Rita would be at the door already, expecting her, the radio playing behind timidly and tinnily to suffocate her greeting in the hopes it told this small old women to leave her alone.
Any post for me? She would ask crooing and coo cooing. She fancied Rita as a version of her younger self, a sister of time through which they were connected by their heart rates and all their benign likes and dislikes, and other unspeakable things.
Rita lied, no nothing today miss. And she would turn very suddenly running. She had had her ear next to the door knees bent and giggling to herself she would spring away towards the bathroom on her left and start running the tape the cascade of sounds beginning. The slight creak of the handle, a hissing rush towards the first breaking drops from the spout till the full stream met with the light grey ceramic basin and finally a gurgling whirl of white water pirouetting back from whence it came. Rita danced with the water as the radio chimed in, laaaa diiii da lla laaaaa. No she hated this song. And switched channels. A car went by, on the street, several suddenly. The street had lied, complied with the radio, where the sound was really coming from. She was tuned into the Tokyo Grand Prix coverage live from Japan of the world formula 1 championships. The voice of the commentator rattling in German irritated her even more and she switched it off. A car rolled past outside.
She sat down and tried again to read malcolm lowery.
28/4/25
Is it Rita after all? A few pages, maybe 70 odd, into Here us O lord in heaven they dwelling place, malcolm lowery, and I’m at the point of realising that ushara never described the tone, style, or even particular subject matter of this book. After the first extract, I think i understood.
It was the silver pointed Albatross skies and the disastrous ring that throbbed through the opening pages. Lowerys setting, an out of time mid twentieth century pacific northwest, is gothic, industrial, and mutters his own, slightly failing, theology of american industry and folk lore. I read it with an abyss of difference from ushara, and from rita? whose to say. She read in the 80s which is enough of an abyss, the sliding chasm of history opening and closing between each sentence, that to contact her thoughts and she went back and forth in the pages and matriculated thoughts from point to point seems impossible. I can’t read her writing. Lower is unreadable in his own way. He makes reference to being enmeshed, a writer himself enmeshed in his character sigbjorn who is himself and suffers from the same homointertextual syndrome.
And my own reading is as far away from as all of this. I cannot take down the lenses i spent hte last eight years training as a scour book to book looking for the right one. The thing that hits and won’t slide down the wall leaving, at best, a memorable stain. Im brought back to my failure to conquer le clezio, the flood. Conquer is the wrong word, I joyfullyy gave up on several occasions finding the endless french prose of existential dread and malaise tiresome and cheap. Lowery has some of this but the american drama, the actual safe guarder of revolution?, seems less reprehensible. Lowery lines his words with the pangs and the throes but so stand next to it his fierce indignation, maybe ebbing from his merseyside roots or more standard alcoholism.
I thought about writing and addction. Seemingly writing is always a codependent habit, fixated itself with some other activity that the writer engages in, either simultaneously or in contradiction to the work itself. For lowery, and possibly many others this was drinking, a serial devotion. Larry mcmurty and benjamin and others were addicted to reading and this constitutes itself a completely sickly hope to have read endlessly so that one can write and never beginning.
But this is all pooh sticks. Rita had no such issue, the highlighted sections and little notes lapse onto Lower’s dramatic one liners and slightly biblical tone. Aikan described him as a boy chased by furies but there appears, to me, another lowery, a lived and meticulous describer who took in that catastrophic air of a nation in ascendence in the midst of its own perpetual crises.
The Manx hymn quoted at the start is yet to connect. Outside of fishing that is. But, despite his years (more like months) at sea Lowery is no fisherman, I doubt he caught a fish in his life. But the endless darkness that was on show in those opening pages, a couple passing a father and son, the zoo and others. The story wraps a surrendering feeling as the reader is told that the ship with the message the little boy put out to sea was found by his now wife with whom he walks. Are we this man, receiving the message again? I hope not, I found the sigbjorn text that follows confused, no doubt it is, Lower is uneditable in that way.
