touring resorts

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The wealth of the literary market is too much to take in.

Today, I browsed the new book ads in the “Spring Books” special issue of the New York Review of Books. I’m a subscriber for decades, now having six unwandered back issues.

I’ll catch up now by one a day. (Also, I have six back issues of the London Revew of Books to wander.)

I’m nearly overwhelmed by the diversity of scholarly books which evidently have a market? How can so much specialist non-fiction (and fiction) find enough audience to be feasible for the publishers?

the lover

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When Terese gave me a copy of Duras’s The Lover to read ASAP, we were to soon “discuss” it at a café in the Castro (by her invitation) while her almost-husband Will was out of town (which his job required regularly, and Terese welcomed. They lived across the bay from S.F.: east of Berkeley).

I didn’t tell her I already owned a copy, though I hadn’t read it.

The sexual scenes are appealing, of course. But I flagged pages which were especially about the difficulties of Indochinese life. “You” hear about the sexuality of the book, but it’s really about a teen girl’s witness of colonial poverty exploited by wealthy colonialists.

That was fascinating. That’s what I wanted to praise and discuss: Duras’s writing. Duras was using the sexual story to bait awareness of colonial tragedy.

Time gives gravity to prettiness where beauty emerges

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Airy living, 15 years ago, “soothing W. H. Auden,” about extra-ordinary life.

That page hasn't been public. It was done for a beloved friend, Terese, whose eidetic memory penned Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" perfectly for me during a lunch.

to a literary scholar who felt stalked

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Today, Americans are avoiding what Weimar couldn't prevent, I pray. 

No, praying won't exorcise preyers. We teach. That was Heidegger's "politics," i.e., his extending the emancipatory interest of Being and Time by exempli-
fying critical phenomenology through ways of therapeutic thinking. (Don't mistake critical mirroring for Self expression.)

I thought of you again when recently I read (re-read, I forget) Heidegger's 1949 "Introduction" to "What Is Metaphysics?" He writes that separating one’s sense of being from becoming is invalid (ref.2.10, p. 285). It’s symptomatic of the metaphysicalism which he variably deconstructs in terms of others’ phenomenality.

A feature of metaphysicalist “thinking” is that it destines itself, whereas authentic openness loves to see chances for re-thinking.

Therefore, Heidegger may have let others’ stubborn attachments (and academic vanity) have its way (groupthink)—there being schadenfreude, fer sure—while he continued his own precursory appeal for ones to come.

a hallowing day

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A feature of the Classical mind, as well as Cartesian subject, was intolerance for irreverence. It insults the vanity of the traditional self (the lorded “subject”).

That kind of thought came back to mind today when I was looking at the Britannica article on “Romanticism,” which includes “…a predilection for…the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.”