This past week was full of excitement. One day Paul called me at the office: THE CEILING is leaking! Water is pouring down. Well, it was not pouring down, but it was the fools upstairs again, a water line to their fridge broke (they had plastic, so cheap and stupid). Water stains on the ceiling in the hall and hall closet. A growing crack. WHY DO WE OWN and not RENT??? THE GOOD NEWS: temps in the 50s and sunny.
Now the anti THEM rant:
Last week I wrote that SONY had altered the end of a German movie, THE EDUKATORS (a discovery I made while reading the WIKIPEDIA, love it or hate it, its there and getting louder). IT IS TRUE, the sony released Region 1 version is missing about 2 minutes. They exercise = CENSOR the rebelious youth setting sail to shut down all (sabotage) television in Europe. Why would Sony do this? Afraid of giving people an idea? TUNE OUT?
SAY IT LOUD:
épater le bourgeois or épater les bourgeois [F] foreign term : to shock the middle classes
WAIT: maybe that is giving the corporate gods too much credit, maybe they oppose the concept of yatch theft? With their small minds they are not interested in the big picture, only their lifestyles of the rich and famous toys? Cleary they are blind to the big picture . . . as the movie mantra reads: THE GOOD IDEAS SURVIVE, even if it takes an illicit download to find the truth….
+++++ NOW FOR THE UPDATE of reading
If you finish this I’ll send you a cyber hershey bar!
THREE RECENT READINGS:
THIS WEEK I READ EQUUS, am digesting it.
Recently I read Benni’s Margherita Dolce Vita. IT IS A SUPERB BOOK. I am still digesting it. I cannot say how much I enjoyed it, fresh, alive, curious, magical, real . . . contemporary EARTH SOCIETY datelined Italy. More on it after I think more. I think you would enjoy its, as an escape on one level, and then more and more.
But:
I finished THE ROACHES HAVE NO KING, by Daniel Evan Weiss. It is not nearly as good as Pelevin’s Life of Insects.
Set in a Manhattan apartment. Humans, roaches, waterbugs, rats. Not one pretty bug. The roaches have some innate ability to read and many lived on book glue. NUMBERS is the main character, he grew up in a Bible (as did the Prophet, Exodus and other roaches). Bismark grew up in a history book; the RAID ORPHANS grew up in a danger zone . . . parentless after the Raid Holocaust.
The apartment belongs to Ira Fishblatt, and is dominated by his girlfriend Ruth Grubstein. Stereotypes abound – Ira a liberal jewish public defender, Rufus a black drug dealer . . .
It’s a fun book, but kind of gross at times (a ride through the New York sewers on the back of a blind sewer rat, not to miss a cliché Weiss has a giant 35 foot alligator – the flushed pet of Jewish kids who vacationed in Florida).
Numbers tries to lead the roaches to safety after Ruth nags Ira into renovating the kitchen – destroying the roaches supply lines. They go into exile under a baseboard (biblical?). Full of adventure, and roach promiscuity, death and destruction. As they are being led to the promise land one night they are surprised and surprise then and then are decimated by Ira and a can of RAID. NUMBERS SURVIVES. - Justice: Even IRA buys it in the end, NUMBERS exchanges draino for his cocaine and Ira thinks the kick is so great he inhales wildly while Ruth is in the tub. She finds his bloody head convulsing. Rufus is busted for murder.
It does have some good lines, upon hearing of the kitchen renovation:
“There is no place to go,” said Bismark. “Then shouldn’t we start storing food somewhere?” “Ants to that. They’re so obsessed with protecting themselves against a bad day that they never have a good one.” Bismark spat. “that’s not living.”
(THIS BOOK was mentioned in INSECT POETICS, that survey of bugs in literature I read in December).
&
Do you remember in The Third Man, the lines:
HARRY
Don't be so gloomy...After all,
it's not that awful. Remember what the fellow said...
He backs a little down the steps in CS and CAMERA PANS LR
with him, losing Martins.
HARRY
in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare,
terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo Leonardo
Da Vinci, and the Renaissance...In
Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years
of democracy and peace, and what did
that produce?...The cuckoo clock.
So long, Holly.
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ONE other book I have not mentioned or admitted to reading is Philip (Portnoy’s Complaint) Roth’s THE BREAST. A very short book-under 80 pages. About a new yorker who feels a bit of pain and wakes up as a giant mammary in a new york hospital. He thought he was loosing his mind but never went into denial. Being a Roth character there was a preoccupation with sex. He had been a college professor and the book is Kafka/Swift esque at times. And also taught GOGOL, have you read THE NOSE? A walking talking nose, and its noseless former owner?
A Metamorphosis. John Gardner- GRENDEL, in the New York Times, back in 1972 (I have the review if you want) , said it was a good book, but severely weakened by trash talk.
The breast (can we call him a breast?) CAME TO ATTRIBUTE his drastic change to his teaching, reading, and idolization of the three creators (GOGOL, SWIFT and KAFKA).
Maybe I should have read THE HUMAN STAIN or EVERYMAN. But THE BREAST was short and that KAFKA bit . . .
GOOD/BEST LINE:
Did fiction do this to me? “How could it, Mr. Kepesh?” Dr. Klinger asks. No, hormones are hormones and art is art. I did not get this way from falling too strongly under the influence of the great imaginations. “But,” I say “it might be my way of ‘being’ a Kafka, being a Gogol, being a Swift. They could ‘envision’ those marvelous transformations – they were artists. They had the language and those obsessive fictional brains. I didn’t. So I had to live the thing.” “Had to?” “To achieve ‘my’ art. I had the artistic longing without the necessary detachment. I loved the extreme in literature, idolized those how made it, was fascinated by its imagery and power and suggestiveness—“ “And? Yes” the world if full of art lovers – so?” “So I took the leap. Beyond sublimation. I made the word flesh. I have out Kafkaed Kafka. He could only ‘imagine’ a man turning into a cockroach. But look at what I have done.” (page 72-73).
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