There is an obvious serendipity between the exercise sophie and ushara describe, the emergence of scenes and moments from investigative works and the way in which these vignettes can compile upon each other to build an image of a person and lowerys failure to deliver on his masterpiece, a voyage that never ends. In the end it didn’t end because he didn't finish it. It was a missing gap shifting between the tide. The missing texts, the unedited contents, the conflicting drafts and versions. They spill out the guts of a man who seemed to reform his own life in the same story multiple times and was still never able to decide upon the shape it would take. This is of course no surprise, the hardest possible subject to pick to edit meaningfully would be the course of ones own life. Lowery’s thought of enmeshed doesn’t scratch the surface.
Rita ate lunch and tried to read again but now she was too full when before she was too hungry. She always left it too long to eat, focusing intently on reaching the right point to stop and sighing with the turning of every page that didn’t reveal a solidly broken paragraph or, better yet, a remarkable end to a chapter. At which point she could get up and lithely prepare padron peppers and curry or muesli if she was rushing to go to meet Andre somewhere. Instead, stomach singing in acid and luke warm coffe she let reptilian memory crawl into play as she tried to focus on the text with the power of the sun alone.
She obsessed with the interval moment between the lovers and the ending of the opening story, their slow eyes watching the canadian lynx hunt a grey squirrel in a bone stone cage.
“The two beautiful demonic creatures prowled and pace endlessly, searching the base of their cage”
She hasn't underlined this moment, there is no writing on either side of this two page spread, pages 18 and 19, and only at page 20 does she hesitantly underline in pencil - or maybe this was ushara. Either way rita didnt care until page 21 which has its page number circled and highlighted with a rich pencil shading. I don’t think ushara would have done this, it feels crass. Perhaps she hated it and wanted to wipe the number from the book but the pencil only showed the intensity of feeling, unable to submerge it in blackness of the landscape lowery had unfolded. It was not night, presumably, when this story is set, but it feels it, to rita, and me. And more so these names ‘sigurd and astrid began to laugh’
Nordic and arthurian, these names make no sense but to emphasise Lowery’s theology.
Rita rather was so fixated on this moment that the pencil sat lingering in her hands, her teeth, beneath the back of her knee where she couldn’t see herself.
She busies herself with different pencil and pen writings in the next few pages as she tries to focus while hunger sits on her, the frog on her chest.
All the while, reading rita reading lowery and trying to avoid Ushara’s concomitant contaminating presence in a book I suppose myself to come to understand, i think of my own pacific north west moments. Lying down on the sofa uncle bob came to mind. This strange american man that Sam knew, the whole time I had known Sam he knew uncle bob and I only met bob when i most hated sam and myself and was burdened with thought. Bob worked at home depot, lived in tacoma washington, had a house full of fake plants and buddhist statues well tended by his wife, wore a ‘i survived vietnam hat’ and took his holstered 9 millimeter pistol to work at a furniture store which he said he preferred to bear sprey in case of an emergency. There are bears in lowery’s seattle zoo too. Bob loved ice cream and took us for all you can eat chinese buffet in a retail park with the largest car park i’d ever seen. He told us which people loved going there and another day I watched a film about a veteran and a dog on the sofa with him. Bob has no place in lowery’s world, or our the joint imagination of myself and the previous readers of this exact copy of this book, who, so far as i know, number at least two and probably no more.
Lowery says the squirrel was mocking the lynx. But bob is probably the most real part of the landscape i am reading about that I had ever encountered.
I thought of le clezio because it was in his book that the notion of ‘reading it wrong’ first dawned on me, but i’ve never managed to unlock the sentiment i meant by this in natural language at all. Ive explained it a couple of times to people who seem to process parts of it. It is that in every letter, word, page, and book every part of language is being deployed for specific reason, or not, but either way it is different to every previous incarnation of that text, language, and so you should read everytime differently, and if not it is an injustice to yourself and whatever you findd yourself reading. And in this, at the time of this conclusion, I felt that I had been reading all of life wrong, as if not noticing that every person and situation I encountered was not itself specific and untampered with till i had read it wrong and tried to acclimatise to my own series of reference points and mapping.
