Without Lifting A Finger

Finished The Loser (will probably hit TB up again real soon) and have returned to Kafka: The Trial . Though certainly school has taken a toll on reading and writing. Drib-drab. Here-there. Lots of good biographical info in the Afterword (Mark M. Anderson) of The Loser , but I've chosen this bit because I found it quite telling and near the mark: Bernhard later noted that it was his grandfather who instilled in him a fierce intellectual independence, warning him, for instance, not to take school seriously or to believe his teachers.

Beer-truck drivers have fascinated me since my earliest childhood, so too that day. I was fascinated by the way they unloaded the beer kegs and rolled them through the lobby, then tapped the first one for the innkeeper and sat down with her at the next table. As a child I had wanted to become a beer-truck driver, admired beer-truck drivers, I thought, couldn't look often enough at beer-truck drivers. Sitting at the next table and watching the beer-truck drivers I again fell prey to this sentiment from my childhood, but I didn't dwell on it for long, instead I got up and left the Dichtel Mill for Traich, not without having told the innkeeper that I would be back toward evening or even earlier, depending , and that I was counting on an evening meal. While going out I heard the beer-truck drivers ask the innkeeper who I was and since I have sharper ears than anybody I also heard her whisper my name and add that I was a friend of Wertheimer's, the fool who'd killed himsel...

Re Thomas Bernhard's "ovular logic": still enjoying it. Only now it'll have to be in smaller bites: Summer is over (too soon). * Excerpt #1: The trip from Vienna to Chur took thirteen hours, Austrian trains are a disaster, their dining cars, assuming there is one, serve only the worst food. A glass of mineral water set in front of me, I planned to reread after twenty years Musil's The Confusions of Young Torless , which however I didn't manage, I no longer tolerate stories, I read a page and can't read further. Excerpt #2: The mind, wherever it makes its claims felt, is finished off and locked up and of course immediately branded as mindless , he said, I thought while looking up at the restaurant ceiling. But everything we say is nonsense, he said, I thought, no matter what we say it is nonsense and our entire life is a single piece of nonsense. I understood that early on, I'd barely started to think for myself and I already understood that, ...