whooof whooooooof

So we all have the same problems, I expect, and was just reading about -- because I am indeed writing a book on Pascal and have made far too many beginnings over the last three years, so that all sorts of perceptions I had then got lost or drowned, and now it is a MESS, but that is (probably, who knows? not me) the way things work - was reading about the company of "solitaires" who then taught in the "petites ecoles" of Port-Royal. How nice to be solitary in a company, and I think Mark Strand wrote something about it in a poem, I read today in our local newspaper. By the way, I remind myself, having read it in the enormously readable book on Jansenism by Francoise Hildesheimer, that  the name of Port-Royal, as in the convents of Port-Royal des Champs, in the field, and Port-Royal in Paris, comes from Porois, which is a swamp. Now that's really encouraging when you think your writing is 1) in a swamp 2) or swamping you.

What I first loved was, besides the secrecy of the Memorial, Pascal's death mask, so strangely like Antonin Artaud...

For Thanksgiving, we try to ask in anyone among our friends who isn't doing family things, so we had two visiting Swiss professors, one of the history of medieval philosophy (and yes I could have asked her about Augustine or Jansenius, but was so interested in her history of the Electric Fish that I got swamped down and didn't) and the other, author of a wonderful book on cubist poetry and art: that's something I would LOVE to have written, but in any case the translations and edition I did with my beloved disappeared friend Pat Terry is coming out NOW this week with Black Widow Press, called Pierre Reverdy, Early to Late, and it looks lovely and very Reverdian.

Enough, then, about Pascal and Reverdy and Augustine and Jansenius and the Flemish and Swiss -- except that I so loved being with Isabelle Lorenz in Berlin, of Swiss heritage and of worldwide delight -- am I lucky or what? 

trying sebald again

and now retrying to read Vertigo by Sebald because I assigned it to my seminar and can't seem to be involved in it -- Gerhard gave me a copy long ago, and i assigned it to my Anxieties  in Modernist Representations seminar, thinking it must be anxiety-provoking, like the film, but I don't like looking at Kim Novak so didn't resee the film and am now stuck -- this is after reading Dali (amazing rewriting of his original and funnily-misspelled French texts, all neatened up by Gala) and after a mixture of Artaud and  Unica Zurn, and it is fascinating reading these and those on our way to Derek Jarman -- so baroque is all this, so wonderfully thought-provokingly baroque

Bernard came to have tea today, writing about Motherwell, do I have anything else to say about him, ah yes probably but I long to write on Jon Schueler, and will I ever get around to making my wouldbe book about my grandmother the painter into a long essay about my relation to her,as my agent suggests? how, I wonder, would that make it more interesting? But I will of course try...

and the mile-high thesis on Max Ernst I have to read and report on and question the knowledgeable writer of the thesis about in a thesis defensein paris in January.. I see it looming up on the piano...

very odd: not having written anything on my blog for (what? months?) because life and work and friends and all that which is wonderful go on and you say" oh, i must absolutely remember to write down this... and that..." and then you don't or I don't , anyway, so since tomorrow at the 92nd street Y  I have to give my first of what feels like MANY talks about my new book: the Modern Art Cookbook, which I loved doing and love contemplating, and is very beautiful, I am eager to put off thinking what I might say and instead speak of less pressing matters -- have to speak at the 192 bookstore on nov 5, and the National Arts Club on Nov 21, and the Modern Language Association in Chicago in January and the Mid-Manhattan Library here on the 13 of January and then go over to Paris to be on a thesis defense about Max Ernst, which looks miles high and on which, of course, I will have to report in French, written and spoken

whatever these "lesser matters" might be

like teaching, well, no, really, just meeting with my phd students and their differing points of view about anxieties, which we are dealing with in "modernist representations" -- that is, what do you represent visually or verbally after the rite of spring and Kafka and all of those and the Munch Scream, that is, what do you next do? so we are reading and seeing de Chirico and Unica Zurn and Artaud and Thomas Bernhard and Sebald and lots of surrealist types

and I suppose I should try to think sleepy thought as opposed to my beloved Modern Art Cookbook, which is not about cooking so much as looking, and a few poems and recipes and how very very beautiful it is

I also just brought out a Pierre Reverdy with 14 different translators, just beautiful and very very small and blue-green, but not giving a lot of talks about that, more is perhaps the pity

perhaps some day