“But when the full force of the wind caught them, looking from the shore it was like gazing into chaos.” ushara ignored this line but the following sentence “the wind blew away their thoughts” has been underlined in blue pen. This must have been rita, ushara would never use a blue pen.
I wish I spoke french and understood frere jacques - brother jack?
Am I this little writing, a small letter from a boy to himself, waiting to be found by the person who would know me best? I hope not. I betray myself everytime I speak, and haven’t the heart to put anything out to sea.
2/5/25
A few days since writing and I almost snapped. There was a fire in the college, the roof caught fire and almost collapsed, we had to escort 30 SEN adults to a park whilst running out a burning building. Luckily no one was hurt. I didn’t think it stressed me I managed the situation fine but that night I dreamt about being stabbed, twice above the breast with a very sharp cake knife by well dressed thugs. I sent a long text to Ushara when I was coming home, clearly over stressed and struggling to hold it together, I am unable to breakdown properly. In the meantime Rita has been slow going, and Malcolm both invites and annoys me. At times I’m endeared by the intertextual references, the comedy, the drama. He ticked many boxes of my reading, kierkegaard (who at this point given the existentialism tying itself to his writing feels particularly relevant). Swedenborg was given a breif mention in through the panama canal. Edwin Muir even appeared at one point, famedd Orkenyian writer who taught George Mackay Brown. I rarely ever see Muir mentioned but his poem, adams dream, sticks with me deeply, I think ushara would like it, ‘who are you”! god to adamm where are you lingering in the eternal questions of humanity. Rita however, I don’t think would. her occasional notes seem increasingly academic and cerebral, she’ll jot down a definition, or give the date and birthplace of a writer that Lowery mentions. e.g wordsworth. At one most initeresting point, page 106, she’s underlined a passage and starred the word ‘perused’ and written “(formal), read carefully” - that is a native german speaker has looked up the word perused and written its definition in the gutters of the page. I am almost certain this is Rita not Ushara for several reasons.
Firstly , it is written in blue pen and as I said I doubt ushara would ever write in blue pen in a book that is her bible, for good reason blue pen is horrible.
Secondly, I’m not sure ushara would write the definition of the word in the margin- she may well look it up and note it down elsewhere but probably not in the book itself. especially not this book.
thirdly, and the biggest one, even if ushara did use a blue pen and write the definition of this word, she would never write (formal) when describing a verb. English does not have formal and informal tenses in the same way that German does, or certainly they are not as important in written or spoken english. Only a german would think to put the form of verb before giving the definition.
However, in all of this there is a beautiful serendipity in which, in writing the definition, Rita accidentally gave vital instruction to later reader of the book. If you had not noticed that this was a definition it becomes quiet admonition to read this page particularly carefully! which perhaps Ushara did - I certainly did until I realised this is what Rita was saying. Rita has then twice underlined the use of the word ‘for gods sake pity me’ which ushara has mirroredd by underlining for a third time in its third use on a ddouble page spread 108-109. perhaps I am wrong about my blue pen theory but I think I can still tell the differnece.
I have glanced cheating to the latter pages and there several pen strokes and pencil lines flurry around eachother wildly, the pages covered in annotation and reference. at that point rita has come to life and is dancing through time with ushara in the malaise of thoughts the lowery has imposed upon the two of them. I am envious of a writers means to do so .
In truth, the greatest difference between the two readers I have noticedd so far is also one of form not style. Thus far Ushara only writes in first person, I and me, Rita writes abstractedd, she gives short hand definitions and dates but does not elaborate on it. she is many ways the greater mystery there .
in page 104 where ushara asks “do I consume myself at both ends like a candle” and underlined the sentence she is referencing. rita has written nothing but simply underlined “stichometry” and “avuncularly” - fair enough, i also didn’t know what these words meant till i googled it - for Rita is this an exercise in vocabulary?
is Lowery an english experiment for her? it would seem odd to read Lowery if so, his hyper-text and failed modernist magnum opus is not where you might think to pick up a host of english words .
side note: the word Manx is mentioned several times in the text and at one point Rita even highlights it and his written “isle of man” in the margin.
