Etta Place Eats Pie

I can’t hear myself read. I’m trying to read Gertrude Stein which is difficult at the best of times. She demands concentration. These guys are gabbing about this man’s house in Coral Gables with a 35 foot cruiser on the canal. He said that the guy pushed a button and all the draps opened. He said that his jaws dropped when that space opened up. Someone else is talking about going next week to bicycle in Uganda. Is it safe? Sure he exclaims. One guy speaks softly. He is no problem except that he keeps asking the guy with the booming voice questions about the house on the canal  down in Florida. Shut up already!  They are both estate agents or at least one of them is. The other I think is a contractor/real estate agent. God I wish they would all just shut up, can’t you see that I’m trying to read.

It’s a six hour boat drive to the keys, he continues on, but you can take a jet boat there in two hours. So guess what I’m going to do? Now he is taking about this guy he knows who has a 45 foot charter boat on Lake Erie. He charges $500 to take people out but he’ll take you and me for free. Where is Lake Erie asks the other guy? On the back of the newspaper is a weather map. Right here the guy doing all the talking says and points at the paper. It’s no where near the ocean. I don’t see how he gets the boat out into the Atlantic. Right here, the first guy points. That’s the Erie Canal. I give up on Stein. He is still talking, now it’s a story about meeting this guy in a bar, really nice guy he says. And do you know who he turned out to be? I have no idea. He was the first husband of Carolyn Kennedy, he is explaining. Really nice guy.

As a man I can neither clasp my arms together nor sully myself innocently. Quite the opposite: honor, courage, dignity, taciturnity, these are the attributes of male virginity – Witold Gombrowqicz – Bacacay, 2004 p110

Whoever rushes to aid

            Will not get this far

The torturer stands in front

            Of his victim

He smiles; he grins

He pounds; he kicks

            No assistance

            Is forthcoming

Dream, dream the blissful

            Dream

Reality has not

            Imagination

I am hand / And face / And feet / And things inside of me / That I can’t see; // What knows in me? Is it only Something inside / That I can’t see – Laura Riding – The Poems of, 1980  p17

Hello Water down there in Texas. You wrote that you read this. But you claim it didn’t happen that way, or at least that’s not how you remember it. This is for you, Walter, down in Texas – Fort Stockton or San Marcos, trying to get to Austin. And you had said that you had a dream. You invented something but you can’t remember what it was. I said, “I had a dream too. I woke up in the middle of the night and I said to myself,” I tell Walter, “make sure that you write all of this down in the morning. Now I don’t remember what it was that I was supposed to write down. I only know that I had a dream.” “Maybe that was the dream,” he says. “We can all be Martin Luther King.” “What?” “The dream was that you had a dream and was going to write it down. Mel Brooks was the director,” Walter continued, “This is my story.” “Go on,” I said as he started telling of another dream. “I imagined I was making a remake of the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid movie, this time staring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. Gilda Radner played Etta Place. I had only gotten three or four of the scenes filmed before I fell asleep.” “So you dreamed that you were asleep,” I asked. He wanted me to guess which actor had played the Sundance Kid. “And Mel Brooks was the director,” he went on. “But most of your actors are dead,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter,” he explained, “it was a dream. And who was it who had played Etta in the original”, he asked? The name was on the tip of my tongue. It was the same actress who had played Dustin Hoffman’s girl friend in the Graduate. Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. “And did you ever notice that Dustin Hoffman’s red Alfa-Romeo was going the wrong way on the Oakland Bay Bridge,” I asked? “Kathryn Ross, it was Kathryn Ross,” Walter says. “What ever happened to her?” “And whatever happened to that actress who was in Love Story,” I asked?

“So Walter, can you tell which is the original?” I held up the drawing I had just done and the illustration form Home and Garden magazine from which I torn and pasted pieces. “No”, he says, “I’m stumped!” “Where does that saying come from,” I asked? “What saying,” he asked? “’I’m stumped’” Then I remembered my dream from the night before. It was about Saabs. Broken down, worn out Saabs. I had owned three at one time all of them were constantly breaking down. At least one was always in the garage at any one time. But I didn’t tell him about the Saabs, neither the ones that I had once owned nor the ones in the dream. Dreams are totally without interest in their retelling.

For me to take a real interest in something it must be part of some context, it must be controlled by an idea. The experience itself I’d really prefer to have behind me, as a memory; the emotional effort it exerts strikes me as unpleasant and absurdly beside the point – Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities, 1956 p976

When the sun hits you

            In the puss

Like a piece of pie

That’s tomorrow

That’s tomorrow

We get inside music completely or not at all – Thomas Bernhard – The Loser, 1991  p84

To be left-handed is to be different in a way that no one will acknowledge. This is fundamentally different than to be different in a way that no one will not acknowledge. Differences are things that one gets used to, adopts to, or otherwise overcomes. But if you are left-handed no one acknowledges your accomplishment.

I could actually say he was unhappy in his unhappinesss but he would have been even more unhappy had he lost his unhappiness overnight, had it been taken away from him from one moment to the next, which is again proof that basically he wasn’t unhappy at all but happy and by virtue of and with his unhappiness, I thought – Thomas Bernhard – The Loser, 1991 p104

A Type I Error of Cognition: believing something is real when it is not – to find a non-existent pattern. No harm done. But a Type II Error (believing something is not real when it is) an get you killed.  Anthropocentric climate change may be a Type I Error but its denial is probably a Type II Error. One results in added cost the other in economic collapse.

What is most thought-provoking, is something altogether out of the hands of those who practice the craft of thinking – Martin Heidegger – What is Called Thinking?, 1968 p25

He needs a home most who does not have one

Poetry bears in itself the message that it is the destiny of human beings to speak the meaning of being – Laura Riding – The Poems of, 1980 p9