Without Lifting A Finger

Reread another Solstad novel (only two I have on Kindle but two more of his works will enter the e-world in May!). Started Handke's The Moravian Night  (read about another recent book by Handke, in which he compiles all the lines that arose in sleep over the period of a year -- or something like that -- but I guess no one's in a hurry to translate that one); read (as an aside) a bit on his "critics." * A short excerpt from The Moravian Night : No sign indicating where the village of Porodin ended, one of the last enclaves in Europe, barely tolerated, and one that stretched mile after mile, “werst after werst” along the road. Did it end at the point where not even a dog still panted along beside the bus? Or where the first of the barns out in the fields lay in ruins, where the first vineyard huts had been burned to the ground, or at least charred? Where, despite the fertile pastures, neither sheep nor cows were grazing, and certainly no pigs skidded through the ...

Didn't stay long. I remembered (or saw it earlier) so we took Charlie. I don't like crowds, Charlie doesn't like crowds. We squeezed through the crowd, took a few pics, then walked halfway (turned where the swan planter used to be -- will it ever find a home?) and exited to walk back along the streets. A. said she heard a clap, which meant they'd cut the ribbon. *

Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: “If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.” * The main problem with such a job was that they were incapable of receiving what he was supposed to give them. * He had even been amused at the thought that his teaching bored the pupils, thinking, Well, such is life, that’s the way it is, and must be, to teach in high school in a civilized country. The very thought of the contrary situation sufficed to make one quickly understand how impossible it would have been if it had not been the way it, as a matter of fact, was. Just try to imagine what things would be like if the cultural heritage awakened an enormous enthusiasm among the coming generation, so that they devoured it greedily because it had both the questions and the answers to what they had secretly been preoccupied w...

I was a little disappointed -- but it was my second time and I had a cold. I made only two trips: omelet, please, and then I got a few breakfast sides. Omelet #1 + OJ, coffee, and champagne; rest and then Omelet #2 + OJ, coffee, and champagne. Always good views w/ or w/o portal. I saw the pool (through a glass darkly) for the first time. Remind me of a mini-version of the inside pool at Hearst's Castle. *

I've only "clipped" once (and I'm almost finished), but I'm enjoying. Fast then slow. And the "project" is a bit opaque, i.e., Seems an odd way to mourn your own son. Of course it's more than that -- and who am I to say what Coetzee should or shouldn't do -- but of course that is remaining an idee fixe for me throughout. Oh, and it's pushing me to read Dusty-and-Dusky's  The Devils . I think I've started it but never finished. We'll see. * He turns the pages back and forth distractedly. Forgiveness: is there no word of forgiveness, however oblique, however disguised? Impossible to live out his days with a child inside him whose last word is not of forgiveness.

In my dreams I am again in the desert, plodding through endless space towards an obscure goal. I sigh and wet my lips. “What is that noise?” I ask when the guard brings my food. They are tearing down the houses built against the south wall of the barracks, he tells me: they are going to extend the barracks and build proper cells. “Ah yes,” I say: “time for the black flower of civilization to bloom.” He does not understand. * I cannot save the prisoners, therefore let me save myself. Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.  

My little poem "Limerick" is in the current issue of Salt Hill .