All the while Lowery is rambling along in his sort of brilliant fashion waxing lyrical about poe, and keats, and beaudelair, and shelly and keats and melville and poe and its all a bit jumbled. It’s clear he had a strong attachment to the gothic, i noted this in the opening story without him banging on about poe and his death. As for me, I like the writing style and there is certainly merit to it but I am finding something reprehensible in this character Sigbjorn. I’m not sure why he would invent a character that is just himself and to what end this serves> maybe all writers do this.
the next passage I have to read “elephant and colloseum” is curiously unmarked, with only one sentence underlined and a few lines of writing in the margin on one page.
Was rita a writer?
I hope so,
She was asleep and then awake and fully dressed and brushing her teeth and filling the kettle and reading a book in a flash with the last sun of the morning making way over the equator of the sky to turn am to pm and leave us all waiting of what comes next. Rita soaked in those final moments, it was a cold cooked october, sub zero and bone dry. her finger were numb in the flat and the pages stuck together , supine and petrified and her fumbling extremities trying to pry them apart. eventually she nibbed the page and turned to read on about Poes time in Tobacco Alley, Richmond Virginia.
she spat and flushed and turned, the book fell into her back pocket and with several quick turns she left the front door. the chaos of her apartment fell still as the cold doorway of a berlin tenemant block stole those final moments of sunlight from the afternoon. the building was grey and blue, and probably built shortly after the first world war in an attempt to reignite the west part of the city. now it was already crumbling, the wall paper thinned and fadedd from the cold and the sun alike, the weathers of opposites having a doubly corrosive effect upon this immaterial stick up paper that ran along the walls. Rita took a deep breath and started with pace along the hallway and downstiars. she skipped two, sometimes three at a time leaping in bounds, her short body responding in bouyant and light effect to the cold air. she felt like freeze dried food she’d heard that astronauts eat or the crisp warmth of clothes out of a tumble dryer. she didn’t have one but she’d been to America in 1978 for half a year to study literature at Dartmouth New Jersey. or had she? i can’t remember, I don’t know who she is or where she was going. I myself am falling apart at the seems. I want to escape desparately from the tumble dryer, the stretch has torn me assunder and Flawrence, Scab and all the kings men couldn’t save me. I’ve thought that I could synthesise my own novel with this rambling mess of a project diary. - becoming rita hermnastrasse - how Am I to do this ? or not , can I avoid trying to whilslt reading this book . I certainly will not becoming Mr lowery. - he seems poisened by post war existentialism, by the sickly envy of the european novel that suggests you have to have suffered, to live in suffering in order to make a great art work . for this was being an alcoholic. certainly there is a majesty to suffering over ones art, as there is with any serious commitment, and certainly in the 20th century, probably before, in the sterile medicalised world there is a loss to the skill of suffering, of dying. Im dying - you keep sayying that but you’re killing everyone around you - dog day afternoon - SENNECA - another story goes under the rug.
do i have to read lukacs theory of the novel to write a good one? did i get close enough before? nothing but a trembling in the leaves . All of them would have been better off if they weren’t so sickly, proust and benjamin included. if benjamin had ever got a job he might have had the fortitude to make it out and not killed himself? maybe - unless he’s tied to it somehow, refusal to participate other than reading. that was his addiction, we spoke about this before. addicted to reading is most writers. but not lowery, no, simple minded fool chose the bottle. so did dylan thomas but he had a one leg in the grave from birth and he was welsh which combined make him a magical genius, he didn’t need to get on a boat to china at 19 in the hopes of discovering something fantastic about the world. But i’m driving myself into the wall of a great coloumn hoping that i will reverse and drive again and again and that eventually the coloummn will collapse and I will have shattered expectation and gone so far beyond it andd as the coloumn falls it will make a megolithich air crushing sounds before vaporising my body and my car into a single biomechancial dredge of bolts and brain, gears andd grey matter subsumed into the same mulch. where upon I will lie for eternity muttering in tork and hebrew about the strange feeling of being so at one with another body of matter. instead the coloumn doesn’t break, it is too strong, the vultures along the top, everyone I know and love, want the coloumn to collapse, they are cheering me on as aI crash time and time again and my limbs fracture and my bones come jutting out my body taring my apart and leaving my skin a fragmented carcass but stilll im unable to stop, i keep moving, keep driving at the fork in the road towards the coloumn. they laugh every time and oh shame, better luck next time, come on!, hungry hungry hungry.
