Corpsey's Ascetic November.

[Mr. Tea]

Tea do you want to join us or are you too sunk in the mire of self abuse?

I get tons of shagging, thank you very much.

Um. Or I did, until recently. The baby is basically going to arrive any day now.

I'm anticipating being far too exhausted to have much of a libidio at all for the coming few months.

 

[luka]

If you can take acid after a significant amount of time off the weed and booze it will be a completely different experience. You will be initiated into the Great Mysteries. I can personally garuntee this

 

[Leo]

I'm really looking forward to joining you on this journey Corpsey.

the wanking?

 

[luka]

How you getting on Jack? Are you sticking with it?
I'm getting into this Proust its well suited to a wet and windy winter night.

 

[luka]

I'll probably have a drink at Christmas to cope with being trapped indoors with family

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'll probably have a drink at Christmas to cope with being trapped indoors with family

Drunkenness at Christmas is compulsory for anyone who isn't Plymouth Brethren or Salafist.

 

[vershy versh]

I started drinking one Christmas whilst suffering from flu and I think it's about as close as I've gotten to feeling like the undead.

 

[Corpsey]

How you getting on Jack? Are you sticking with it?
I'm getting into this Proust its well suited to a wet and windy winter night.

I found it tough to start with but I'm beginning to sink into it. I liked what he said about how he so enjoyed being kissed goodnight that he'd hope for the moment to be delayed for as long as possible.

The sentences (moncrieff translation) are so long, you can't read it without concentrating, and it becomes surreal, how much he packs in, e.g.

"when I must needs take most pains to receive it with due formality, I had to snatch it, to seize it instantly and in public, without even having the time or being properly free to apply to what I was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the precise moment in which the door was shut."

 

[Corpsey]

As with Henry James

The length of the sentences, clause upon clause stuffed in

Gives you the impression of a mind that never stops thinking, never stops refining

As does the jumping around in time

 

[luka]

I have a more modern translation

 

[Corpsey]

The disgust and contempt I feel for his obsession with his mother, forgetting my own mum obsession when I was a kid, and how natural and understandable that was, so that the contempt I now feel for it is probably something like cauterisation of a wound

 

[luka]

I was having a think about that too. Trying to remember a time when that might of been true for me. I have virtually no childhood memories.

 

[Corpsey]

I just read the first transportingly beautiful bit

When he describes how the staircase which he watched his father's candle flame travel up has now been demolished, and says he can now hear the childhood sobs that have always been there, because now it's quiet enough, as when the hubub of the city fades and you can hear the vespers which have been ringing all day.

Something like that.

What strikes me immediately is how strange it is. In this translation its written in this very 19th century prose, but the way it's structured is so strange, completely atypical for a novel. It's sort of Victorian modernist...

 

[Corpsey]

I was having a think about that too. Trying to remember a time when that might of been true for me. I have virtually no childhood memories.

Me neither, or at least none that come easily to mind.

I've found if you start to consciously rummage around in there you can start pulling out all sorts of long dormant flotsam. An easy example of dormant memories - when you hear the theme tune to a cartoon you watched a lot when you were a kid, and you instantly remember the program that you'd completely obliterated from your conscious mind.

Anyway, that overwhelming all encompassing love for your mother - I think that is nearly universal (allowing for those with absent mothers, or cruel mothers, etc.). And of being protected by your mother for so long against the cruelty of life, the cruelty of time and death.

 

[luka]

It's the ideal book for Corpsey. Can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. I would have been reading it too but I was too busy smoking weed drinking rum and watching pornos

 

[luka]

Joke, joke, I'm on the strait and narrow, I'm right there with you, hand in hand

 

[Corpsey]

Trying to resist a big lump of lovely hash I've just been given.

Since this is a translation, the beauty of it isn't to be found so much in the language as in the observations and juxtapositions, the metaphor that can survive translation.

I'm sure if you can read French the beauty is in the language too. But that's life innit

 

[luka]

That's life.

 

[Corpsey]

Maybe beauty is a stained befouled word

 

[luka]

Third would probably call it bourgeois. I think it's redeemable, in part. It's tricky.