Baroque Prose of the Day

[Viva June]

Yes, Theroux is an amazing writer. I must admit that I am often left in the dust, comprehension-wise, by his logophilia and hyperlexicality, and yet Darconville's Cat is a joy to read. The epononymous protagonist is obviously an idealised version of the author himself; in this respect the novel reminds me of another exercise in literary megalomania, Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian VII. Moreover, Theroux's brand of satire is, like Rolfe's, unashamedly elitist. You should maybe avoid the book if you hail from Virginia or any other part of the American South (unless, of course, you hate your origins, in which case you will probably enjoy all the anti-hick sentiment and epigrammatic put-downs). All the characters are outrageous to the point of being entirely believable, my favourite so far being the villain, Dr Crucifer, a Satan-worshipping eunuch who is also the grey eminence of Harvard University.

Edit: Should that be "the grey eminence of Harvard University" or "at Harvard University"?

[gveranon]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

Yes, Theroux is an amazing writer. I must admit that I am often left in the dust, comprehension-wise, by his logophilia and hyperlexicality, and yet Darconville's Cat is a joy to read. The epononymous protagonist is obviously an idealised version of the author himself; in this respect the novel reminds me of another exercise in literary megalomania, Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian VII. Moreover, Theroux's brand of satire is, like Rolfe's, unashamedly elitist. You should maybe avoid the book if you hail from Virginia or any other part of the American South (unless, of course, you hate your origins, in which case you will probably enjoy all the anti-hick sentiment and epigrammatic put-downs). All the characters are outrageous to the point of being entirely believable, my favourite so far being the villain, Dr Crucifer, a Satan-worshipping eunuch who is also the grey eminence of Harvard University. Edit: Should that be "the grey eminence of Harvard University" or "at Harvard University"?

The quoted passages are so tantalizing that I'm feeling I must read Darconville's Cat and probably other works by Theroux as well. I tend to relish unashamedly elitist invective. I'm not from the American South; I'm from another often despised region, the Midwest. I appreciate and frequently agree with witty put-downs. What gets under my skin, for some reason, are put-downs that are as crude and stupid as what is supposedly being put down. And this, of course, is much more common than real acuity and wit.

[Jezetha]

Quote Originally Posted by Viva June

Yes, Theroux is an amazing writer. I must admit that I am often left in the dust, comprehension-wise, by his logophilia and hyperlexicality, and yet Darconville's Cat is a joy to read. The epononymous protagonist is obviously an idealised version of the author himself; in this respect the novel reminds me of another exercise in literary megalomania, Frederick Rolfe's Hadrian VII. Moreover, Theroux's brand of satire is, like Rolfe's, unashamedly elitist. You should maybe avoid the book if you hail from Virginia or any other part of the American South (unless, of course, you hate your origins, in which case you will probably enjoy all the anti-hick sentiment and epigrammatic put-downs). All the characters are outrageous to the point of being entirely believable, my favourite so far being the villain, Dr Crucifer, a Satan-worshipping eunuch who is also the grey eminence of Harvard University. Edit: Should that be "the grey eminence of Harvard University" or "at Harvard University"?

I am on page 196 of An Adultery, and still enjoying it immensely. The female character the narrator is in love with reminds me uncannily of someone I know, so I am just as much learning as reading... [Because of Theroux I have at last come round to ordering (and eventually reading) Hadrian VII, too.] It's always a treat to read something that is so good. Every page has at least one great sentence or an acute observation, for instance: She looked like a ghost overtaken by daybreak and I had heard of women who constantly needed to know men wanted them, who were driven to find newer and newer converts to create an image of themselves for themselves. It was like looking in a mirror, and if she sometimes ended up in bed it was proof of his adoration as well as her own desirability. To be alone for such a woman is often to have no identity, to be extinguished.

(I think 'of Harvard University' btw)

[Viva June]

Quote Originally Posted by Jezetha

[Because of Theroux I have at last come round to ordering (and eventually reading) Hadrian VII, too.]

One of the strangest books I have ever encountered. I keep meaning to read A. J. A. Symons's famous biography of Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo.

Edit: This is a nice explication of Theroux's prose style from someone who is more equal to the task of analysing it than I am.

[Viva June]

Another tidbit from Darconville's Cat:

The anagram of 'The heart's desire' is 'hate strides here'—the imperfection in the transposition being the apostrophe you can't cry out.

Pretty clever writing.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

EDITED (11 Aug 08) to change subject title from 'Purple Patch of the Day'. ============================== I define 'Purple Patch' as an item of Purple Prose, one that does not stick out like a sore thumb but gains a foothold by enhancing or infecting or enlightening or darkening its surroundings of Prose in a positively Textured way. We want no lean or hungry prose in this thread (like Hemingway!) but Proustian or Ligottian with a meaningful (or even meaningless!) richness that tentacularly or insidiously or gorgeously or obliquely haunts you or eats away...

Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"

[gveranon]

From Quentin S. Crisp's "Remember You're a One-Ball!"

