Wyndham Lewis

[Benny Bunter]

It's not Paris though, they're these weird little backwaters full of horrible, parasitic russians/poles and hysterical peasant women. Nothing glamorous about it.

It is pretty good, don't get me wrong, and I don't really understand the context of it yet. Not a world I'm familiar with.

 

[luka]

found apes of god for £1 in oxfam today

 

[Benny Bunter]

This guy's got such an odd style. Sometimes some of his sentences could go in that prissy locution thread, but it's always so scathing/mocking that 'prissy' doesn't seem like the right word for it.

" When a customer is confessing in the fullest way his paraesthesias, allowing this new host an engaging glimpse of his nastiest propriums and kinks, Bestre behaves, with unconscious logic, as though a secret of the most disreputable nature were being imparted to him. Were, in fact, the requirements of a vice being enumerated, he could not display more plainly the qualms caused by his rôle of accessory. He will lower his voice, whisper in the client's ear; before doing so glance over his shoulder apprehensively two or three times, and push his guest roughly into the darkest corner of the passage or kitchen."

 

[version]

He writes pretty much how you'd expect from looking at him.

 

[Benny Bunter]

There's definitely something evil about him.

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[Benny Bunter]

"The Eye was really Bestre's weapon: the ammunition with which he loaded it was drawn from all the most skunk-like provender, the most ugly mucins, fungoid glands, of his physique. Excrement as well as sputum would be shot from this luminous hole, with the same certainty in its unsavoury appulsion."

 

[luka]

you can see him in sinclair and in prynne

 

[Benny Bunter]

This Bestre story's great, better than the first two I think, or maybe I'm just getting my head round what he's about more now.

Some good stuff about the eye - Brestre has 'substituted' the mouth for the eye as a weapon, that reminded me of that brilliant Mark E Smith lyric "With print you substitute an ear for an extra useless eye" (remember @luka mentioning McLuhan's influence here ages ago, but I haven't read McLuhan)

That thing that we're all just flesh puppets adapting to the environment around us.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Some really maddening sentences in this book - wtf is this supposed to mean? Read it about 10 times and still have absolutely no idea.

"Would this boy have met death with the exultation of a martyr rather than give up his picture of an old and despondent mountebank—like some stubborn prophet who would not forgo the melodrama forged by his orderly hatreds—always of the gloom of famine, of cracked and gutted palaces, and the elements taking on new and extremely destructive shapes for the extermination of man?"

 

[luka]

i think he's talking about thirdform