after hunger and i ate too much i want to be sick who is this rita you talk so much about and wont she just get on withit and appear before my eyes. I want to see her cloaked in reality, a woman leathered head to toe in the pages of a book. women exist in the margins of society and this women really does . she lives in the margins of a page and walks along the lines of texts and hides and reappears and I’m supposed to understand why on that day she left the cold berlin apartment block, got on a single decker bus and went to work in a cinema, where she tood reading, deja vu this is already the words I planned,
damn it all, she’s wrapped in her head reading Edgar Allen Poe, the raven, gronk gronk, and having cinerous night mares in the daytime dark of a substreet level german movie theatre showing a mixture of german and english language films, west berlin, american cinema is on and they’ve got their hands on a controversial al pacino flick- dog day afternoon - a real life story - a story from real life with the real names of the people and the cops really shot his friend and he really did marry another man who became a woman. and Rita is watching the world go by and yes that’ll be 4 marks please, here’s your coke, commmodity, the west have coca cola and its unreduced sugar blend. the radio stirs behind her as if coming out of a deep sleep and she remembers the rush as she made her mid-day shift. the theatre opened and they earlier sleepers, the rough vagabonds and teenage romancers who are escaping school to hide in the back are there early but they’re not teenage they’re in their mid twenties and hate eachother and stare at the screen with parallel eyes, dry and weepless while their clothes are soaked in the tears they cry about eachother alone. Rita’s Poe is marvelous, an adventure story, the great american gothic, not southern not flimsy, but full of obsidian volume and the weight of a skull and bones. in between serving the last customer and returning to her book she strikes a long day dream, hours long. A scenario far away in the future. she’s a film maker herself, she has no ambition to be one but the auru of the auter has caught her imagination in the halogin light of 1:30pm one floor below street level in cold Cold War west Berlin, and touring London in the future she seeks a location to film Poe’s masterpiece, to display his Raven in the the majesty of the decayed British Empire. instead she finds crows in their hundreds pouring out of cemetery light and mocks two odd strangers in frills and dresses, one tall, astride ,and gracious but both lugging awkward bags and the other of them, the hunched man in green, is singing an ugly tune. She leaves the moment of the daydream and arrived back into Poe and ruminating upon the word repeating ‘nevermore’ but in her melancholy she is the black eyed raven speaking to herself, a reminder to move, to stay astride and achieve something else, get away from this if there is nothing else you can do, nevermore do you stay for eternity. If she died she could condemn Poe to truth, "the death... of a beautiful woman" is "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world". She is not beautiful but death is and in parituclar hers could be. that is her death to the world, she is already dying, like al pacino in that movie without music, and he says “leon , im dying here leon” “oh you’re dying you’re dying, you know something sonny you’re killing me sonny , you’re killing everyone around you “ so too was Rita dying because of this, I am she thinks, like a sham puppeteer, a ventrilloquest who performs by holding a puppet that moves themselves up and down and the puppet struggles to keep its mouth closed while the the person opens their mouth and talks freely and the strings on Rita hang like sequins from a marbles chandeleer the ceiling cascading towards her. the cinema has a slanted room as it bends down towards the two screens. they only have two screens in the cinema. one showed serious films and the other showed good films. it was 1982 and the serious screen was showing Ingmar Bergman and the good screen was showing Al Pacino.
