hit 70 yet. Definitely colder than two years ago.  

Sarah Hungden sent word about the shooting outside the Rumney post office!  Just heard that at one of our favorite cafes here a woman parked her car, took her dog for a short

walk and came back to find a window broken and her purse stolen.  10 am.  

We've been watching a lot of the French Murder In . . . series, lots of different towns and regions of France featured and the main detectives in the more recent episodes

now have romances and even kiss and the end.  Has Hallmark infiltrated/sabotaged the murder mystery genre???  We got into Gilded Age on HBO max and look forward

to Sanditon and Outlander season 8 I think.  

Will try to send you photo of the washer install that Joe Puglisi did for us in the Plymouth hallway just outside the kitchen.  Looks very successful.  

Since you go back just after Easter there is time for you to hop on a plane and come out here!!!  Use your tax refund!  Am waiting to see what our NM income tax will

look like.  

Missing you and say same hello to Natalie.  

love,  Bob and Virginia 

Nice photos of cars in A'que. And the weather looks good now.  So how are you and Va doing?  Getting out and about or not?  Reading anything interesting? 

As for me,  I think I mentioned that I had to buy a new computer and printer recently because the old ones died within a few days of each other.   Going from Windows 7 to Windows 11 has been  hell but I think I've finally got a few of the important issues solved, thanks to a young kid at Best Buy's Geek Squad.   Also,  the technology in the Honda has been giving me problems, but I went to the dealer and a young kid there showed me how to solve those. So I'm finding out how much tech rules my life and that young kids are my only lifeline.

 Finally, my nephew in WVA asked for some money because his mother in law is retiring and that means he's losing some financial support.  I agreed to give him 1,500/month until he  gets a job or I get tired of giving him money, whichever comes first.  Also, I'm dealing with all the tax issues for Peg's estate.   On and on it goes, and meanwhile I feel quite lonely these days without Peg.   She and I were pretty independent and isolated, and now that she's gone I have no one to talk to on a daily basis.  I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the internet.   These days it's my only connection to the world.  

P

PS Have been trying to read latest novel about climate change by Tim Stanley Robertson, "The Ministry for the Future." Sitter recommended another novel by Robertson, but this one is far more depressing than the one John recommended.   It's a perfect companion to the news coming from Ukraine. 

You should hop on a plane and come out for a quick visit!!  We went this morning to our second Chatter.  https://www.chatterabq.org/   

Starts at 10:30 in an old warehouse remade into a blank performance venue, concrete warehouse with good acoustic remake, no frills,

Program today was a trombone quintet which was amazingly good, interesting non classical jazz music.  A Storyteller, professional, woman,

who, again, surprised me by being excellent and producing none of the "compassionate sighing" which so often mars poetry readings

and other such smarmy chatuaqua gatherings.  Our friends here got us to try this.  I went the other day to the Botanical Garden,

was not here thirty years ago.  Remarkably well done, high desert and mediterranean climates.  And Japanese which feels exactly

right.  

Two oddities have emerged.  Talking with these friends the other day, (about movie Power of the Dog, and tv series Gilded Age,)

Barbara got into family history and said in one part of hers there

was a flaming gay military guy who was chief assistant to President Taft, lived with his artist lover and both died on the Titanic and

there is a fountain in DC dedicated to them!!!  The Butt-Millett fountain!  sure enough, check it out---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butt%E2%80%93Millet_Memorial_Fountain

The other oddity:  we hired a caregiver two years ago, a woman in her 50s?  she comes now too, once a week, so I get my day off.  

She has lived here for years but it came out the other day she told Va she disliked Albuquerque and would really love to live in

Cumberland, MD!!!  Longs to go back there!!!  We have to get more details when next we see her.  Her family had reunions at

Deep Creek Lake and Cumberland always struck her as a beautiful place.  Not sure how many years ago this was.  Crazy.  

Sure your loneliness is pretty terrible.  Unlike any variations you may have experienced before.  What to say about it? 

As with the news from Ukraine.   Our British friend who led oxfam in Russia for ten years says the underreported

story from Russia is how many young Russians have fled the country, "Armenia is full."   

Va is reading another Isabel Allende novel and I'm staying with Robert Musil, with an occasional look at a story by Mann. 

B

——-

found good commentaries on Atlantic and reddit on why the power of the dog movie is a dog of a movie!   "But the problem with The Power of the Dog is not that it is offensive—it isn’t. The problem is that it is dull: a slow study of stock characters. Beneath the film’s aura of profound mystery is the smaller, specific recognition that society has often suppressed fellowship between queer people and forced them into kill-or-be-killed wariness. But Campion treats that reality as the object of gruesome, clinical dissection, only to find that every bit of gut and bone is exactly where it’s always been.  spencer kornhaber  the atlantic 

Nicholas posted about White's Solid Mandela.  Weak, I ordered a copy in spite of earlier statements to myself that White no longer interests me.  

