Tuesday 8 June 2010

From my reading... the question of style (and nipples)


A little reading sometimes goes a long way. As witness:


...In my student days Eva had been a famous actress in Vienna. Although I was only an unknown student she remained faithful to me for years...If, after the show was over, she noticed me standing on the other side of the Josefstädter Strasse under the gas-lamp, she would leave a world-famous director without saying goodbye and run across the road between automobiles and streetcars to join me. At such time Max Reinhardt gazed after her with a melancholy expression...


...My poverty, which prevented me from taking a woman to a café or seeing her home in a taxi, made new conquests impossible, or rather, it deprived me of the opportunity to create a situation in which a woman could seduce me...


...Throwing a last glance at the mirror reflecting her bare shoulders, shining like sixty-watt, frosted-glass electric bulbs, she caught sight of me standing behind her, green with hunger...


...I hesitated a moment and resolved to be as tactful as possible. 'I find your words too hasty...However estimable such outbursts of fury may be, I believe that they are merely emotional and of a temporary validity...'


...At every beat of my heart I felt the alcohol mount to the frontal lobes of my brain...


...We were talking about the colour of the female nipple. Dear Marfa told me that she had to ask only middle-aged men endowed with extraordinary intellectual capacities what colour of nipple they preferred... Dear Marfa emphasised however that the problem of nipples was merely secondary, even the most sensual of men regard the physical-spiritual qualities of a woman as more important than the colour and size of her nipples. Yet the nipple of a woman is like the buffer of a train; when you run after a train it is the buffer you see...


...I gazed at him, or rather I pushed my glance into his eyes like an electric plug into a wall-socket....


The author? All will be revealed in due course (no, it's not me.)



2 comments:

Mark Granier said...

'Throwing a last glance at the mirror reflecting her bare shoulders, shining like sixty-watt, frosted-glass electric bulbs, she caught sight of me standing behind her, green with hunger...'

I was going to ask why 'electric' is necessary here, then I reread the first extract (with the gas-lamp). I might have said 'light bulbs' , but 'electric' (apart from being usefully old fashioned) has other qualities. Not sure why 'electric plug' is necessary though. Were there other kinds? Perhaps, again, it is just simply of that era.

' Yet the nipple of a woman is like the buffer of a train; when you run after a train it is the buffer you see...'

Why the singular/synecdoche, rather than nipples/buffers?

Whatever about seeing the buffers of a departing train, I imagine you would certainly see the buffers of an approaching one, before it runs you over (better of course to just board the train, if you can).

When nipples come to mind (as they will) I often think of Heaney's poem 'A Dream of Jealousy':

“Show me”, I said to our companion, “what
I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.”

George S said...

The clue would be that it is in translation. Nor is the translation by me.

I don't know the answers to the questions, but am inttrigued by the grotesqueries of the text.

So, for example, why are the nipples like buffers when he is running AFTER the train (ie it is receding from him with its back to him)? Not to mention all the other strange aspects of the simile, which would make a considerable list.

The question of the grotesque is fascinating generally.