On the train back, I fell into an empty seat in a kind of stupor, and gazed out of the window at nothing, trying to abandon myself to the helplessness of the passenger. At length the sluggish branch-line engine heaved itself out of the station and into surroundings I had only ever known as moving scenery. It was a beautiful stretch of country with a shallow, dusk-coloured river meandering through copses and fields of sheep. It had been a long wait for the train, and the vast gooseflesh of air that was twilight was surrendering to true night. The clouds above were a dramatic hanging canvas of brewing troubles. A rattle of rain beaded the window. Although it was not especially cold, the dying twilight, the clouds and the straggling shower, all made me shiver. From the ever-passing chaos of this gloom -- this looped backdrop -- there seemed to emerge my own face, tired and grim, there in the foreground of the window. It was almost as if I saw through my ghostly self to what was beyond, or rather, inside me. The gigantic, out-reaching and half-shapeless shadows of trees were remnants of my past life that were beginning to awaken and stir again after a sleep of long forgetfulness. They were both inside me and vaster than me, because they were the truth, and I -- I was the lie, as thin, crackling-pale and insubstantial as this reflection. And within the magic lantern of my own reflection these shadow actors played out a nightmare that I only half-understood.

[gveranon]

This was posted recently at bookslut.com:

Letter from William James to Henry James, upon the publication of The Golden Bowl:
…This method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don't know what to call it, but you know what I mean) goes against the grain of all my own impulses in writing; and yet in spite of it all, there is a brilliancy and cleanness of effect, and in this book especially a high-toned social atmosphere that are unique and extraordinary…But why won't you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style?...

Henry's response to William:
I mean . . . to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as Brother—but let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated, if you do like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonored grave than have written…I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't—you seem to me so constitutionally unable to "enjoy" it…How far apart and to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally properly!) our respective intellectual lives.

[ramonoski]

Hallucinated rain in a mirage of gutter. Conjured by its sound, the summer downpour frying in the puddles rinsed between the teeth of drains. This insubstantial torrent, sluicing a cholesterol of styrofoam and dogend from the city's dead, gray veins. A phantom, speculated city, somewhere else, that had its night voice netted once, then chloroformed, pinned to a specimen board of magnetic tape, revived to flutter weakly here tonight--who knows how long since it was captured, or how far away. Where do the Yarmouth breakers detonate, a distant Semtex, when we are away from Yarmouth? Where do the lights of London flare when we are not here? What non-euclidean map includes the places we are gone from? Say its name, the absent town, the city in remove and there it rises in the backyard of our eyes, some common landmark snapshot first, and then, specific street, and house, and room, specific chair. Say "Birmingham", and the rotunda rears within us, our imagination squinting in the traveler's fair glare of Newstreet Station. Or say "Folkston", and recall the quay side sudden still beneath our feet. These are the towns of light, built from remembered brick, conjectured beam, that stand in Hilbert Space, a plane of concept and idea where thought is form. Where the recalled smell of fresh paint upon forgotten stairs is an event in place and time. These detailed weightless urban sprawls we carry in our fragile skull, that teem with reminiscent traffics, populace with bias, opinion, rumor, legend, lie. Locations we shall never visit that yet have their hearsay substance in our lives, and so are never far from us. They rest in occult Mercators where distance is not marked from point to solid point, but calibrated there between the spark gaps of our free associations, yielding geographies with Land's End next to John O'Grouts, an Earth with poles adjacent. Continent, nation, mapped outside of matter, state of mind. Metropolis erected out of nothing, only metaphor, and ringed with slums of dream. Mnemonic highways made from smears of field glimpsed once through glass at speed, or from the jaundiced strobe of gone-by sodium lamps. Hot amber necklace on the night's bare throat, monoxide dabbed upon her pulse-points. Strung between the shimmering fabricated towns, inroads of anecdote, synaptic rails to bear the trains of thought, a beaded web across our gazetteer of the interior. Seen from above, the glittering threads of meaning run like mercury, converge on the imaginary capital: a shadow London, our idea of London, flickering in the forebrain. When we are not here, this apparition is our only London.


-- Alan Moore, "The Map Drawn in Vapour" (excerpt)

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

The skeleton clock, in daylight, was threatening to a degree its oddness could not explain. Looking through the glass at its wheels, cogs, springs and tensions, and at its upraised striker, awaiting with a sensible quiver the finish of the hour that was in force, Clara tried to tell herself that it was, only, shocking to see the anatomy of time. The clock was without a face, its twelve numerals being welded on to a just visible wire ring. As she watched, the minute hand against its background of nothing made one, then another, spectral advance. [...] ‘I’ll tell you something, Clara. Have you ever SEEN a minute? Have you actually had one wriggling inside your hand? Did you know if you keep your finger inside a clock for a minute, you can pick out that very minute and take it home for your own?’ So it is Paul who stealthily lifts the dome off. It is Paul who selects the finger of Clara’s that is to be guided, shrinking, then forced wincing into the works, to be wedged in them, bruised in them, bitten into and eaten up by the cogs. ‘No you have got to keep it there, or you will lose the minute. I am doing the counting – the counting up to sixty.’ . . . But there is to be no sixty. The ticking stops. From ‘The Inherited Clock’ by Elizabeth Bowen 1944