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7.5.4
snapshots of the predecessors
I went to visit the Pintchik Oracle on Wednesday, and what the scrolling sign told me was: "ORACLE DATING... COMING IN JUNE." Well, I replied, I'm not really in the market for a date - but if the Oracle has a connection - I wouldn't turn down an offer to huff some ethylene maybe? The Oracle responded with a short list of housewares and their discounted prices, which I think is Oraclespeak for "ALL SIGNS POINT TO NO."...
Discovered today that everything Ben Marcus has ever written is a ripoff of the Donald Bartheleme short story "A Manual for Sons." Let me quote some Bartheleme to prove my point: There are twenty-two kinds of fathers, of which only nineteen are important. The drugged father is not important. The lionlike father (rare) is not important. The Holy Father is not important, for our purposes. There is a certain father who is falling through the air, heels where his head should be, head where his heels should be. The falling father has grave meaning for all of us.
Hard for me not to think of Marcus, now, as the fallen father.
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Extrapolating from my body's current rate of decline, by the time I am 35 I will need to drink a liter of water for each deciliter of wine, if I wish to avoid a hangover the next morning. But who's to say what I'll wish in the year 2013?
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Last week I learned from a Frenchwoman that Paul Auster is very highly regarded in France. Apparently his novels are highly anticipated and devoured on publication.
"Then I came to this country, and read some of them in the original [English] - they were really not as good. The genius must have been in the translator," smiling ruefully.
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"The undocumented life is not worth living." Discuss.
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Was informed recently that Jonathan Ames represents "the next wave" of literary goodness. This assertion was backed up with a synopsis of a recent Ames story in which the protagonist craps his pants after receiving an enema. On the other hand, he's supposed to have cited Isherwood as a primary influence, which is impressive. So, maybe I'll borrow The Coma instead.
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A Manual for Sons is in fact an outtake from Barthelme's novel The Dead Father, which anyone with a father should read.