Joubert: Pensées; Bluets: Maggie Nelson; Michael Frayn: Constructions; On Bullshit: Harry G. Frankfurt. This is the top layer of my desk.
Underneath we have the orpheus quartet, work in progress. The seed list for Seed Savers 21: Touchstone Gold beans, Bath Island Cos, Outredgeous lettuce, Suyo Long cucumber, Fino fennel, Yerevan parsley, Lucullus chard.
George Craig thought Joubert was a good man but that there was somewhere a failure of nerve. I bought the Michael Frayn on George's recommendation. There's a physical resemblance too. In fact George Craig's face was right there at the top of a roster of faces from Colin Davis to Samuel Beckett.
Jean Joubert has an eager profile as he appears on the cover of Pensées: large eyes and a bandage-like cravat right under his chin, in the mode of the late eighteenth century.
Dieu et le lieu où je ne me souviens pas du reste.
Maggie Nelson reads Joubert and I seek out Michael Frayn, Constructions, from 1974, on the bookshelves, the pages spotted with brown. Read a piece in NYRB about How The Awful Won, followed by Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt.
Joseph Joubert, Maggie Nelson and Michael Frayn are all books of short thoughts. Sometimes this is the most peaceful, the least dictatorial reading. You read a line or three and then go happily into the white of the page, the white of your mind.
Se faire de l'espace pour déployer ses ailes
In the same way as real thinking
takes place when your head is empty,
the landscape inside you is larger
than the landscape outside you.
Kurt Johannessen
Plus, this evening, Alfred Brendel, Beethoven Opus 31. And the first rain in a while.
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