"...non ce qu'ils voulaient dire, mais la manière dont ils le disaient"

At the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show yesterday, E and I marveled at how — at least to the eyes of us outsiders — the dogs in each competition ring all looked like clones of one another. We were standing in front of the Bernese mountain dog competition, Ring 8, a fantastic parade of identically bumptious black top-coated, caramel-pawed, white-ruffed big dogs, the people around us trading knowing observations about these "Berners" and anticipating the appearance of the even-more-bumptious "Newfs" (which turned out to be, delightfully, like watching a parade of drooling, good natured black bears).

As we were watching, squeezing each other's arms from time to time in pure glee,  E wondered aloud: "Do you think if they just suddenly let the dogs all run loose, the owners could figure out which one was which?"

An old man next to us, apparently an old hand at these shows, smiled wryly and shook his head. Then he said, "But the dogs would find the owners."

This seemed like an enormously satisfying idea to me. That for all the humans' ostensible running of the show (the insane breeding in the first place, the further coaxing of their dogs into what's called "conformation," all the precisely calculated grooming, not to mention the last-minute blow-outs, brushing, and nail buffing), the dogs still had something on their so-called masters.

I like this description of Borges, as formulated by Tahar Ben Jelloun's version of Borges in L'enfant de sable:

Après tout je n'inventais rien. Je lisais les livres et les encyclopédies, je fouillais dans les dictionnaires et je rapportais des histoires assez vraisemblables pour le plaisir et aussi pour narguer l'angoisse du temps qui creuse chaque jour un peu plus notre fosse commune.*

Well, I mainly like the first part, about reading and rummaging in dictionaries and encyclpedias to bring back stories.

Also, for some reason, I'd forgotten that faire is used with dreaming in French, among other languages. J'ai fais un rêve. "I made a dream," instead of "I had a dream." Both are nice, in their way. The romance language version reminds me of that phrasing of Nabokov's, with the dreamer as both stage manager and actor. (Or was that Freud, first?) Whereas the English, "I had a dream," places more emphasis on the fleeting qualitity of dreams—how you have them, but then they slip away.






*After all, I invented nothing. I read books and encyclopedias, I rummaged in dictionaries and I brought back some plausible enough stories, for pleasure and to flout the anguish of time, which digs each day a little more of our common grave.. 

Read last summer, just before Dad and I spent some time in Vienna.

The memorable passages, for me:

"...the smashed dreary city of Vienna divided up in zones..." (11)

"I never knew Vienna between the wars, and I am too young to remember the old Vienna with its Strauss music and its bogus easy charm; to me it is simply a city of undignified ruins which turned that February into great glaciers of snow and ice. The Danube was a great muddy river a long way off across the Second Bezirk, the Russian zone where the Prater lay smashed and desolate and full of weeds, only the Great Wheel revolving slowly over the foundations of merry-go-rounds like abandoned millstones, the rusting iron of smashed tanks which nobody had cleared away, the frost-nipped weeds where the snow was thin. I haven't enough imagination to picture it as it had once been, any more than I can picture Sacher's Hotel as other than a transit hotel for English officers or see the Kärtnerstrasse as a fashionable shopping street instead of a street which exists, most of it, only at eye level, repaired up to the first storey. A Russian soldier in a fur cap goes by with a rifle over his shoulder, a few tarts cluster round the American Information Office, and men in overcoats sip ersatz coffee in the windows of the Old Vienna." (12-13_

"We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us—Martins felt the little jab of dispensability, standing by the bus door, watching the snow come sifting down, so thinly and softly that the great drifts among the ruined buildings had an air of permanence, as though they were not the result of this meagre fall, but lay, for ever, above the line of perpetual snow." (15)

"There was always a conflict in Rollo Martins—between the absurd Christian name and the sturdy Dutch (four generations back) surname. Rollo looked at every woman that passed, and Martins renounced them for ever. I don't know which one of them wrote the Westerns."

"It was odd how like the Lime he knew was to the Lime I knew: it was only that he looked at Lime's image from a different angle or in a different light." (23)

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability toe feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent humanity, the mark of cruelty.”

James Baldwin, in "Everybody's Protest Novel" (which I've only just read)

Yep. I've often thought something like this, sitting next to certain men at sanctioned sentimental displays, feeling disappointment at this poor substitute for something that might make me feel and cry, but glancing over to see their eyes misted over.


ETA. And more, and more, that's so right on.

"[The human being] is not, after all, merely a member of Society or a Group or a deplorable conundrum to be explained by Science.  He is...something more than that, something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable. In overlooking, denying, evading his complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish..."

"...only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves..."

"It is this power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a vast reality..."

"...the formula created by the necessity to find a lie more powerful than the truth has been handed down and memorized and persists yet with a terrible power."

"...this fear of the dark makes it impossible that our lives shall be other than superficial."

Wow: "our confusion, dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit prison of the American dream"

Also: "But unless one's ideal of society is a race of neatly analyzed, hardworking ciphers..."

"The aim has now become to reduce all Americans to the compulsive bloodless dimensions of a guy named Joe" [like "the zeal of the alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the nakedness of the natives"]

"For [Bigger's] tragedy is...that he has accepted a theology that denies him life."

"...but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding forever, a new act of creation, which can save us – 'from the evil that is in the world.' With the same motion, at the same time, it is this toward which we endlessly struggle and from which, endlessly, we struggle to escape."

How well he describes a particular that extends to all of us.

And finally, perhaps: "The failure of the [allow me to substitute lousy] novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended"

First, when I'd read Antony & Cleopatra before, I'd never heard the echo of Antony's line, "Let Rome in Tiber melt" in these lines from "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

I do really like the part in The Merry Wives of Windsor when Ford acknowledges how close his wife and Mistress Page are.

FORD

Well met, Mistress Page. Whither go you?

MISTRESS PAGE

Truly, sir, to see your wife. Is she at home?

FORD

Ay; and as idle as she may hang together, for want
of company. I think, if your husbands were dead,
you two would marry.

And then later, when they're hatching the scheme to get Falstaff at Herne's oak, how they carry on each other's thoughts.

It's nice.

Watching a good performance (finally!) of Romeo and Juliet this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised that they'd included all of the Nurse's bit about how she remembers how old Juliet is -- because of the earthquake, and putting wormwood on her dugs to wean the little girl. One of those bits in Shakespeare where he gives you, just for a minute, a glimpse into another whole world.

Was kind of thinking how that's one of things I'm enjoying most about reading this Pynchon novel. Those moments where the story just opens up into another dimension -- about Cornelia and Rocky's honeymoon, about Horst and his boys in the arcades. Nothing that's particularly crucial to the plot, but just so enjoyable in themselves. Reminds me of those Advent calendars we used to get, the ones where you opened a different window in the little village every day, each one showing something you wouldn't otherwise see or know was there.

I keep wanting to quote the dialogue from this Pynchon. Here's one, with no particular significance, that filled me with glee:

"Fantastic morir soñando here," he informs Maxine, "old Cibao recipe, handed down through the family for generations."

Maxine happens to know it's the owner going in the back and throwing Creamsicles in the blender. She considers letting Windust in on this and is instantly annoyed at how reflexively wiseassed it will sound.