On the second night, you begin to recognize faces in the audience, realize you accidentally stumbled upon a secret handshake.
:::: Serious travel — the kind that doesn’t involve air-conditioned buses, fanny packs, and American buffets in Cairo or Beirut Best Westerns — is accompanied by an element of play: the same sort that takes place in readers when discovering their ways through what Roland Barthes referred to as writerly texts — those which, by short-circuiting literary codes, fling the reader out of his or her subject position, put everything up for grabs, announce bliss’s entrance to the banquet.
:::: What if I turn right instead of left? What’s that over there? What does this taste like? Where will I stay? What’s that statue, this rash, that rotunda, this bazaar, that café?
When does the next train leave, the next bus arrive?
:::: If required, we can live without a heart, Joseph Beuys observed.
:::: Serious travel is also accompanied by an element of calamity that can run the gamut from mild discomfort to affliction, depending on who you are, when you are, where, with whom.
Why, I wonder, hasn’t more been written about reading as a mode of pain?
:::: I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.
Felt Foucault.
:::: The fifth definition: desire to know or learn in a blamable sense; the disposition to inquire too minutely into anything; undue inquisitive desire to know or learn.
Videlicet: curiosity killed the traveler?
:::: Tell me how you interpret the adrenaline rush you’re experiencing, and I will tell you who you are.
Ortega y Gasset didn’t say, but could have.
:::: The steady rain unfreezing the lake minute by minute.
:::: Those all-you-can-eat buffets offering up the same blah food you can find at your local Chuck-A-Rama, Applebee’s, reminding you of those corporate novels offering up the same blah fiction you can find at your local John Grisham, Inc., Tom Clancy, Ltd.
:::: When André the Giant turned 12, e.g., he was already more than six feet tall and 240 pounds. He was so big, in fact, that he couldn’t fit on the local school bus, and his family couldn’t afford a car to transport him.
André’s father was a Bulgarian farmer named Boris Rousimoff. Boris worked on a farm about 40 miles northeast of Paris. In 1953, a skinny guy with an eagle’s smile showed up and bought some land next to his. Boris helped him build a cottage.
The guy’s name was Samuel Beckett.
:::: In the early sixties, there were more than 100 publishing houses thriving in New York. They were responsible for bringing out what we think of as innovative writers, including Barthelme, Coover, Delany, Gass, Le Guin, Pynchon. The recession brought on by the 1973 oil crisis changed that. Editors were laid off. Publishers went under or were absorbed by bigger publishers. Attention recalibrated from aesthetic risk to bottom line.
Being a brief history of the McDonaldization of U.S. publishing.
:::: Boris Rousimoff befriended his new next-door neighbor. Sometimes they played cards together. When Beckett learned the young André the Giant was having trouble getting to school, he offered to drive the boy in his own truck.
The only topic André could remember Beckett and him talking about on the way was cricket. That is, one of the conversations to which I would most love to have been privy in my life would have been utterly incomprehensible to me.
:::: [[I’m]] at a theatrical rethinking of Kafka’s The Castle.
Instead of speaking, the actors in the Novoflot opera company sing gorgeously rendered Schubert lieder against a sonic background generated by a dissonant ensemble featuring improvisation by a trombonist who, at one point, uses his instrument as a sledgehammer against a metal wall.
Ten minutes, and audience members are asked to rise and move from the primary theater to a connecting one. As soon as they take their seats, the stands they’re sitting in commence revolving. Tucked into a corner, an artist at a computer doodles stick figures, arrows, phrases that are projected onto the walls. The ceiling lowers, compressing space.
The production doesn’t retell Kafka’s text so much as actualize a series of moments that half-rhymes with it.
[[I]] end up feeling what [[I]] felt when [[I]] read The Castle, only more so: [[I]] negotiate a non-space more Kafkaesque than Kafka’s original, a production more like The Castle than The Castle is like itself.
Near the end, a dead child lowers by cord from the ceiling.
:::: The first postwar art gallery — Galerie Rosen — opened at 215 Kurfürstendamm three months after Hitler and Eva Braun changed tense beneath what is now the lawn of a residential housing project and kindergarten in the old East Berlin.
The gallery featured works that earlier in 1945 would have been denounced as degenerate and burned. Gerd Rosen, the founder, thereby flagged the reintroduction of a liberatory sphere for the arts in Berlin that championed an aesthetics of life over living death while standing in flagrant contrast to the head-slappingly dreary social-realist figurative one manufactured by the G.D.R. at the same time that attempts to share with us the beatitudes of farmish and factoryish monotony.
Being a brief history of the experimental and mainstream in U.S. publishing.
:::: Curiosity arrives in English from the Latin curiosus, meaning not only diligent, but also meddlesome, by way of the old French curios, which often denoted anxious, odd, strange.
In booksellers’ catalogues, the word curiosity means pornographic.
:::: Paul Bowles felt most inspired when inhabiting the interval between two places.
:::: Sit on your hands, the Stasi interrogator tells the accused in the opening scene of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, another rethinking of Kafka. They are in one of those confining tan interrogation rooms at the East Berlin detention center Andi and I visited earlier this week.
The interrogator’s flat tone and blank blue eyes announce: Pay attention to me. Anyone can happen next.
:::: The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, like Galerie Rosen, was located on Kurfürstendamm with its swank shops, hotels, restaurants, and Jaguar showroom. It was largely demolished in a 1943 bombing raid. The damaged spire remains as memorial.
Every few years scaffolding rises around the structure. A team of specialists sets out to maintain just the right ruined look — not too much destruction, not too little.
:::: This book: a waste aesthetics.
:::: Naturally O. isn’t suggesting New York doesn’t publish vibrant, surprising work: José Saramago, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Mark Danielewski, et alia.