FUCK

Wherein the Author Tells the Reader How It’s Been Going, Among Other Things Most Interesting; Including a Surprise Postscript

I’ve been in a terrible mood the past week or two, and it’s heavily affected my reading, which then, of course, rebounds on my mood in a viciously circular movement.

When I’m in a bad mood like this, it makes me impatient.

I’ll be walking up the street to the grocery store. Half-way there, I’m gritting my teeth because “half-way” will actually only be once I’m at the store… so I’m only a quarter of the way… and then I jam my foot into an uneven slab of concrete and go flying forward into a bush… and now it feels like I’ve lost my big toenail, I’m sure it’s bleeding, I can feel my sock getting wet down there, and I look up from picking up all the stuff I just dropped and there’s a big crowd of girls and now they’re all pointing and laughing, covering their mouths, and so on like that, and I finally get it together by the time I’m at the grocery store (okay, now I’m halfway), but honestly I’m still kind of flustered from falling down in front of people, so I forget a bunch of the things I was planning to buy—things I needed for dinner—so that by the time I get home and realize this, I don’t want to go back, and now my girlfriend is going to be annoyed that I forgot tortillas, because how are we going to have tacos for dinner if there are no tortillas? and well, look, I say, but only hypothetically because I’m still just getting home and my girlfriend is still at work, We still have lettuce and tomatoes and that kind of thing, so I can just make us taco salad! That’s good right? And as I’m going up the steps to my apartment, kind of half talking to myself about the taco salad idea, I trip again and smash the tomato I bought with the hand I’m using to catch myself, sending tomato juice all over the steps… and a little bit of it goes into my eye… it’s more acidic than you’d think, it’s burning and now the taco salad idea is getting fucked up too… taco salad without tomatoes sucks…

So, I get inside and wash the tomato off my hand. I take my shoes and socks off, yep, there goes that big toenail, and I wrap up my big toe (the right one) with a band-aid that doesn’t quite lie comfortably between the toes… the edges poke the other toe… so I go to the chair in the corner by the window thinking I’ll read… and what, I pick up my book, it’s a novel, and now something is happening in the utmost seriousness. The protagonist is talking to a secondary character about something that I can’t possibly give a shit about right now, and the character is responding in a brief way that suggests he’s not that interested in the subject either, at least not right now… but I could be reading that into the character…

A page later, I admit to myself that the book isn’t doing it for me. It’s always a good thing to stop reading a book if you don’t feel that inner pull of urgency, but only if you understand that the problem is almost certainly you. Never keep reading a book if you’re not able to give it its due. And so on.

I shelve the book.

In the next hour or so (before my girlfriend gets home and the issue of dinner comes up), I start three new books, getting about 12 pages into each of them. They all end up going back on the shelf.

Now I’m pacing up and down the length of my bookshelves, running my eyes up and down the spines, like a kid listlessly looking for food in the half-empty fridge, over and over again, my eyes are getting all googly from reading so many spines… and I hear the door open…

“Hiii,” …

“Heeey”…

“Listen, sweetheart…” my palms upturned as though to beg God for mercy, “I have to tell you something…” I hang my head. “I fucked up.”

It’s okay, I don’t think she reads these… unless…

She’s really nice about me forgetting all the ingredients, it’s not a problem! It’s okay that I didn’t buy the main ingredient required to make tacos, the thing that we planned on having for dinner tonight. Oh, and the hallway—it smells kind of tomato-y… ???

Anyway, after going back to pacing the bookshelves, slightly less googly-eyed, the only book that is able to hold my attention even a little is Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I’ll give you a good section from “The First Book of Pantagruel”. (However good the Screech version is, the Thomas Urquhart translation of the late 1600s seems like the best). It describes Pantagruel’s partner in crime, Panurge, who is simultaneously “gallant and proper” and “a very dissolute and debauched fellow”:

Panurge was of a middle stature, not too high nor too low, and had somewhat an aquiline nose, made like the handle of a razor. He was at that time five and thirty years old or thereabouts, fine to gild like a leaden dagger—for he was a notable cheater and coney-catcher—he was a very gallant and proper man of his person, only that he was a little lecherous, and naturally subject to a kind of disease which at that time they called lack of money—it is an incomparable grief, yet, notwithstanding, he had three score and three tricks to come by it at his need, of which the most honourable and most ordinary was in manner of thieving, secret purloining and filching, for he was a wicked lewd rogue, a cozener, drinker, roister, rover, and a very dissolute and debauched fellow, if there were any in Paris; otherwise, and in all matters else, the best and most virtuous man in the world; and he was still contriving some plot, and devising mischief against the sergeants and the watch.

The parts about Panurge have been the only fix I’ve come across for my bad mood and my persistent feeling of impatience.

While reading Rabelais, I thought it would be good to finally also pick up Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Only finding a bunch of expensive copies online and being, still, more or less impatient, I looked up “RABELAIS AND HIS WORLD BAKHTIN AUDIOBOOK”.

Usually, I hate audiobooks. One of the best things about reading is that you don’t have to hear someone else’s vocal affectations. But this audiobook is done completely in robot-voice. Someone ran the text through a PDF reader and uploaded it as-is. At first, this was distracting; then, I got used to it. I basically just listen and subvocalize what I hear back to myself, which I do when reading anyway, so that it feels more like “actual” reading.

I struck a good balance between the Bakhtin book (which is great: even if you’re not reading Rabelais in parallel, I recommend it) and Gargantua and Pantagruel. Shunting myself back and forth between the two books served to get me out of the annoying cycle of impatience I had been having with my reading (and also, partly, with everything else).

So my mood has begun to gradually improve.

Because of Rabelais and His World, I also checked out a weird little book I had never heard of before: The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, which Bakhtin comments on, and then quotes from:

We find a characteristic discussion of laughter in one of the most remarkable works of Romantic grotesque, "The Night Watches" of Bonaventura (the pen name of an unknown author, perhaps Wetzel [actually August Klingemann]). These are the tales and thoughts of a night watchman. The narrator describes as follows the meaning of laughter: “Is there upon earth a more potent means than laughter to resist the mockeries of the world and of fate? The most powerful enemy experiences terror at the sight of this satirical mask, and misfortune itself retreats before me, if I dare laugh at it. […]”¹

The impression this books gave me is of an embryonic, more timid stage on that literary trajectory the high point of which is Lautréamont’s Maldoror.

Maybe I’ll have more to say about this one later—although, unfortunately, Nightwatches strikes me as mostly of historical interest. A very stiff and melodramatic book.

I WAS ORIGINALLY going to send this out to paid subscribers only, but it occurred to me that maybe free subscribers should get a preview every once in a while…

Consider becoming a paid subscriber! It helps me keep the light (sic) on at the COM-POSIT bunker, and it gets you the full COM-POSIT payload.

I’ll also send you a print-only essay, which I still have copies of.

IN ANY CASE, here’s a month of paywalled writing for free:

1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 38.