Justin Tanner? person on amazon gave it a super review that helped win me over once again.  

now here is a passage in Musil's diary:  "When one says that a feeling of attraction toward an animal can, in part, resemble self-surrender to a priest, or that an act of infidelity, at a deeper level within, can be a uniting, then one has found a new way of putting the basis of "Veronika" and "Claudine."  diaries  129  

this passage more uplifting:  He sets against Kerr's idea that literature takes up only a corner of his life.    "Literature is a bold life arranged in a more logical way.  It involves the creation or distillation of possibilities, etc.  It is a fervor that pares a human being down to the very bone for the sake of a goal in which emotion is in an intellectual mode.  The rest is propaganda.  Or it is a light that originates in a room, a feeling in one's skin when one looks back at experiences that at other times remain muddled and indifferent."  126  diaries

another interesting passage——Musil was indeed raised Catholic, later became Protestant:  "A priest has something of an animal about him!  . . . That empty mildness that momentarily keeps things from happening, like a sieve, that immediately runs dry."  125  Intimate ties 

Dennis arrived yesterday in a bright yellow coat.  Perfect for a photo with the airport yellow chihuahua dog.  

"portraying unlimited other possibilities"  Musil  Diaries 140  could this become an infectious way of looking at everything?  If B wants a community within a facility, could that pull us into it as well?  Would that be better than we can imagine?  

Aham-Prema   finally a guru has given me my mantra!  (on YouTube)

Dennis departed today.  He/we enjoyed his holiday journey to the West.  

Donald is next at the end of next month, roughly six weeks I guess.  Five weeks.  Week after Easter.  

from wiki "Smoley relates these observations to the ancient Christian division of the body, soul, and spirit, which, he claims, has become obscured over the centuries. The body, that is, the physical body, constitutes one level. The psyche (which he explicitly equates with the soul, on the grounds that in most versions of the New Testament the Greek word translated as "soul" is psyche) is the total constellation of an individual's thoughts, images, and feelings, conscious and unconscious. The third element, the spirit, the "I" or "true I," as he puts it, "seems to have no power, no volition of its own, yet it is that in you which is constantly awake and experiences all that passes for your life."[5]: 50 "  "According to Smoley, esoteric Christianity symbolizes humanity in its fallen state of individuality by Adam. The restored human unity, the reintegrated maximus homo, is symbolized by Christ: "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). He explicitly relates his views to conceptions of the cosmic Christ and the Catholic doctrine of the mystical body of Christ."

Started to look at his book on kindle.  Always wondered about the  craze for the Course on Miracles so it covers that and expands from it.  

getting a handle from the introductory notes to Notebook 25 on Musil's distinction between the moral and the ethical.  Morality concerns rational justification and calculation in relation to a system; "the ethical is free of rules and free of all hardheaded assessment."  perfect recent exmple:  Adam Neumann as portrayed in the movie We Crashed.  The "moral" people of corporate life  are "made uneasy by the spontaneity, the sleep walking certainty, of those whose actions are prompted by an innate sense, by the feeling 'This is right for me now,' a move that takes no heed of what the world may think."  309  

Musil called the ethical state "the 'other' condition.  

from Dennis  Well, we didn't miss a key plot point after all. Good for us.

51 here today. Rain all day yesterday. It was nice to get out and walk. Taking my mother shopping. My sister drives. My mother will take my arm to steady herself but not my sister's. Go figure.

His visit went well.  Trial run for the next three.  On alert to get O'Keeffe tix for the Monday of Donald's visit.  Would love to try taking the train if the

times would work.  I might try it on my own to see how it works and feels.  Trouble is the 9:44 departure time.  

Off coffee.  Missing the excitement.  Green tea in the morning.  Calm most of the day.  Sleepy a bit.  BrainBooster interfering with much?  helping?  

All seems calm and tranquil now.  Except for Ukraine news.  

Musil in diaries pp 315-16  discussion of the contemplative disposition is wonderful.  Desire of this sort of love is to bestow, share not to have or possess.  To live together in the newly discovered world of 'other.'  Now I can see what Agathe was all about, trying to be all about and couldn't quite comprehend it.  Now I am better prepared to launch into Vol II of MwQ

he says well that when young many people are in a state of love which is not the same as being in love—-the overflowingness of wishing to bestow

"be mine = love=rationalism-capitalism"  "The 'other' attitude demands that one does not treat even one's own notions as possessions—one does not store them in the thesaurus of the 'I'—but they are common goods of the people who love."  316

now that I understand Musil's use of the term "other" it seems genius indeed.  He shields all that it means from the baggage of traditional vocabularies that carry all the histories of churches, spiritual traditions, spiritual teachers, languages for the experiences of "other" which have been worn out.  And his essayism tries to protect and expand without losing the sense of what "other" means.  

Chatter this morning:  Musil would have enjoyed hearing so many echoes of his thought.  March 27

Yesterday off.  Two weeks before I had a sense it would be a signal day of some sort.  Why was I not surprised, then, while eating lunch at Whole Foods, a fellow asked if he could sit at the table, it was crowded.  Anthony. 

Filmmaker.  Just bought a place last year, in a one day visit, in Tanoan (gated community), moved from LA.  Italian family in suburbs west of Chicago. Money, father worked in tech, retired at 57.  Middle brother.  Older sister, four years older, younger brother, 18 months and they often dressed them as twins.  Christian Brothers high school (St Patrick's?) Albuquerque second largest film making city now.  Two cats. Chubby as a kid. Played tennis to fit in.  Learned to enjoy watching baseball.  Cubs.  Cubs logo on his baseball cap (backwards). Working on his dream project, already written, about Lucille Ball.  Hated the new version by Sorkin.  Is in personal touch with Lucy Arnez, now 71.  She likes his screenplay.  Carthage College in Kenosha.  To be a history teacher but never taught, went to LA and got into film.  Made one called Brotherly Love, production and actor and writer credits on three or four other films.  42 or 43.  Charming and open.  "Extroverted introvert." Likes Eastwood's way of making a movie, treating his actors.  Favorite director Guillermo del Toro.  Hired to be writer on a project dealing with the early days of movies, conceptually different from similar projects.  

Sixty years this spring since high school graduation.  Ammendale.  Elkins Park.  Lunch with Anthony rang bells about all of this.  

Musil would have taught me how to frame such events.  As I've learned.  

A good Chatter yesterday too.  Two poets and interesting music.  Last piece was too long, like the Sunday before.  

diaries page 335-336  Musil anticipates Ellison's Invisible Man and so much else—-queer theory, deconstruction, etc etc  

"Atomism and ossification as phenomenon of civilization."  "knotted in institutions"  336 

"State, nation, Church, profession, class, gender, etc.  The individual cannot fully belong to any of these groups because they are in conflict with each other.  Here, too, the issue is one of struggles between different kinds of apparatus."  Musil Notebook 26 : 335

I remember visiting your Dad's place at the Lake at least once.  Did I go more than once?  I managed to get up on the water skis for one or two short stints.  No upper body strength.  You looked like Apollo on water skis.  Never knew about Apollo for years later, of course.

This caregiver woman talking about the lake last week got me remembering it.  Must have

been the summer after our freshman year at La Salle.  60 years!   wow.  when we were graduating, 60 was a good age for lots of people to die.  Guess it is good that kids are

dumb and clueless, but old age now? hmmm  

I think you came at least twice.   Once you and Sitter stayed overnight or a weekend, and later a guy I knew was in a car that ran into the back of your car.   But there might have been at least one other time.   

Water skiing:  I remember you had a hard time holding onto the rope to get up out of the water.  Sitter did better.  He  got completely out of the water, but didn't last long.   

The lake has changed as it has been discovered by more = and richer = people from DC and beyond.   Dad's cabin and others near it still stand, but other cabins have been torn down and replaced by large houses, some with landing spots for family helicopters.   Apartment buildings have been built in several areas.  Mountain tops have been developed.   As the world has warmed, the wintertime ski resort has had to resort to artificial snow most of the time, and the lake no longer freezes over from late December to early May.   I remember digging out a five=foot snow bank in late May so we could get our car into our driveway and ice on the lake so thick cars could be driven on it.  Not any more.  P 

went to VW dealer while the women swam and talked with manager John Holcumb.  He checked with the technician and they think I can park the car for six months and find the battery will be lower but not that much lower, so not to worry.  Cookies at Whole Foods on Carlisle—-I think they remodeled a Kmart or something there.  Bigger than Academy.  Drove by Mackland and it looks pretty sad.  Crumpled drapes over the windows and

serious stucco damage along the lower front wall. Leakage or just rains?  

"State, nation, Church, profession, class, gender, etc.  The individual cannot fully belong to any of these groups because they are in conflict with each other.  Here, too, the issue is one of struggles between different kinds of apparatus."  Musil Notebook 26 : 335

Interesting query from Inchausti about his nephew deciding to take a tenured painting professorship in Chicopee at the Elms or in Ashland, OR.  

31 March   

Patrick White novel arrived.  Took a strange detour into Bataille and Genet on the kindle, mainly while waiting for Willow to have a massage in the morning and do PT work at Armada in the afternoon.  Time for some Musil and White.  Homework from Eloy to move on about getting a business permit for short term rental from the city.  

Herbert Schaumann's books arrived too.  I should do a detour through those for old time's sake.  Issue of Poetry from February 1947, carefully wrapped in plastic.  Big private Limited First Edition of Odysseus and Calypso  1956 Omnibus Studio Enterprises, Orange, New Jersey with

a small photo of three guys in bathing suits at the shore in the back

and a dedication  "For Calvin  as we were and are — Very much his book

XII, 4, 1956."  Maybe I should give these things to Donald when he gets here, for safe keeping on into posterity.  Or, better, to Nicholas, who has

a huge library and will make sure his books are disposed of properly once

he dies.  So for another thirty years at least.  But look the Children on a Doorstep is inscribed by Schaumann as well —-  "for Bernard Katz with best wishes  October 62  year of our high school graduation.  Book published in DC, Views Associate Press, 1961.  would it be this Katz?  Sir Bernard Katz, FRS^[1] (German pronunciation: 26 March 1911 – 20 April 2003)^[2] was a German-born British^[3] physician and biophysicist, noted for his work on nerve physiology. He shared the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1970 with Julius Axelrod and Ulf von Euler. He was made a Knight Bachelor in 1969.  

Or someone else?