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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Full reading and meeting schedule for our year-long exploration of Musil's The Man Without Qualities.

Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

Hannah Arendt and Martha Musil. Could be cousins. Happy , Healhthy, Inspired New Year to you all. Thanks for being in this crazy world with me. Trying to understand, trying to love, trying to communicate.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 31/12/2024

The last four months of 2024 have been difficult (illnesses, dread about the world, --violence and floods), but high times too: Sicily, Musil talk at Society Library, restoring Walking Book, Arendt poems, Musil biography work, with your encouragement.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

From What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, out yesterday. Edited by @samantharhill.bsky.social and translated by Samantha and me. Book launch tonight at The Strand in New York City (I won't be there, but Sam will be brilliant as usual!).

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 07/12/2024

Many people tried to help Musil survive exile in Switzerland or to emigrate. He had always felt alien & in exile, his anxiety & need for peace to work may have made him difficult to help: "I have a debilitating disgust for the Fatherland, but also for the merry outcasts."

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

A tower of co-author copies of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt to brighten the dusk of this cold evening here in Vermont. Official publication date is December 10th.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 02/03/2024

"Often when I turn a corner, I feel now that I must see you, surrounded by fur and cold. Then am I as mild and still as if I had dipped by hand in snow-water." Musil on his love, Martha, shortly after they had met.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 02/03/2024

15% Discount on ALL my @contramundumpress.bsky.social Press Musil translations: Thought Flights, Unions, Theater Symptoms, & Literature and Politics Get two of each! contramundumpress.com/thought-flig... Use the coupon code: "Grill" when checking out!

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 26/02/2024

Ea von Allesch, a model for femme fatale Alpha in Musil's Vinzenz & the Mistress of Important Men, for Klimt's Water Snakes, wife (for a while) of Musil's friend Johannes von Allesch, later Broch's mistress, was a fashion journalist. Blei kisses her hand as Martha sneers.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 26/02/2024

Gustav Donath (Musil's friend & Model for Walter)....He divorced Alice after her breakdown and remarried. I read somewhere they had a child together, but can't find the reference right now.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 26/02/2024

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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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 12/02/2024

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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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 04/01/2024

Ken Schoen of the amazing Schoen Books in S. Deerfield, Massachusetts, sent me a pile of curious Musil books, including these vintage covers. He is a real Mensch. schoenbooks.com

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 16/12/2023

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: thegeorgiareview.com/posts/nine-l...

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 26/11/2023

Lost in Thought by Zena Hitz is a profound reflection on the life of the mind set free from external goals, the bravery required to see "eye to eye" with realities--a struggle in exchange for infinite riches of time, space, humanity.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 06/11/2023

Happy Birthday to Robert Musil, born at five a.m. on November 6, 1880. The midwife was Katherine Schweiger. At about 5 weeks, he was “languishing,” presumably because his mother was not producing enough milk—but revived, when bottle fed. He might have died as his little sister had before his birth.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 04/10/2023

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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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 03/10/2023

The cigarette salesman has Batschari, Manoli, Waldorf Astoria. Oh, I forgot, the guy who is looking for the Novelta isn't just some schmo. Its der liebe Gott himself.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 03/10/2023

This is the kind the character in the draft play was looking for, Novelta. He says he tried them by chance in Munich, and heard they come from Berlin, but no one in Vienna has heard of them.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 03/10/2023

Some pages from Musil's Cigarette Notebook, keeping track of how many he smoked a day.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 28/09/2023

Musil's notebooks have @20 pages of notes from Ellen Key's The Development of the Soul through Conduct of Life (Lebenskunst). He was enraptured by the call to do/think everyday something fine & beautiful, the marriage of ethics & aesthetics, individualism & creative aliveness.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 27/09/2023

"like a dark rope, binding him to his chair, protecting him from the dizziness crashing down into limitless emptiness all around him.... like running along a tightrope with burning cheeks and he could only save himself with the speed at which he piled up his thoughts." Musil on childhood writing

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 05/09/2023

They are indeed available, in German. I would love to translate them, but for now I will only be translating pieces of them for my biography.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 30/08/2023

Musil's father, industrious engineer/pedagogue, painted in his spare time: portraits & mythological landscapes! He also longed to travel to the Tropics, with his nephew Alois, in search of exotic insects and flora.

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Genese Grill @genesegrill.bsky.social · 22/08/2023

Musil's mother, Hermine, to celebrate the signing of a contract with Yale UP to write his biography. I intend to give the women in his life their due. Especially Martha, his wife, but also Hermine, with whom he had a difficult intense relationship. You can see why...she looks slightly nutty, no?

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