Without Lifting A Finger

     In the end a battle arises between you and the work, the same as that between a driver and the horses which are carrying him off. I cannot control the horses, but I must take care not to overturn the wagon on any of the sharp curves of the course. Where will I end up, I don't know, but I must get there in one piece. Moreover, I must, when I get the chance, recall the delicious terror of the ride.

No really set itinerary. Can't plan plan when you fly standby. Just have to get from Amsterdam to Poland and back again, so I'm thinking something like: West to East: Amsterdam, Aachen, Wurzburg, Dresden, Wroclaw; East to West: Berlin, Lubeck, Hamburg, Amsterdam. But like I say: all very fluid. And that's partly why I'm back to Gombrowicz and his Diary. * Why am I taking it out on poets? I will let you in on the reason for my benevolent cruelty: I know that the poet can bear just about anything and will not feel offended on the condition that you acknowledge that he is a poet. And here I can give them full satisfaction and can say a hundred times, yes, they are poets and even, as the Anthology will have it, the most outstanding poets (I have nothing against this).      But you, people, be on guard against their historically justified twilight. Do not allow yourself to be drawn into the little game which consists of their "singing" and your admiring. Re...

Finished Cosmos , sparingly dipping into Dziennik (kind of saving it for my trip to Germany/Poland this summer), and am re-reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory  (third time, first time via Kindle). * From Speak : My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.      And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:           ... Beneath the sky           Of my America to sigh                  For one locality in           ...

Finished Trans-Atlantyk (boombang) and am now splitting time (like an atom) between his Dziennik (Diary) and Cosmos (his last, and IMHO his best, novel). * From his Diary :      Upon meeting the young painter Eichler at the Grodzickis', I said: I don't believe in painting! (To musicians I say, I don't believe in music!) Then I found out from Zygmunt Grocholski that Eichler asked him if I make up these paradoxes for the hell of it. They can't imagine how much truth there is in them, truth that is probably truer than the truths that nourish their slavish "attachment" to art. From Cosmos : I was particularly astonished by the fact that both their mouths were now, in my imagination, in my memory, more closely linked together than then, at the table, I tried to clear my head by shaking it, but that made the connection of Lena's lips with Katasia's lips even more clear-cut, so I smirked, because truly, Katasia's twirled-up lasciviousness, he...