Without Lifting A Finger

Peeting, reading (Bernhard), playing with a nonsense line on Schleiermacher. When I thumbed through my Kindle Library it was not-so-surprisingly bare re S. I did find a slender sampling of the German Romantics, however, and I latched on to this bit (gleaned from the little I read on an essay about them, written by _________________), which became my mantra for the morning's walk: And reality is not as transparent as the Enlightenment assumed it to be; existence divided by reason leaves a remainder, as Goethe had put it. 

The photographer said the pilot said nothing about it. But if he'd gotten much closer they would've been lunching at Curry Village (old names die hard). *   By Photographer X 

Sure the clouds were gray to black, but this is Southern California. I stopped under a big leafy tree to wait it out (the first significant rain of the season?), took a few pics, and then hoofed it home with a little protection (windbreaker more than raincoat -- but hooded). The ducks were beelining it to the bank for cover, a leaf  (hanging on a thread or caught in the wind?) took forever to fall. *                   

Not sure what you'd call it. Bit darker than her last outing. Something about family, playing cards (Euchre, Horse), growing up, loss, home, home away from home, homelessness, memory, wounds, disappointment, grappling with the complexity of the world (world = age of humankind), ... *                                                                     

HCE Review is "an online literary journal published through the Creative Writing programmes at University College Dublin." My poem -- "Munising: Musing" -- is in the current issue (Volume I, Issue VI, p. 34).



The artificial world produced the artificial human being, and conversely the artificial human being produced the artificial world. Nothing is natural any longer, I said. We start from the premise that everything is natural, but that’s a fallacy. Everything is artificial, everything is artifice. Nature no longer exists. We always start from the contemplation of nature, when for ages we should have been starting from the contemplation of artifice. That’s why everything’s so chaotic. So false. So desperately confused. Where there’s no nature there can be no contemplation of nature, Gambetti—that must be obvious.

Left here about 5:00. Got to Peet's by 5:30. Only took early morning pics. I couldn't tell an Old Ford from an Old Chevy. I can spot the Old Woodies. On the way down (still dark) a line of classic cars spit and choked past me on Park. I was in a cloud of gray-blue smoke for at least 5 minutes. *                   

        

The country he's referring to is of course Austria. But these days ... * Wherever you look, tastelessness reigns supreme. And a total lack of interest in everything—as though the stomach were all-important and the mind quite superfluous, I said. Such a stupid people, I said, and such a magnificent country—an incomparably beautiful country. Natural beauty such as you find nowhere else, and a people that has so little interest in it.

The Crystal Palace   was a   cast-iron   and   plate-glass   structure originally built in   Hyde Park, London , to house the   Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in its 990,000-square-foot (92,000 m 2 ) exhibition space to display examples of technology developed in the   Industrial Revolution . Designed by   Joseph Paxton , the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m). [1]   The invention of the   cast plate glass   method in 1848 made possible the production of large sheets of cheap but strong glass, and its use in the Crystal Palace created a structure with the greatest area of glass ever seen in a building and astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights. The name of the building resulted from a piece penned by the playwright   Douglas Jerrold , w...

Dropped Hawthorne for now (he just toured the no-longer Crystal Palace in London) and have picked up another Bernhard. Apparently his last novel. Extinction . * The epigraph is by Montaigne: I feel death ever pinching me by the throat, or pulling me by the back. * Two clips: I had given Gambetti five books that I thought would be useful and necessary to him in the next few weeks, telling him to read them slowly and carefully: Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs, Kafka’s The Trial, Thomas Bernhard’s Amras, Musil’s The Portuguese Woman, and Broch’s Esch or Anarchy. * For a thinking person it is possible first to arrive at an ideal concept of art by way of nature, and then to arrive at the ideal contemplation of nature by way of the ideal concept of art.



More new phone play. 

Pandora's Box of Technology. Can't live with it, can't live without it. *