Without Lifting A Finger

Had to be in the area for a PD. Anyway, got there early, stopped at a Bucks, and looked around a little bit. Hollywood Pres is close to the freeway and a good campground for a few. Stories they could tell. *                           

Pisanello   (c. 1395 – c. 1455), known professionally as   Antonio di Puccio Pisano   or   Antonio di Puccio da Cereto , also erroneously called   Vittore Pisano   by   Giorgio Vasari , was one of the most distinguished painters of the early   Italian Renaissance   and   Quattrocento . He was acclaimed by poets such as   Guarino da Verona   and praised by humanists of his time, who compared him to such illustrious names as   Cimabue ,   Phidias   and   Praxiteles . Pisanello is known for his resplendent   frescoes   in large murals, elegant portraits, small easel pictures, and many brilliant drawings. He is the most important commemorative portrait   medallist   in the first half of the 15th century, and he can claim to have originated this important genre. [1] He was employed by the Doge of   Venice , the Pope in the   Vatican   and the courts of   Verona , ...

Austerlitz, Emigrants, Rings of Saturn -- now I'm in Vertigo.  Will probably let Mr. Sebald rest after I've finished with Vertigo. Good stuff. Great. Could read him every 5 years or so and it would be like discovering him anew. Writing = Palimpsest. Maybe I'll return to his nonfiction (his work cries for a rubric of its own!) in a bit. *** Later that evening I returned to the bar on the Riva and fell into conversation with a Venetian by the name of Malachio, who had studied astrophysics at Cambridge and, as shortly transpired, saw everything from a great distance, not only the stars. Towards midnight we took his boat, which was moored outside, up the dragon’s tail of the Grand Canal, past the Ferrovia and the Tronchetto, and out onto the open water, from where one has a view of the lights of the Mestre refineries stretching for miles along the coast. Malachio turned off the engine. The boat rose and fell with the waves, and it seemed to me that a long time passed. ...

          



  A little too rough and tumble for Charlie. He's not used to sharing the bridge or path. Still, it was something to do. Only our second time.   *                                        

                

St. Sebaldus of Nuremberg [1]  (Sinibald, Sebald) is venerated as the  patron saint  of  Nuremberg , traditional administrative centre of  Franconia , and the guarantor of its independence. [2]  According to legend Sebaldus was a  hermit  and a  missionary . Legend Almost all details of the life of Sebaldus are uncertain, beyond his presence in the woodland of Poppenreuth, west of Nuremberg [3] which was explained by his being a hermit. However various legends about his life have been recorded.   One of the earliest legends (ca 1280) claims Sebaldus was a contemporary of  Henry III  (died 1056) and was of  Franconian  origin. After a  pilgrimage  in  Italy , he became a preacher at Nuremberg. [4]  Another text claims that he was a Frankish nobleman who met  Willibald and  Winibald  in Italy (thus dating his life to the 8th century) and later became a missionary in the...

Had to cut my walk short in order to go to Polly's pies. My contribution. The algal Pangaea was something of a revelation (highlighted by the morning sun). Revelation #2 was the cloud of small birds practicing synchronized flying. Amazing! * 

The denial of time, so the tract on Orbius Tertius tells us, is one of the key tenets of the philosophical schools of Tlön. According to this principle, the future exists only in the shape of our present apprehensions and hopes, and the past merely as memory. In a different view, the world and everything now living in it was created only moments ago, together with its complete but illusory pre-history. A third school of thought variously describes our earth as a cul-de-sac in the great city of God, a dark cave crowded with incomprehensible images, or a hazy aura surrounding a better sun. The advocates of a fourth philosophy maintain that time has run its course and that this life is no more than the fading reflection of an event beyond recall. We simply do not know how many of its possible mutations the world may already have gone through, or how much time, always assuming that it exists, remains. All that is certain is that night lasts far longer than day, if one compares an indiv...

Telephone pole by day, pontoon bridge by night. *                 

Waiting for the dentist to open. *                                       

Bucked near there (off of Bellflower) so I could get some painting equipment as soon as they opened. Touch up job. *     

Knowledge of that descent into the dark, for Browne, is inseparable from his belief in the day of resurrection, when, as in a theatre, the last revolutions are ended and the actors appear once more on stage, to complete and make up the catastrophe of this great piece. As a doctor, who saw disease growing and raging in bodies, he understood mortality better than the flowering of life. To him it seems a miracle that we should last so much as a single day. There is no antidote, he writes, against the opium of time. The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old.

              

Two of my poems -- "Settling In" and "Strindberg (Smoldering)" -- have made it into the latest Denver Quarterly : Volume 52, No. 1, 2017 .

Nabokov appears in Austerlitz at least once: his butterfly man photo is certainly there. So: he also shows up in The Emigrants . * But instead of strolling around Montreux, or going over to Lausanne, I set off to climb Grammont a second time, regardless of my condition, which by now was quite frail. The day was as bright as it had been the first time, and when I had reached the top, utterly exhausted, there below me was the country around Lake Geneva once again, seemingly completely unchanged, and with no trace of movement but for the one or two tiny boats that left their white wakes on the deep blue water as they proceeded, unbelievably slowly, and the trains that went to and fro at intervals on the far bank. That world, at once near and unattainably far, said Ferber, exerted so powerful an attraction on him that he was afraid he might leap down into it, and might really have done so had not a man of about sixty suddenly appeared before him – like someone who’s popped out of ...

    

            

Have found a house out of the city, at Eyüp. It is next to the old village mosque, at the head of a square where three roads meet. In the middle of the paved square, with its pollard plane trees, the circular white marble basin of a fountain. Many people from the country pause here on their way to the city. Peasants with baskets of vegetables, charcoal burners, gypsies, tightrope walkers and bear trainers. I am surprised to see hardly a single wagon or any other vehicle. Everyone goes on foot, or at best on a beast of burden. As if the wheel had not yet been invented. Or are we no longer a part of time? What meaning has a date like the 24th of September??