Without Lifting A Finger

If nothing turns sour, we'll leave early tomorrow morning for Stuttgart (via Atlanta). Once I'm on the plane I'll leave my Kindlized Beckett behind and crack a shiny new paper copy of Durrenmatt's The Pledge . Anyway, a few parting bullets from Beckett's "Texts for Nothing": Piers pricking his oxen o'er the plain, no, for at the end of the furrow, before turning to the next, he raised his eyes to the sky and said, Bright again too early let us be dupes, dupes of every time and tense palp your skull, seat of understanding He'll have served in the navy, perhaps under Jellicoe, while I was potting at the invader from behind a barrel of Guinness, with my arquebuse Yes, there are moments, like this moment, when I seem almost restored to the feasible. Then it goes, all goes, and I'm far again, with a far story again, I wait for me afar for my story to begin, to end, and again this voice cannot be mine. That's where I'd go, if I could ...

A fellow Szymborska admirer passed this one on to me. Perhaps not her best, but even mediocre Szymborska outshines most of the competition (though there is no competition). Some Like Poetry Some - thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority. Not counting schools, where one has to, and the poets themselves, there might be two people per thousand. Like - but one also likes chicken soup with noodles, one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf, one likes having the upper hand, one likes stroking a dog. Poetry - but what is poetry. Many shaky answers have been given to this question. But I don't know and don't know and hold on to it like to a sustaining railing. [ Translated by Regina Grol ]

Wislawa Szymborska dies at 88; Nobel-winning Polish poet *** I'm a little late on Wislawa (not sure why I haven't posted anything till now), but you know I love her.

Adrienne Rich Obituary: The Obituary and Death Notice of Adrienne Rich | Legacy.com *** Honestly, other than glimpses here and there I don't know her work. On the day she died (I think) my classical music station (KUSC ) played her reading one of her poems: something about "trees" or "these trees" and perhaps "these times." I'll try to find it and post it. I didn't even hear the whole thing, but I thought: Her voice is convincing. Anyway, she died.

From Stories and Texts for Nothing : I thought the ending of "The Expelled" underscorable (via Kindle): When I am abroad in the morning I go to meet the sun, and in the evening, when I am abroad, I follow it, till I am down among the dead. I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.

Very briefly, however: on page 433 of 436. Zweig explains why, with approaching war and his being an "alien," he decides to stay on in England by quoting Shakespeare: Let us meet the time as it seeks us . He then goes on to explain how he tried to "contract a second marriage" in Bath (Lotte isn't named), but because both he and his wife-to-be had alien status the clerk, uncertain of procedures, declared that he would have to apply to London for further instructions. Zweig drops the story there and goes on to tell us that England had declared war on Germany. There is a brief flurry of sentiment before he concludes the book on a fairly positive note: But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

Château de Chillon, Montreux, Switzerland. , a photo by ayush.bhandari on Flickr. We visited here the last time we were in Montreux. Saw the dungeon, Byron's graffiti. Perhaps we'll go in again, but I guess it's much busier "in season" (last time it was winter and we practically had the guide to ourselves).

Princess Marie Bonaparte (2 July 1882 – 21 September 1962) was a French author and psychoanalyst , closely linked with Sigmund Freud . Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany . Marie Bonaparte was a great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon I of France . She was a daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte (19 May 1858–14 April 1924) and Marie-Félix Blanc (1859–1882). Her paternal grandfather was Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte , son of Lucien Bonaparte , who was one of Napoleon's rebellious and disinherited younger brothers. For this reason, despite her title Marie was not a member of the dynastic branch of the Bonapartes who claimed the French imperial throne from exile. However, her maternal grandfather was François Blanc , the principal real-estate developer of Monte Carlo . It was from this side of her family that Marie inherited her great fortune. [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Marie_Bonapart...

Of course I already knew of Zweig's connection to Freud (unlike my hero Nabokov, Zweig considered Freud a paragon of "the scientific mind"), but in the final pages of The World we learn, via Zweig, of Freud's final days in London: The thought of the eighty-three old invalid in Hitler's Vienna had weighed on me for months until finally the amazing Princess Maria Bonaparte, his most faithful pupil, had succeeded in getting this pre-eminent man out of subjugated Vienna and to London. I counted it a happy day in my life when I read in the paper that he had arrived on the isle and I saw the most revered of my friends, whom I had believed lost, restored from Hades.

Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky , ( Russian : Дми́трий Серге́евич Мережко́вский ; August 2 (14), 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris ) was a Russian novelist , poet , religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry , regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement , Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida Gippius – was twice forced into political exile. During his second exile (1918–1941) he continued publishing successful novels and gained recognition as a critic of Soviet Russia . Known both as a self-styled religious prophet with his own slant on apocalyptic Christianity, and as the author of philosophical historical novels which combined fervent idealism with literary innovation, Merezhkovsky was a nine times nominee for the Nobel Prize in literature , which he came closest to winning in 1933. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Merezhkovsky ]

Unless it's in the final 10 pages (will finish it later today or tomorrow) Zweig doesn't say peep about his wife (and leaving his wife for his co-suicide) or his final act. * What he does reveal is how much "being Austrian" and "being European" really meant to him. Perhaps--because he was such an international writer/person--he didn't initially think it would. But it did. Ten years before Austria falls to the Nazis Zweig meets a Russian author, Dmitri Merejkovsky, in Paris. The Russian exile's words then haunted Zweig (now a man without a country) later: Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.  According to Zweig before the First World War it was much easier to travel: Indeed, nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after the First World War than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminutio...

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From The World of Yesterday : Anonymity in every aspect of life is a necessity to me. Even as a boy I could never understand those writers and artists of an earlier generation who, by means of velvet coats and waving hair, by means of unruly locks falling over their brow, as with my esteemed friends Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, by means of showily trimmed beards or clothing in extreme style, sought easy recognition on the street. I am convinced that when the physical appearance of a man becomes familiar, he is unconsciously tempted to live like--to use Werfel's title--a "Mirror-man" of his own ego; to assume with each and every gesture a particular manner, and with this external alteration cordiality, freedom and carefreelessness of the inner self are usually effaced. Therefore, if I could start all over again today, I should try to derive double enjoyment, as it were, from those two happy states, those of literary success and of personal anonymity, by publishing ...

From The World of Yesterday : On that day, I was already in Westerland. Hundreds of vacationists were bathing gaily in the surf. Again, as on the day when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was announced, a band played to carefree people when, like white petrels, the newsboys stormed over the boardwalk. "Walter Rathenau assassinated." A panic broke out and the tremor spread through the whole Reich. Abruptly the mark  plunged down, never to stop until it had reached the fantastic figures of madness, the millions, the billions and trillions. Now the real witches' sabbath of inflation started, against which our Austrian inflation with its absurd enough ratio of 15,000 old to 1 on new currency had been shabby child's play. *** From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau :   Walther Rathenau (September 29, 1867 – June 24, 1922) was a German Jewish industrialist, politician, writer, and statesman who served as Foreign Minister of Germany during the...

From The World of Yesterday : Along the entire Kurfurstendamm powered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had never known such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakeable in their probity. Young girls bragged proudly of their perversion, to be sixteen and still under suspicion of virginity would have been considered a disgrace in any school of Berlin at that time, every girl wanted to be able to tell of her adventures and the more exotic, the better.

Richard Diebenkorn - Art Talk on KCRW *** I'd like to get to this exhibit. Apparently it runs to the end of May (almost). We'll see if I can get the girls to go with me. ***

Hitchcock Blondes *** Tippi Hedren Evan Marie Saint Kim Novak Grace Kelly

Sienna Miller to play Hitchcock obsession, Tippi Hedren - NYPOST.com

Eakins, Thomas (1844-1916) - 1871 Max Schmitt in a Single Scull , a photo by RasMarley on Flickr. I believe this was the Eakins painting that came to my mind this morning. I crossed the bridge this morning, under gray skies, and saw (looking to the Alamitos Bay side) three or four sculls abreast.

From the chapter titled "Intellectual Brotherhood": In 1914 a forty-eight line poem like Lissauer's "Hymn of Hate," an inane manifesto like that of the "93 German Intellectuals," or an eight-page essay such as Rolland's Au-dessus de la Melee , or a novel like Barbusse's Le Feu , became an event. The moral conscience of the world had not yet become as tired or washed-out as it is today.

Romain Rolland (29 January 1866 – 30 December 1944) was a French dramatist , novelist , essayist , art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. [1] Biography Rolland was born Clamecy , Nièvre into a family that had both wealthy townspeople and farmers in its lineage. Writing introspectively in his Voyage intérieur (1942), he sees himself as a representative of an "antique species." He would cast these ancestors in Colas Breugnon (1919). Accepted to the École normale supérieure in 1886, he first studied philosophy , but his independence of spirit led him to abandon that so as not to submit to the dominant ideology. He received his degree in history in 1889 and spent two years in Rome , where his encounter with Malwida von Meysenbug –who had been a friend of Nietzsche and of Wagner –and his discovery of Italian masterpieces were decisive for the development of his thought. When he returned to France in 1895, he received his d...

Haßgesang gegen England. Was schiert uns Russe und Franzos'? Schuß wider Schuß und Stoß um Stoß! Wir lieben sie nicht, Wir hassen sie nicht, Wir schützen Weichsel und Wasgaupass, — Wir haben nur einen einzigen Haß, Wir lieben vereint, wir hassen vereint, Wir haben nur einen einzigen Feind: Denn ihr alle wißt, denn ihr alle wißt, Er sitzt geduckt hinter der grauen Flut, Voll Neid, voll Wut, voll Schläue, voll List, Durch Wasser getrennt, die sind dicker als Blut. Wir wollen treten in ein Gericht, Einen Schwur zu schwören, Gesicht in Gesicht, Einen Schwur von Erz, den verbläst kein Wind, Einen Schwur für Kind und für Kindeskind, Vernehmt das Wort, sagt nach das Wort, Es wälzt sich durch ganz Deutschland fort: Wir wollen nicht lassen von unserem Haß, Wir haben alle nur einen Haß, Wir lieben vereint, wir hassen vereint, Wir alle haben nur einen Feind: _ENGLAND!_ In der Bordkajüte, im Feiersaal, Sassen Schiffsoffiziere beim Liebesmahl, Wie ein S...

Ernst Lissauer (16 December 1882, Berlin - 10 December 1937, Vienna ) was a German-Jewish poet and dramatist remembered for the phrase Gott strafe England . He also created the Hassgesang gegen England , or " Hate Song against England ". Lissauer, a friend of Stephan Zweig , was a committed nationalist and a devotee of the Prussian tradition. Zweig said of him "the more German a thing was, the greater was his enthusiasm for it." His devotion to German history, poetry, art and music was, in his own words, a monomania , and it only increased with the outbreak of World War I when he penned his hate song. Wilhelm II decorated him with the order of the Red Eagle. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria ordered it printed on leaflets and distributed to every soldier in the army. [ 1 ] Despite the obvious zeal, Lissauer ended by pleasing no-one. He came to be criticised by the vigorous anti-Semitic movement of the day for expressing such "fanatical hatred", whic...

DSC03671 , a photo by kettlemoraine on Flickr. I guess the earlier posts re "modern" architecture reminded me of this house. Saw it on my honeymoon nearly 18 years ago. *** The Maison de Verre ( French for House of Glass ) was built from 1928 to 1932 in Paris , France . Constructed in the early modern style of architecture , the house's design emphasized three primary traits: honesty of materials, variable transparency of forms, and juxtaposition of "industrial" materials and fixtures with a more traditional style of home décor. The primary materials used were steel , glass , and glass block . Some of the notable "industrial" elements included rubberized floor tiles , bare steel beams , perforated metal sheet, heavy industrial light fixtures , and mechanical fixtures. [ citation needed ] The design was a collaboration among Pierre Chareau (a furniture and interiors designer), Bernard Bijvoet (a Dutch architect working in Paris since 1927)...

From Beckett's "Assumption": The process was absurd, extravagantly absurd, like boiling an egg over a bonfire.