Rita left the daydream and was no longer in london or the cinema but returned to Poes gronk gronk raven looking at the lamenting lover and again she thought she could see through the Raven’s eyes.
She put the book down, her thumb remaining in between the two pages she was reading from and her blue pen lodged between the thumn and page and she stated out up the red carpet to the doors the led to the stairs that led up to street level. With her other hand she stirred a little dessert fork in a ceramic coffee cup and tasted the metal of the fork and the sugar it was helping dissolve into luke warm coffee. she only drank sugar with her cofffee at the cinema where she knew it couldn’t be judged.
5 hours go by and she’s been to the bathroom twice but otherwise enjoyed and undeserved unrelenting peace and calm swimming around the corners of her smile, the day is colder than before when she leaves and she slips on her neat thick red and blue gloves that come awkwardly up to the forearms. she loves them, lights a cigarette wriggling it along her teeth on an empty stomache and enjoying the emptiness inside. she walks for 12 minutes and stops at a small bar waiting in the doorway for andré who’ll be there any minute. she check to feel poe in her back pocket, the blue pen still there jutting out her jeans and she recalls that funny day dream in a future london where she was a film maker and a crow watching two odd people try to become her.
Two night ago I dreamt I was stabbed twice and begged for my life before, rolling over onto my back having fallen on my front, telling them to just get on with it, it didn’t matter anyways. they helped me up and let me be and I ended up on the foreshore with my friends tom freedman and daniel bower. they said the tied was coming in and i could feel the water lapping at my shoes and wetting my feet, but they were wrong. yes it was high tied and we needed to leave, but the tied would soon be gone and the water would be full of treasures. I was sure of it.
3/5/25
Without revealing too much about myself I am the reader of the book. In this current moment it is in my bag and I worry that the frail front page, unprotected by the torn cover that used to conceal it, my peal away itself and a new page, the inside inside cover will become the front and slowly degrade away from the page. In this way the book, a most prized possession of my closest colloborator, could individuate itself into countless lost pages to be found by people who walked behind me as a litter the streets with the torn faded A5 sheets, like a demented hansle and grettle trying to escape a library. it seems odd to have written so much, not a lot but a fair amount, describing the contents of a book and my opinion on it when our fixation, it is by this point a shared one, deals so heavily with the specific copy. Despite being an utter whore for the physical codex, the printed word, I still conceive of books in a platonic form - Malcom Lowerys ‘Hear us O lord from heaven thy dwelling place’ receieves a venerable location in the mineswept framework and landscape of literature in my mind whilst the acutal object is little more than a pile of worries cluttering my already horded mind. I panicked during the fire that the brigade would drench the entire building and the precious book, tucked into my jacket pocket perfectly snug so that it wouldn’t be damaged and nudged around by things in my bag, would be soaked through, irreparably and its destruction, devestation, and the hands of my civil saviours woudl lead to the end of the longest and most productive working relationship I’ve ever had. I think we could survive the destruction of this book, I certainly hope so. But alas the book is fine, it is sat next to me awaiting my own self to finish writing, take it up and eagerly chew the final pages of ‘elephant and colloseum’ which I am finding more innocuous than the rest of the texts so far. the gothic air of early seattle in the first few pages has been tradedd for a rather stale portrait of rome and a Manx writer removed from his heritage, americanised and now firmly midatlantic in his european adventure.
