covered in kilometers

"I walked the last block between snorts and moans. What was left of me arrived at the door to the building. The neighbor from the tenth floor was just leaving, the woman who would go downstairs with her poodle to the consortium meetings. I went in and went up on the elevator. In the mirror I was horrifying. That wasn't the same face that had taken the elevator down that morning. Deadly pallor, sunken eyes, disheveled hair, rumpled clothing, out of alignment, asymmetrical, hunched over, filthy, beaten, guilty, and covered in kilometers."

~~ from The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

The Woman from Uruguay

"That was all I told Guerra about you, Catalina. I didn't say one word more. There was a certain loyalty in my disloyalty. And I was very drunk. All of this was happening as we were jaywalking, in a state of grace. Fortunately Uruguayans actually slow down when they see you set foot in a crosswalk. In Buenos Aires we would have been run over."

~~ from The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

men didn't buy books

"[The literary agent] asked if I had taken a look at the rejections his assistant had scanned and emailed me the week before. Half a dozen letters on publishing house letterhead gave brief, polite explanations why they would not be purchasing my novel. One editor said she had bought too many novels similar to mine. Another explained he couldn't buy a wrestling novel because women wouldn't be interested in wrestling and men didn't buy books."

~~ from Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill

perfect relaxation

"Some people are so constituted that they can sleep well all their lives, or during the best part of their lives, or at least a tolerably good part of their lives, I thought, while some others, those like me, can't sleep, they never sleep, they are condemned never to be able to sleep, for even when they are sleeping they are never really relaxed by nature and what they do can't be called sleeping, these people never sleep as long as they live because all thier lives, no matter how long they live, they have never had the advantage of a perfect relaxation of their head and body."

~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

three points of support

"A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position, so Roithamer had written." ~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill

 

Almost Heaven

Andrew Cockburn's recent Harper's Letter from Washington, "The Enemy Within," is where I  learned that Senator Joe Manchin lives on a house boat named Almost Heaven when he's in D.C. 

A few days later, I read that covid-positive Lindsey Graham was socializing with other senators on that very same vessel just before it was recognized that Graham had the virus.

what, in fact, was I doing here?

"[W]hat, in fact, was I doing here?—why was I so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind (and deliberately so or with his eyes wide open, as he liked to put it)?—why had I come here under cover of darkness, walking along these empty and godforsaken streets like a thief?—why, when visiting his museum near the Kuznechny Market or other places connected with him, had I kept somehow to the side or trailed behind, as if I had turned up there by accident and none of it really interested me?"

~~ from Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin

isosceles triangle

"When they arrived home, [Dostoevsky] fell on his knees once again, begging for ten francs, only ten francs, to try his luck just once more, for the very, very last time, because he would never have another chance again—after all, they were leaving, and of this very last time he just had to win, if only a small amount, if only ten francs equal the amount he was asking from Anna Grigor'yevna—but the main thing was to win without losing anything, not even a single franc, and then he would be able to leave with peace of mind because the last word would have been his, the last spin, and then all this would take on the appearance of an isosceles triangle which, despite having very acute angles and a blunt apex, at least would have some kind of peak—otherwise, it would all just resemble an ordinary horizontal line with nothing to crown it."

~~ from Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin

this totally decrepit modern world

"The very first lines of this effort, when I reread it, gave me the idea of editing a book-length collection of Roithamer's short descriptive pieces, in a time such as ours when everything but what is noteworthy, everything but what is truly original as well as most brilliantly scientific is edited and published, when every year hundreds and thousands of tons of imbecility-on-paper are tossed on the market, all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products, at such a time it is simply one's duty to bring out a work of art as unassuming and unadorned as the art of Roithamer's prose, to publish it, even though it would not be likely to make any kind of a stir, I think, but just to make sure that it would never be lost again, once it is printed and preserved forever, because these prose pieces of Roithamer's are indubitably precious gems and the greatest rarities anywhere, including our country."

~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard