Genese Grill
@genese_grill
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Essayist, Translator, Writing first English-language Biography of Robert Musil for Yale UP. Portals: https://www.thisissplice
Plainfield, Vermont
Joined March 2019
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May I introduce my book on the tension between spirit and matter? Available for pre-order with
@thisissplice
now in a limited edition deluxe hardcover or an infinite basic edition paperback. I tremblingly hope some of you might find it meaningful.
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It's my birthday & I'm in Siracusa, writing letters on the hotel stationary.
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I have been rereading Confessions of an English Opium Eater and I just can't believe how brilliant Thomas De Quincey is. His mind is a beautiful, psychedelic, mathematical, palindromic, synesthetic, poetical marvel.
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Hooray! I've just signed a contract with
@yalepress
, under the expert editorship of
@jenniferabanks
, to write the FIRST English-language biography of ROBERT MUSIL.
It'll take a few years & I'll need your help, but...here we go!
A picture of his mum, Hermine.
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Some pages from Musil's Cigarette Notebooks, keeping track of how many he smoked a day!
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One reason why the humanities have collapsed: instead of teaching magic, fascination, beauty, students are taught cold identity power politics. This is economic too, since without the spirit of ART, people can only cram their souls with commodity.
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I've been reading Marie Bashkirtseff's marvelous journal, important for Musil and so many others. Adorno called her "the patron saint of the fin de siècle." Musil must have been in love with her mind, passion, lust for life. She died at 26 of consumption.
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My omnibus review of 9 (!) Robert Musil biographies (mostly in German, one in French) is "up" on The Georgia Review, with some juicy tidbits from each:
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Finally fell in, by chance, to the incredibly rich and beautiful realm of Patrick Leigh-Fermor's prose. Hallelujah and what have I been doing all my life up to now? He fits all the beauty & sorrow of human life into a single sentence.
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It really is my most radical idea: that the lack of spiritual (by which I mean artistic, cultural, folkloric) meaning in people's lives is the greatest social ill, more damaging than poverty, racism, sexism, war.
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Tonight, reading Lawrence Durrell & Henry Miller's letters back and forth to each other before the stove with my friend. The happiest I have felt in a long time. This rush of ecstatic aliveness, love of language, of writing, of striving. I'd forgotten.
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The idea that it's fine to bowdlerize Dahl or "update" any literature at all to conform to contemporary (and EPHEMERAL!) moral and aesthetic values is anathema to Art. Art = LEARNING the OTHER, not making everything conform to now and your own petty self.
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Studying ancient languages with my dad (he, Hebrew;I, Greek) this morning. For our wonderful
@CatherineProj
tutorials.
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Just finished Stefan Zweig's The World from Yesterday, memoir of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of WWI & the rise of Hitler, WWII, exile, horror. He & his wife killed themselves the day after he finished writing it.
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Been reading Hazlitt. The bite of the great aphorists, like le Rochefoucauld, with the charm of the great essayists, like his friend Lamb, and a lovable confusion and openness to not knowing, like the best, Montaigne.
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Happy Birthday to Robert Musil, born at five a.m. on November 6, 1880. We know the name of the midwife, Katherine Schweiger, from the birth and christening certificate, and we thank her in retrospect for her ministrations. At about 5 weeks, he was “languishing,”
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Thank you,
@BorisDralyuk
for your tenure as editor of the
@LAReviewofBooks
. You have been extraordinarily welcoming and have curated with grace and wisdom. Happy you will have more time to write poems now!?.
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May I introduce my book on the tension between spirit and matter? Available for pre-order with
@thisissplice
now in a limited edition deluxe hardcover or an infinite basic edition paperback. I tremblingly hope some of you might find it meaningful.
11
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141
Not only did Musil keep track of his smoking, but he kept an alphabetical Register-Heft for major themes, characters, and projects, cross-referenced to his many notebooks. It helps us poor scholars try to figure out what/who is related to what and whom in notebooks and drafts.
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Re-reading the same books 20-year old Musil took up the mountain with him when he was fleeing from his first great love, Valerie & enjoying a primal mystical experience: Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Emerson's Essays, and Maeterlinck's Treasure of the Humble.
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I know if I tell you it's my birthday it's a kind of shameless pitch to get attention, but I also feel funny not telling you. So there it is. Today is my birthday. I made a giant lemon pound cake, which will have whipped cream and raspberries, and lasagna.
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I've just crossed over the 1/2-way point of my very rough draft of the Musil biography-in-progress. It is an organic living thing, with an impulsive mind of its own, despite all plans & expectations. Daemons, please support me, in-spire me, be gentle with me.
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Half-way through in one sitting & may not get up until I devour the rest. I'm with those who think this is a marvelous book.
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Just ordered this postcard of Ida Roland, Viennese actress whom Musil had an affair with, impelling Martha to make a scene, which he recorded in his notebook but Martha clipped out & sewed in the lining of a coat, where it was found by chance in the 1980s.
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With very heavy heart, I bring sad news. Burton Pike, translator, teacher, scholar, mentor, died this morning. He was 92, had a beautiful life, &our Festschrift is coming soon. Here is a little description of my last meeting with him.
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A warm greeting to you, to remind myself and others that, while mankind is and has always been cruel and vicious, we have also simultaneously always been loving and creative. The world is very bleak right now, and sad. May you find some light.
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This is astonishingly wonderful. A reconstruction of how Greek poetry & music might have sounded. The hymn to Orestes at the end! "Goddesses of the night! With baneful music your dance sinister revels....!
How did ancient Greek music sound?
Listen to the first choral performance with reconstructed aulos of reconstructed ancient scores of Athenaeus Paean (127 BC) and Euripides Orestes chorus (408 BC), with the evidence presented and explained by Professor Armand D'Angour
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Books are a grand aphrodisiac. According to family lore, Robert & Martha made love for the first time after he helped her arrange her books in her new apartment in Berlin in 1908.
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Just finished draft chapter III of the Musil biography (averaging only 1 every 2 months), called, "Dead Hours, Living Moments". Now on to Berlin: studies in perception, philosophy, finishing & publication of Törless, Herma's tragic death... Wish us luck.
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My "translators should be paid" empowerment group will be happy to learn I just got my largest grant yet from the Austrians for the next book: Robert Musil: Literature & Politics, forthcoming with d
@_contramundum_
this summer.
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Kept us warm all through the chill early spring northern night.
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Musil's father got him an engineering apprenticeship. He was already secretly studying philosophy & writing Young Toerless. His boss said his participation was "zilch" & a colleague said, "Herr Musil will never be a proper engineer."
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Wild, but I am in Palermo, Sicily, with my dad and sister....me and dad, drunk at lunch, a bookstore, a palace, my sister,
@SimoneEllin
.
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Tracing Musil's path from first apartment in Berlin (Burgstrasse 10) across Spree, through the Lustgarten, past the Berlin Dom, (destroyed) City Palace, Reichstag (now a museum), Old Museum, to stately Humboldt University, flanked with statues of Wilhelm and Alexander.
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Very excited for this forthcoming edition & translation...Sam found these poems in the Arendt archive(!), translated, annotated, introduced; & I just helped with the translations.
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Public Philosophy talk on Musil was fun. Only three people there had read him, which made it all the more amazing that the ones who hadn't still listened so intently and we had such good discussion afterwards.
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I guess one is supposed to announce such things: I am runner up for the 2020 Gournay Book Prize. Congratulations to the winner, Hasanthika Sirisena, and thanks to judges, who said my book provided the Montaignean answer to Descartes.
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Thank you,
@aliner
. This book, written by Musil, Klaus Amann, with an intro by me and an appendix by Philip Payne is insanely, frighteningly relevant ... and I wish more people would pay attention to it!
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Love Alfred Kerr's memories of young Musil, who came to him with Törless for guidance and assessment: "Musil & I, we not only went over every sentence in the ms; we worked through every one together...[Musil] was one of the most attractively
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The world is all just too much. Too sad. Too cruel. Too stupid. Conflicts endlessly on repeat for thousands of f-ing years. Humans are so horrible and also so beautiful. How do we keep on keeping on.
(I am okay, by the way, just feeling because I still can.)
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My 81 year old father is having his first poetry chapbook published. I am struggling with the cover image, mainly because he is more modern than me.
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Translators, Literary Scholars, Lovers of Musil, please spread the word, register, and save the date:
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It's my birthday. A solid 55. Resolution: pare away even more of the extraneous; get closer to the sweet pith, the poetry, the words.
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Boydell & Brewer are releasing my Musil book, The World as Metaphor, in paperback, so those of you who want to read it but can't afford the high hardcover price can now have your own copy....
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My attempts to understand Mach and Musil's study of Perception Science:
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Almost at the end of Patrick Leigh-Fermor's A Time of Gifts, but fret not:
@nyrbclassics
just saved me by sending a box of these other PLF classics! (& I already have the 2nd book of the trilogy). Almost wish it were the start of winter!
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I thought you all might appreciate this picture of our dictionary, taken by a guest at a party recently. It really is, in many ways, the bible of the house.
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Been reading Hofmannsthal's stories (early 1900s)--so wonderfully weird, decadent & perverse. Does anyone else love them, know of their likely influence on Musil, Kafka, &c? Andreas is always praised, along with Chandos, but these early ones?
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On trip to visit my parents in NY, found the MOST charming bookshop in Hillsdale, NY, down winding dirt roads, in small, but magically expanding cottage barn, warmed by colorful carpets & lamps & of course fine books! My winter comfort reading is replenished.
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When a mentor dies, one can barely gauge how much is lost. It's been 9 months since Burton Pike died; almost every day I want to ask him what he thinks of something. What a gift to have someone, even for a while, whose opinion one treasures like that.
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Just in case everyone assumes that everyone else, besides themselves, is doing swell and being creative and productive, let me tell you, I am having a hell of a time getting anything meaningful done over here.
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You are really just so nice. I was so down, with a headache and feeling blue, and you are all being so supportive about my book project and it really lifts a gal's spirits. Thank you. Here is a picture of another of Musil's relatives, Alois, the explorer
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Trying to bear witness to my horror about Israel-Palestine & at some people's gleeful cruel celebration. Write all sorts of wise things, then delete, fearing sickening responses. Dear fellow humans, let us love ALL our children, find common humanity somehow.
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Beauty, Pleasure, mythology in Taormina. No wonder people are so happy.
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Have I always been this strange? And how does that happen, that one does not align, does not see things quite like "most people" do? It comes with infamous troubles: alienation, loneliness; but I can do no other. I am weird.
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Gawd, I feel so sick of all of it. All the squabbling, the righteousness, the way everyone else seems so sure of themselves. I, for one, know very few things for certain. Thinking is difficult, slow, complicated. Why isn't writing/speaking more considered?
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Weary of people who act as if they know the absolutely true, right, and good. Tragic conflicts are sometimes irresolvable, or, as M. Nussbaum notes in The Fragility of Goodness, sometimes "none of the possibilities is even harmless".
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My copies of Robert Musil's Literature & Politics finally arrived. It's sort of like he is sitting in my armchair, except he would never wear the pattern I have on.
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Just read Zamyatin's We. What an extraordinary book: deliriously psychedelic in its sensuality & philosophy (from pure Reason to Imaginary Numbers) & mordantly funny in its subtle critique of totalitarianism. Written in the 1920's!
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What an honor it's been to work with Sam on the Arendt poems she found in a box in the archives. We kept finding more meanings and possible and impossible ways to attempt to render the untranslatable. Sam's insight & knowledge is a gift. Wait until you read her introduction!
Four years, countless meetings.
@genese_grill
and I just finished going through the proofs for What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt. Doting on the good ones, sighing at the bad ones, endless Heidegger jokes. A Brilliant partner in crime.
@LiverightPub
@haley_bracken
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Such a good day! Found my way around most of Musil's homes & haunts, drank delicious coffee, went to Mendel museum & Abbey (so amazing!), had a sauna, ate bouillabaisse, & figured out how to link the phone to the computer.
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As someone who had a rather dark, depressed, alienated winter, I cannot recommend highly enough just going on a little trip somewhere for a few days. A change of perspective, an hour on a ferry, a different skyline can shake everything up in a very good way.
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Me and some preternaturally gigantic blackberries in the neighbor's garden.
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Been reading Martha Musil's letters to Arnim Kessner after Robert's death, when she was striving to get his work out into the world. They are funny, intense, light, passionate, smart, silly, erudite, desperate, delightful, charming, & filled with gems.
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The day he died he was working on revising "breaths of a summer's day," one of the most lyrical passages of the novel. Just reading in his notebook from 1908 yesterday, found a passage that shows up, slightly changed 28 years later in published novel. Circularity & Presence.
Austrian writer Robert Musil, who is often ranked with Joyce, Kafka and Proust, died 80 years ago today. Like Joyce, his last days were spent in exile in Switzerland. His wife was Jewish and his books were banned by the Nazis.
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Presumed picture (the only one we have) of Herma Dietz, Musil's working-class mistress (model for "Tonka"), drawn by Musil himself, scribbled over, & rescued by some technological process. She worked in textile factories, may have been Czech & Jewish.
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"For the young person, only the present is of primary importance; all of the past is a cemetery...one would have to make him understand that his true, burning life resides in this past, in an infinitely more intimate way than it resides in the present"
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Just finished a draft (55 pages) of something I've been working on all winter. Something that has seemed impossible every day, but that was nevertheless born out of this bitter struggle and stubbornness. May it thrive and prove to have sufficient life in it.
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My first collaborative translation! Working with
@Samantharhill
, who discovered these poems (!!), knows Arendt intimately, and whose insights & instincts are rich and deep, was an absolute pleasure. We think we did some good work.
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Summer Musil Study ready for the Strange Action of Thinking.
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I don't agree with everyone I follow; but I like to know what radically different people think. Only thing I don't abide is repressing thought/speech. This, alas, isn't the place for nuanced discourse, but I'm committed to the free exchange of all ideas.
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More on Musil's smoking: in a draft play (in my Theater Symptoms) called "The Double I," he has God go into a tobacco shop looking for a cigarette called Novelto. The salesman doesn't have it, but does have Manoli, Waldorf Astoria, and Batschari.
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This is truly amazing.
Fyodor Dostoevsky's manuscript draft of The Brothers Karamazov.
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Alice Charlemont (Musil's Clarisse model), painted by her father, Hugo Charlemont, 1909, a few years after marrying Gustl (model for Walter). Imagine her a while later escaping from a mental institution with a Greek homosexual & painting on the walls of her hotel.
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In 2008 I was in Klagenfurt doing Musil research; Klaus Amann asked if I might translate his book.
Publishers waffled; I took a break from translation. Rediscovered the ms a few years back.
It comes out, TODAY--15 years later!
@contramundum
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I love my Twitter friends. You are really amazing. Keep doing whatever you are doing. It is working.
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Back to de Quincey, whose sentences make me giddy about language and syntax...currently reading essay on Coleridge. He says, disapprovingly, that Kant, over dinner, revealed his atheism, and a joy in the inevitable rotting of his body after death.
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Musil quotes Goethe: 'General concepts and great presumption are always on the way to precipitating terrible misery." Beware of those who are facile in their assertions of absolute moral righteousness.
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Deep deep snow, & no end of falling in sight. May I learn to glimpse infinity from this, some sense of time and space colliding.
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This is where I sit all day every day. With one or another book in lap. With coffee, tea, whiskey by my side. Morning, noon, night.
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This is me at seventeen. Nothing at 20, but I was already in college, at Cooper Union. I think we were in maybe Central Park, on a picnic? Unbelievable that one could ever have been so young.
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Putting the finishing touches on my translation of Robert Musil: Literature and Politics, by Klaus Amann and Robert M. himself, to be published in the Spring/Summer by
@_contramundum_
Press. A truly powerful and important book.
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So much snow today here in rural, Vermont. Big, wet, heavy flakes against misty mountains and a pale, grey sky, with only the dark brown branches and one lone red leaf as reprieve from the soft, soporific whiteness.
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Reading Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (Culture & Collapse in Habsburg Vienna by Edward Timms, trying to understand why Musil was so hard on Kraus (aside from jealousy of his successes). Maybe he was skeptical of his reforming impulses? Any thoughts?
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I left the chair and went for a long walk. Very fine, for body and mind.
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