All that is to say, the physical material, object, and weight of this little paper book slowly falling apart has not struck me as significant until I thought about it now. How when I consider this book it is an abstracted image of this collection of writing this image of malcolm lowery’s words, published in 1960 something and collated by different people. I think about the greater permenance of the words on the page, their histroy and significance, than the actual wordds on the page, which could disappear if , say, the school I worked at were to catch fire. This i suppose is what gives Rita its power. It is one of a kind, in time and space, and with the death of this book this woman would also disappear,.
or not, it is perfectly the case that in my growing imagination we already have Rita a phenomena, she has become like the book, a platonic form of the margin writer, the inscription, the self saturated and entwined and wittled down to a few thousand characters and underlined sentences that accumelate to make an image of a women . for ushara this person is completely different to me, already her german manners remind me of my grandmother (not german but affected).
but this is besides the point, she has taken on the form beyond the singular unique object that contains her purely through our speculation which for Ushara has existed for many months and is exploding into this project and for me has formed from resistance and frustration, brooding and musing, and is finally less aggrevated because I actually know what is being discussed?
that rita could be tall or short and work in a cinema or an infirmary. I can make sociologically estimated guesses on her upbringing, education, lifestyle, middle name? (lotta) But it would only be the wet bones of an uncloaked person. In the real world, in which we know eachother and love and die, even a face to face knowledge of these stratified content does not provide you, really with an image of someone. What do they do alone ? Are they afraid of the dark or falling? And who is Rita Hermenstrasse?
spelt with the funny B
Look at your Eyes
they’re looking for mine now
out of
the sea they are
cast like shadows
to. the ground at my
feet
Rita waited for 40 minutes outside that cafe bar in the harsh cold having left the cinema after an eight hour working day. When André showed she was sweating in the cold like the chill of disease ran whithered along her face. but her stern and far away eyes showed no such sickness. they hung urgently and hurried inside, muttering welcomes to eachother under the cover a soft applause from the ten or so people already crowded in from the cold watching a cheap trio do mr bojangles an injustice but their drunken demure smiles felt true to the story of its writing.
Rita opened her purse and took out her poe and began talking incessantly to André who smoked and smiled and assumed it all wasn’t such a big deal as Rita was making it out to be , but it was, but André was like this and so was Rita and they were both right at the time. that is that André was elsewhere most the time, thinking of nothing in particular but scarcely paying attention. It wasn’t malicious, more careless, but Rita indluged her in this far away gaze while she herself let her passion and zeal claw her closer into the present moment than ever before and the night began to slowly sting with indignity as Rita rambled and rambled about the obssessive love from death, and the raven, and this odd daydream she kept having of two people from the future. André nodded and smirked when she wanted to feign interest. anything more would be overdoing it but if she faked a smile with a calm snap of her dimple it seemed subtle enough to be genuine. and even in this play acting Rita studied her and indulged her, receiving and barreling forwards against it as the words and thoughts cascaded out her brain from the long hours in the subterannean cinema where time stretched like the slowing of reel to reel tape and the distance between herself grew immense and yet was bridged by the face moving thoughts she bounded with down the slowly churning wheel of history. She finished her train of thought, interrogating the difference between the death of an undeclared and spoken love and André told her she should read less of this dark poetry. André tried to push her into something new and chaotic, neveux radique, but Rita resisted, proud of the sombre and profound weight in the prewar writing that she fawned over. It was sexless but impassioned and in that way had prestige and mystery unlike the vogue sulk and vulgar nihilism of the second half of the 20th century.
the folk band began again and André and Rita simmered to a muted hush occasionally mustering an open mouthed look to eachother to say something but then turning away as the trio covered a Pentangle track, my dad loves this band said André , and they went straight from that into an original, the solo singer miming guitar that the lead guitarest played and the percussionist blew smoke down a wash board to make a flat line shuttering sound unlike anything Rita had ever heard and it seemed in every minute she was stepping in another world.
d 8/5/25 I still haven’t bought. a new note book and in some ways this resembles everything I’d hoped that could be. I’m ambling through Malcolm Lowery, ambling because it does nothing for me and by this point I usually would’ve skipped ahead or put it down or given it away or put it back on the shelf from which I thoughtlessly plucked the spine whilst browsing in the classics section where Lowery does not belong. Perhaps in the modern cult classics, if that. really he finds himself in the tired milleu of 20th century novelists whose side notes and unfinished cravass are not note worthy. That’s how I feel so far. All of elephant and colloseum came to a somewhat heartfelt and tender reflection on a long journey with an elephant and an oh no I miss my wife. If he had just told the elephant story the wholetime instead of banging on about his publisher this and that and oh I’m a succesful Manx writer but everyone thinks I’m american.
In the next section - look its the same character but know he’s got an equally stupid name, is scottish, because he says things like och ay, and he’s friends with the equally empty character from crossing the panama canal. and lastly all of them are malcolm lowery in his ‘enmeshed’ contents. The writing is lethargic and forgetful. I zone out at long points to find him listing of something to do with a random bit about Italy, some comment about prostitutes in Pompeii, ‘if pompeii was destroyed because it was sinful we’d all be UNDER A VOLCANO --- nudge nudge wink wink - yes real smooth malcolm. ultimately there’s nothing particularly heinous about his writing, or his own story - it is, at least, I suppose, not entirely existential.
The writers own concern with being european or american - when really he was british through and through - is uninteresting simply because he lacks a grasp of either and in that way gives himself away as being totally american, and this is also his saving grace which perhaps will hopefully emerge.
I still prefered most the opening story with its gothic pacific north west that feels consciously dark, where the land is rural and the sea is industrial. a terrific contrast that should be hammered home elsewhere but isnt.
ANd rita - she has all but disappeared, assumingly glazed over the last two chapters whilst working in the cinema, she picked up lowery when she gave Poe to andre at the cafe bar two weeks ago and his been raking through his gibberish since then. she finds him instead an accute historical artefact into interwar america and she studies germany and france in the same period. she is making sense of the allies and their precipitated animosity towards the Germans, the feelings disappearing. but lowery is a struggle and she’s put down her nice blue pen which was highlighting all the words she didn’t know or thought might come in handy and instead she half reads page after page as he reiterates some nonsesne about frere jaques or italian publishers etc etc
I am uninspired as rita, having just spoken to efraim and nathaniel for two hours I am itching to read the symposium, to internalise socrates doubt that is cynical but serious, serious about truth - when socrates could not make a speech in praise of love because he is not sure what love is and the road to athens is for conversation, and how all of this connects to the form of story telling and the theory of the novel - this is what i want to immerse myself in and be consumed by but instead I am reading a extremely innocuous average collection of writing that is all more or less the same thing by Malcolm Lowery, or perhaps I am just reading it wrong - i have not given myself over to understanding. did rita? didn’t she skip these two sections fo the book
i don’t think she even read the whole thing, I dont even think ushara read the whole thing - how could you have reasd this book cover to cover and not known thast the word manx means isle of man? unless you were entirely glazing major chunks of it, which i am, its actually full reasonable that one could? but then why is it her bible? I wonder if reading thebook turned it in to the bible or if rita’s writing was enough. she did not judge a book by its cover but by its inscription and if it was good enoguh for rita whatsherface to write in the front cover, its good enough for me. all this being said I think really the place and time of this specific copy again is what gives this book its power for ushara. in berlin where and when she was and encountering it in the way she did. which for her means it is meant to be and wholly more meaningful whereas for me suggests it is circumstantial, that any book picked up in that moment could have left the same impression. do i read any differently?
i was deeply moved by ‘walter benjamin at the dairy queen’ after stumbling across it on ebay, and i suspect that is in many ways as circumstantial, accidental. if i am moved by plato though, it is because i sought it and discovered something powerful in the pages of a text millenia old. one can only hope we are not reading malcolm lowery in a thousand years time.
in other parts of my practice, the collage, the tape loops, the floor finding - i am specifically looking for things to accidental, inexplicable, perhaps even unreasonable if that it is not too dangerous to say- it goes against my better nature to do so, i should say.
And I don’t suppose my writing is any better. - Im anxious to read Ushara’s email because this book is flattening me - I also care about Rita now and her path, the character I have unfolded reads malcolm differently to me and ushara, with neither our blindness and blindedness. for they are a very different thing. I am blinded she is blind. Both of us have eyes we are not using.