Anodyne
Sunday, March 04, 2007
 

Grey spring light on Main Street, door open, breeze curling through. Neil Young on the deck ("Captain Kennedy"), my trademark grey cable turtleneck traded in for the more causal (& perennially unfashionable) blue and orange plaid. Big green buds on the little cherry tree outside. A jet droning overhead in the clouds, engines in reverse, flaps down, the eee-urk! eee-urk! of hydraulics echoing down below. In dailyness. In "mental routines." In the wash basin's green soap, in the razor blade drawn smoothly over the nape of my neck, in the curly black thickets marching north up my shoulder blades. Change for the meter, for laundry. Russell Banks on Kundera as the proponent of a resolutely European "antimodern modernism," a kind of ironic realism (Banks names Broch, Kafka, and Musil as other practicioners of the form; I'd add J.M. Coetzee, Thomas Bernhard, and the Melville who wrote The Confidence-Man, emphasizing Banks' term's utility as an index of a kind of mental, and not purely geographical, origin).


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