Category: Absurdities

“Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self.”       —  Cyril Connolly

Cyril Connolly.  Cool.  I was bemused that it was my dear brother who shall remain nameless that introduced this Cyril Connolly quote to me.  I wasn’t familiar with it.  It’s me, not him, that’s read Cyril Connolly, including Enemies of Promise, The Unquiet Grave, and, in addition, The Evening Colonnade.  

My brother is the last person I would have thought could and would quote Cyril Connolly, especially to me.  After all, it was me who held him in my arms when he was a little baby.  At the age of two as he sat on the kitchen counter, I, many years his senior, gave him a little brotherly kiss he was so cute.  I could have dropped him on the floor.  Now he does this.

This is a picture of my brother.  He looks a bit grumpy, and, you know what?  He can be a bit grumpy.  But he’s a man among men and there are manifold reasons in this fine world to be feeling, on occasion, grumpy.  I’m grumpy myself occasionally, but is that any reason to back off from denouncing my brother?

If I’m Friedrich Nietzsche I say, “No reason at all.”  If you think you can get out of Eton College and Balliol, Oxford you’re bloody soaked, man.  You’re for it.  With nothing to show but the brilliant man you are?  It could be worse.  I mean as Oxford goes you should have seen my rooms in Magdalen.  I remember looking up that staircase and thinking, “Is this medieval set-up something I’m dying to do?  I don’t care about the ‘Deer Park’.  There’s plenty of bloody deer back home.”  I chuffed it but Cyril Connolly stayed on across the street, decades earlier, and I was thinking about that boarding the train.

And so, years later, I visited the stacks and had a look at my much depleted Connolly collection, noticing how old it’s looking.  “The Unquiet Grave” is a paperback edition published in 1967, years before I was born.  “Enemies of Promise” is  a 1976  paperback  edition and looks in worse shape, today, than me.  I remember when it was a  fine new paperback I bought at the bus station in Tulsa on that nightmare trip to Oklahoma.

It’s terrible.  The pages are dark with discolouration and when I searched for a favourite old remembered section the spine broke.  Crack!  It was a little “crack” but it made a big impression.  Right at that instant something changed for me.  I knew I had to have a new copy.  And I really hate discolouration.  Even the word makes me puke.

Because I’m smart I knew that the University of Chicago Press had brought out a new edition of “Enemies of Promise” awhile back.  And that there were likely scads of copies lying around even now, looking for buyers, because there just aren’t scads of people interested in literature although there are scads who don’t even know what that is.  So I’ve ordered a copy that should be here just in time for Christmas.

Cyril was obviously talking about the semi-useless art of blogging.  He was psychic, far ahead of his time.  Blogging’s a bit like smoking cigarettes, something else I gave up awhile ago.  You keep hoping the next one will taste better and that’s why you keep lighting up.

There’s more I could contribute to this important discussion but we’re off to get a tree and I just don’t have any time right now.

Plus the “Snow Warning” has ended on the weather site, but that has had no effect on the fact it’s still coming down.  So it’s time to move into traffic and maybe get in an accident.

Talk soon

That was too much.  All of it.  People still don’t believe it.  It hasn’t even started yet.

It’s the great new uncertainty.  Sad.  Pale-coloured urine you can barely squeeze out.

You wonder why this happened to you.  And what’s going to happen.  It’s a big family.  Are they all like that?

Come on down you’re gonna luv it.

Might as well start early.  Start early and end early. That’s what I say.   Let us rejoice.  It’s not over yet.  As Nietzsche observed: One’s own struggle will go on.  Nietzsche lost his mind.  It was too bad.  It was a beautiful mind.  He died in 1900.  What a cool year to die in.  Easy to remember.

But if you get nothing out of reading this there’s one thing you’ve got to  remember: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is the boring-est book you’ll ever come across.

I read “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” one summer while lolling around several afternoons on a clothing-optional beach.  A nude beach.  Or beach where people with no clothes are, weather depending.  “Wreck Beach”.  Because everybody was wrecked.  Or maybe it was just me.  Doubt it.  Sunshine Supermen and women, boys and girls frisbee-ing in the surf, butt naked.

Maybe it was the translation, but the book was a “Penguin Classic” paperback with a florid image of Nietzsche’s head sporting that horrible moustache.  “Also Spoke Zarathustra” brought out the masochist in me and I forced myself to read all of it, with pleasure.

Remember what I said.  Awful.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Which reminds me.  We’ve often said, how could this have happened?  Like that time when I said, “Lene Lovich probably isn’t her real name.” And you said, “Really?”

I’ve never forgot that.  I’m serious.

So now we understand what’s going on here. The fight gets intense-er.  It’s the new normal.  Same as the old normal.  Those days when you worked for that organization?  Forget it.  Never coming back meaning time to act now.

The future’s what we need to think about and tomorrow may be too late.  Let’s get on with it.  You first.

No, I’m kidding.  Kidding kidding kidding.  Get out your talismans.  Your ya-ya’s.  Your amulets and prayer beads and complete, 200 piece Jello™ airplane wheel set from the 60s with images of vintage aircraft complete with rack like a poker chip rack because we’re gonna be wishing and hoping and praying everything’s going to be all right and this is just filler.  It’s a place to get somewhere else.

These people are actually pretty funny in many unintentional ways.  It’s a game of chance anyway.  Everything.  They didn’t start it.  They won’t finish it.

I was down on Wreck Beach the afternoon I finished Nietzsche and I was with one of the most beautiful girls.  She was built, as we used to say and maybe still do.  I felt lucky.  Fortunately, we were just there as friends.  Or unfortunately.  But it was just one of those afternoons and I had a car.  You couldn’t drive to the beach but you could drive to the top of the trail down to it.  I knew this person.

We’re lying together, side by side.  Casual.  I was good at faking along as casual.  It was a time in my life when I didn’t have a lot else to do.  This nude guy comes along, a little older than me, and hunkers down in front of us.  “Nietzsche, eh?” he says.  Everybody talked like that in those days.  Eh?  Eh?  He was talking about Nietzsche but he was staring straight at my friend lying there on her back.  And I don’t think things have changed much.