Lance Olsen - There

Go ahead: make a joke.

:::: Organ Recital : the term a friend uses to describe conversations among the progressively old about their bumps, twangs, bruises.

:::: Every parting gives a foretaste of death.

Reminded Schopenhauer.

:::: One morning et cetera et cetera:

3.2 Why, although Americans possess no identity, they do have wonderful teeth. . pg. 207

:::: Stan Brakhage used to tell his students at the Art Institute of Chicago you became an artist because, as a child, you lost someone or something profoundly important to you.

Art is the search for what has already left your life.

:::: Meat eating is a perversion in our human nature.

Opined Joseph Goebbels.

:::: O. wanders among mummies entombed below the Cappuccini Monastery in hilly Savoca in northeastern Sicily. They date from 1599, when local priests preserved a neighborhood monk so they could pray to him. Soon everybody in town wanted relatives remembered this way.

Now some lie in coffins. Some stoop in wall niches. They look like broken marionettes wearing the same nice clothes, now shredding, in which they were dressed for death. Among the children is two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo who died of pneumonia in 1920. The town nicknamed her Sleeping Beauty. Rosalia’s hair appears to be too yellow, her skin the tint of dirty talc.

Sleeping Beauty’s blood was replaced with a liquid made of formalin to kill bacteria, salicylic acid to kill fungi, alcohol to dry her out, glycerin to keep her from drying out too much, zinc salts to make her stiff.

When Rosalia’s epidermis began to taint, her coffin was placed into a hermetically sealed glass case filled with nitrogen.

Looking on, I can’t help thinking about Michael Jackson’s hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

:::: The lengths some people go to remain pretty, even after having assumed room temperature.

:::: Savoca, O. learns, is also where several scenes in The Godfather were shot. He didn’t know this before arriving. The Bar Vitelli, where Michael Corleone asked Apollonia’s father to meet his daughter, still serves cheap food and nostalgia for a time that never (quite) existed.

:::: Hitler loved to watch movies, but, if a scene involving cruelty to animals welled up on the screen, he would cover his eyes and look away until someone told him the coast was clear.

:::: You can’t get enough currywurst and french fries with that mayo dollop, the comfort-food staple of Berlin. Herta Heuwer came up with the idea in 1949. She obtained tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and curry powder from British soldiers and started hawking her snack, which quickly became popular with construction workers rebuilding the city, at a street stand in Charlottenburg.

The Currywurst Museum opened on 15 August 2009. It’s a five-minute walk from what used to be Checkpoint Charlie, where Soviet and American tanks faced each other during the 1961 Berlin Crisis.

:::: Or you could point to that defining moment in a once-new environment when you begin considering expeditions you initially undertook out of a sense of dynamic inquisitiveness as tourist snipe hunts and Facebook photo ops.

:::: Because the noisy jackdaws strutting through the sunny morning outside your bedroom window.

:::: The word for jackdaw in Czech is Kavka , a pun on Kafka , and hence the sign Franz’s father Hermann hung outside his fancy goods shop: the image of the black bird perching on an oak branch next to his name, the idea being to associate himself with a symbol of the German nation.

Later, he replaced it with a more abstract piece of foliage.

:::: Sisu is the Finnish word meaning strength of will, determination, perseverance, acting rationally in the face of adversity, deciding on a course of action and sticking to it in the face of repeated failures.

Integral to an understanding of Finnish culture, as in: the Finns fighting 42 wars with the Russians, and losing every one.

:::: Roy Batty, a replicant, virtually identical to humans in every way except that the memories he believes are his own are really someone else’s, except that he has a four-year lifespan, is more human than the other so-called humans around him.

Being a brief parable about how museums function.

:::: A ball will bounce, Richard Wilbur wrote, but less and less.

:::: Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

Bon-motted Baudrillard.

:::: On 17 August 1962, an 18-year-old bricklayer named Peter Fechter lost his bid for freedom in the West: he was shot in the pelvis by East German guards as he tried climbing over the Wall with a friend at Checkpoint Charlie. Bleeding profusely, screaming for help, Peter lay tangled in barbed-wire fencing at the base. Because he was inside the Soviet sector, American soldiers couldn’t rescue him.

His body was removed an hour later by the East German guards.

:::: One spring Walter Abish came to the University of Kentucky to give a fiction reading, and Andi and I drove him out to our cabin. Our neighbor Homer, whom we had hired to build our porch, was measuring and sawing wood out back when we pulled up. Walter was obviously flustered to meet an indigenous Kentuckian, yet recovered quickly and, eager to make pleasant conversation, put on his lovely European charm, picked up a board that was lying close by, and asked in his faintly Austrian accent: Is this what they call a two-by-four?

Homer carefully removed the board from Walter’s hands and asked: You work at the University?

:::: Is it possible I’m misremembering?

:::: It’s impossible I’m not.

:::: Linda Hutcheon: merci.

:::: We live our months at the Academy in a beautiful, tranquil, comfortable, rarified chamber like Sleeping Beauty’s in Savoca, like Michael Jackson’s in Neverland.

The staff takes immaculate care of us in what amounts to monastic epicureanism — good company, good-spirited support, dauntingly rich food prepared by über-chef Reinold Kegel served with a choice of red or white wine by Stefan Czoke, zero chores, freedom to do what we want when we want.

Andi and I cherish the knowledge sheepishly.

::::

3.6 The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person. . pg. 265

3.6.1 (There are photographs somewhere. I remember seeing them as a child.). . pg. 270

:::: Here are Scott Black and Eric LeMay: There’s that moment in Google Maps when you dive through the map and suddenly get an image of the street-level places and activities abstractly modeled at the higher level. Maps are artifacts of a certain height (whether actual or metaphorical), at once registers of the surveyor’s movements and guides to your own. You need a map to navigate a new city, but once you’ve made a home in it the map is superfluous. Essays are maps. They’re registers of movements through books, or streets, or woods, which also remind their readers that a map suggests a route through a place you have to make your own. At that moment of use, you both realize the map and make it redundant.

:::: Essays, of course, are maps of other maps which are themselves essays of other maps.

It’s failed mapping all the way down.

:::: Because Germans produce nearly 50 million tons of garbage annually, fourth behind Japan (52.36 million tons), Russia (200 million tons), and, of course, the U.S. (254 million tons).

:::: Because our assholes are behind us, we’d hoped to leave our shit there too, and move like Manifest Destiny, always forward.

Pointed out Charles Potts.

:::: Baudrillard again: We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end. Because finally we have never believed in them.