This whispering down, like all explosive feats of the kind, was as the apogee of a Vimy Light's parabola, commanding undeserved attention because of its sudden brilliance. *** [From The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett by C.J. Ackerly and S. E. Gontarski] 

Adolf Loos (1870-1933) - Villa Müller (1928-1930), Praha ' Prague ' Praga , a photo by Adam Gut on Flickr.

Ornament and Crime is an essay written in 1908 by the influential and self-consciously "modern" Austrian architect Adolf Loos under the German title Ornament und Verbrechen . It was under this challenging title that in 1913 the essay was translated into English : "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects", Loos proclaimed, linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts. [ citation needed ] In Loos's essay, "passion for smooth and precious surfaces" [ 1 ] he explains his philosophy, describing how ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. Loos introduced a sense of the "immorality" of ...

Mies van der Rohe pavillion , a photo by lgpueyo on Flickr. In Barcelona, Spain.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German architect . [ 1 ] He is commonly referred to and addressed as Mies , his surname. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, along with Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier , are widely regarded as the pioneering masters of Modern architecture . Mies, like many of his post World War I contemporaries, sought to establish a new architectural style that could represent modern times just as Classical and Gothic did for their own eras. He created an influential twentieth century architectural style, stated with extreme clarity and simplicity. His mature buildings made use of modern materials such as industrial steel and plate glass to define interior spaces. He strived towards an architecture with a minimal framework of structural order balanced against the implied freedom of free-flowing open space. He called his buildings "skin and bones" architecture. He sought a rational approach that would guide the creative process of ...

I've finished the trilogy and have begun re-reading Beckett's shorter prose (actually I've just started the intro to get a lay of the land), which I will read until I leave for Switzerland (April 1). No Kindle in Europe. I probably won't be on any trains (unless it's the one from Montreux to Château d'Oex ), but after last summer (on the train from Brussels to Amsterdam) I don't want to risk it (RexRead2 doesn't like the idea of falling into strange hands). I'll stick to paper in Europe: Durrenmatt's The Pledge and Fodor's. I'll also attempt to translate the impossible landscapes. Inside and outside. In between.

The Making of Samuel Beckett by J. M. Coetzee The New York Review of Books

you don't feel your mouth any more, no need of a mouth, the words are everywhere, inside me, outside me, well well, a minute ago I had no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I'm in words, made of words, others' words, what others, the place too, the air, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me, I'm the air, the walls, the walled-in one whether I am words among words, or silence in the midst of silence the question may be asked, off the record, why time doesn't pass, doesn't pass from you, why it piles up all about you, instant on instant, on all sides, deeper and deeper, thicker and thicker, your time, others' time, the time of the ancient dead and the dead yet unborn, why it buries you grain by grain neither dead nor alive, with no memory of anything, no hope of anything, no knowledge of anything, no history and no prospects, buried under the se...

CIMG0566 , a photo by dapog on Flickr. Don't know if I'll have the time to take the hike and get my own photos. It's the last leg of our journey--from Montreux back to the Stuttgart Airport--and if we just drive through or close to Todtnauberg I'll consider myself lucky.

The Storchen , a photo by oobwoodman on Flickr. Of course I'm interested in this hotel in Zurich because of Celan and Sachs--I'm hoping for some gold coming across the water.

Vevey Fork , a photo by JR Studio on Flickr. Apparently this sculpture was originally meant to be temporary. I guess it became part of the landscape. Also, so far as I can tell, just a few steps (dry and wet) from Charlie.

Statue of Charlie Chaplin, Vevey , a photo by mindweld on Flickr. Just a stone's throw away from Montreux, so we may stop by.

Agreed, agreed, I who am on my way, words bellying out my sails, am also that unthinkable ancestor of whom nothing can be said In other words, they like other words, no doubt about it, silence once broken will never again be whole But simply to discover, without further assistance from without, the alleviations of flight from self, that's all, he won't go far, he needn't go far No need to think in order to despair

From The Unnamable : No, I can't move, not yet. One minute in a skull and the next in a belly, strange, and the next nowhere in particular. Perhaps it's Botal's Foramen, when all about me palpitates and labours. * [From The Dissector's Manual of Practical and Surgical Anatomy by Erasmus Wilson, 1856]