Page 16

Who of us knows the theory and practice best suited to the life we are destined to believe we choose while destined to disbelieve the destiny that chooses, wheels within wheels, frantic little rings whirring as the great planet slowly swings through its track that the slow swing alone makes.

the most complete descriptions imaginable

She had given to him the most complete descriptions imaginable of the furnishings and of the ancient upholstery, the silk pillows, faded yellow and rose and gold with long gold tassels, the tapestry chairs, the wall measurements, the fountains and the shadows of the fountains, the Gothic arches, the illusive distance between one object and another, the number of feet between a divan and a chair, between a dynasty and a dynasty, the immobility of the furniture, the floors wavering like water, and she had told him of the absolute stratagem that would be necessary if he should find himself, that it was the morning tower, that he should not make the mistake of trying to walk through the thin partition of glass that separated him from eternal space, the morning sea like the twilight sea, the circling far white sands at the water's milky edge, a grey, twisted tree licked by the surf's tongue, its branches gleaming with red lichen, a white bird with a white comb roosting at the top, some bird of passage pausing for a moment here, everything arranged for convenience.

Purple lace, ctd.; Dreams, ctd.; Recursion, ctd.

From the same sentence as the purple lace Brooklyn Bridge (p. 24): "tenements crowded with discrowned kings, rabbit warrens and the rabbits dreaming of the rabbit god, his nostrils twinkling in the polar sky..." Aren't we all? That's what I now aspire for my writing to do, twinkle in the polar sky.

The shortest sentence

"Oblivion was his brother." (p. 20 -- very moving in context, I thought)

Any other contenders? Comments...

marcelled hair

Miss MacIntosh's "marcelled hair" (gleaming like the sand streaked with sunset when the sandpipers wade in the glassy surf as the last light fades, in case you were wondering, p. 11): what is it?

A style, a.k.a. "the marcel wave," named after Francois Marcel, the French hairdresser who invented the process in 1872.

Chambers within chambers

I had thought my page 2 sentence would be a description of a house trying to be as wild as the pregnant woman's clothes, but she beat me to it (to that too):

The great, sea-blackened house with golden spires and cornices and towers peeled by the salt air, dark allees, hidden interiors, the empty drawing rooms where the hostess had not set foot for many years, as many drawing rooms as tideless years, the rooms too many for mortal use, chambers within chambers, the gilded, mirroring ballrooms where no one danced, the hangings of scaly gold and rain-stained velvet, the heathen monsters everywhere, the painted, clouded ceilings illuminated by partial apparitions of the gods, the silken, padded walls, the ropes of rusted bells, the angels and the cherubim and the immortal rose, the dream of heaven, the lily-breasted virgins sporting in fields of asphodel, the water-gurgling gargoyles or those coated by dust, the interior and exterior fountains, the broken marble statues in ruined gardens sloping towards the sea, the disc throwers, the fat cupids, the thin psyches with flowing curls, the mute Apollo Belvedere, the king's horsemen, the life-sized chessmen seeming to move against the moving clouds that moved above the moving waters, the sea light lighting their wooden eyes, the seagulls perched like drifts of snow upon their heads.

Wows:
scaly gold and rain-stained velvet
water-gurgling gargoyles
seeming to move against the moving clouds that moved above the moving waters

tip

If you're writing an 1,198-page book that's all fustian and monument, explain the title by the top of page 6. (I love her appearance there!)

Page 1

It is not always easy to tell the difference between the woman you plan to marry and the woman you have married.

Page 4

The melody of this birdcall was one he had never heard before, or once, in his childhood, or his childhood's childhood, mistily unseen even then.

What was the organization of memory?

"Yet he would remain forever engraved on memory's whirling disc" (p. 4)

What do we think this image is? Were there floppy disks by 1965? Is it a circular saw, or a long-playing record; does 33 1/3 or even 78 rpm qualify as "whirling"? How "engraved"?

If there are no answers to these questions, then this is a very interesting kind of image, made up of image-particles as it were that are concrete but never solidify.

intensifying repetitions

Her phrases take you to another territory, then, instead of leaving you there, lurch you one step deeper:

"the train as small as a toy train crossing a toy bridge" (p. 4): it's a small train, in fact a toy train, and then you just can see it in its miniscularity crossing the toy bridge

"red polo riders riding red horses" (p. 2)

Page 3

How much simpler, by contrast, men seemed to her than women.

Grey Goose

The drunk driver's "Grey Goose bus" (p. 1): Not just a vodka but a Canadian subsidiary of Greyhound bus line. The vodka started in 1997 so it is an unintentional double entendre in the book.

The Beautiful Conditional

Nice first sentence!

The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, who would be a woman with ample breasts, those of a realized maturity.

I read (past tense) that sentence as a future -- his wife whom he would someday find and marry. But the next sentence recasts it into a subjunctive (or conditional? grammar mavens?) in the present: the narrator imagines him as currently having a wife, who must perforce be bodacious. I go back to re-read and find again that word "anticipation," which threw me so to speak into the future, but the driver may merely be looking forward to getting home to his extant wife. In English, "would be" seems to allow for both. It's a beautiful oscillation of future and fictional present with which to start a novel.

(Third paragraph, confirming that the first sentence is about fictionality: "Was he, after all, a bachelor, perhaps even some mad Don Quixote... and his family life, an emanation of my over-active imagination...?")

Potential Literature Project

San Francisco experimental poet Taylor Brady published a chapbook in 2000 called 33549 (the zip code of his Florida home town), in which every sentence was based on that page of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: first sentence based on first page of Proust, second sentence on second page, etc. At least that's how I remember it. It was to be the first subpart of a multivolume novel called Research (as in A la recherche, get it?).

I liked 33549 a lot, although I didn't keep reading Brady's later work. I loved the idea. I might steal it for the WLP Book Club. Do any other members have Oulipo constraint-projects to propose?

Before and After (I): Before

To record for posterity: What do I want from this book before starting it?

I joined the World's Least Popular Book Club knowing pretty much nothing about MM,MD. I had seen it in bookstores and always thought it was by Marguerite Yourcenar -- the existence of another Marguerite You-x never quite registered.

By now, having bought v.1 today (but resisted opening it until writing this post!), I have gathered that it's a "stream-of-consciousness" possibly-masterpiece; Norman Mailer admired it and called Young a "Hercules in high heels"; and it apparently has no beginning, middle, or end. 1,198 pages of small-print middle might beg to differ.

Which, for the quantitatively minded, puts it right in the first of the two big gaps in the bar chart below, along with Infinite Jest (1,079 pages) and The Tale of Genji (1,090):



Launching into this book, while also deciding tomorrow whether to run the Center for Fiction's Proust reading group for a year (3,000 pages), I'm looking forward less to the consciousness than to the streaming. That term always means so many different things -- Woolf and Bernhard have almost nothing in common. What will MM,MD mean by it?