Saturday, July 25, 2009

Reading and Re-Reading

Except that I'm reading books instead of burning them, I'm going through them like a horde of fanatic Christians lately. First stop--a thorough re-reading of La Double Inconstance. What is it I love so much about Marivaux? I've thought and thought. What I think it is is the same as with Goldoni--whom after all in perfect sweetness of temper he so much resembles--his utter, unaffected, absolutely genial (in both senses) originality. You'd think, by the loose way people sneer about "Marivaudage," that it was something that anybody could do--but name even one who ever did! Cynicism, after all, doesn't mean you're smart. So why aren't Marivaux and Goldoni admired and acknowledged as the unexampled, freshest and purest psychologues of the 18th century (in the tradition, of course of Molière)? Because, unlike Rousseau and de Sade, they were men, not nasty beasts.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Having a delicious dream this morning,











I woke from it and returned to it several times--lying naked under the ceiling fan in the center of my room, with the windows open--feeling the silky cool morning air blowing over every grateful inch of me--I dreamed that the perfection of air-conditioning had made life so agreeable for everybody on the Indian subcontinent that mental illness had disappeared, and everyone had simply forgot what caste they were supposed to belong to. And so utterly charmed with this fantasy I went to meet for the first time my new psychiatrist, an elderly Roman Catholic Japanese gentleman--whom I quite liked (despite his antedeluvian opinions about marijuana), and who made no difficulties about continuing my prescription for Adderall; although, being very, very (and, I would judge, until quite recently) Japanese, he couldn't resist trying to invent absolute participial phrases that rendered his discourse sometimes unintelligible to me--and I had to stop several times to spell and define words (supernal, palliative, palliate) that were new to him. Well, hell, he's free*. We had one funny little exchange anent his Catholicism. I asked if he were perhaps from Nagasaki, as I've heard that it (or what's left of it) is a center of Catholicism in Japan--and indeed he is from that northern suburb of Nagasaki that mistakenly got the direct hit of the 2nd atomic bomb ever to be dropped on a civilian target; but, he said, he didn't convert to Roman Catholicism until he moved to Tokyo to go to school...and if ever I heard a man complacently rustling prestigious academic achievement, it was in that modest phrase.

The man and the boy pointing to their shadows in this entry's first photo I've chosen to illustrate the fact that when I left Dr. Kai and rushed a-bus to get my Adderall ("happy pills") prescription filled at the Queen's Hospital pharmacy, the sun was at highest, directly overhead, slightly greenish, zenith. And it is to note that the slightly mad euphoria, that had possessed me since before I woke up, was a-thrilling in that solar verticality--which lasts in these lattitudes, this time of year, for an hour on either side of noon--with all the estival mania of sunlight whose contrasting hiemal obliquity will fill me with the mental depression of Seasonal Affective Disorder six months from now.


* free i.e., His services to me are paid for by Medicaid/care; he costs me nothing.

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Playing Bridge Online the Other Day,



My partner was a young Italian man of "Intermediate" skill. We successfully bid and made several contracts, losing a couple of hands by just a single trick or two. I was encouraging my partner and "chatting" with him in Italian. Things were going great. Till one hand--he indicated that he had more than opening points, and I had nearly enough to have opened two no-trump myself. We had begun the bidding in no-trump, so I bid 4 Clubs (Gerber), asking for aces. Alas, my partner was unfamiliar with that bidding convention, and responded with a wildly disinformative bid, causing me to set our contract far above our means of fulfilling it--and our opponents pitilessly doubled us. We went down big-time, 1,600 or 1,800 points. Came then the mortified chat-message from my partner, "Mi dispiace. Ho sbagliato. Buona notte." It was like I could see the tears in his eyes. Hastily, I typed, "C'era solamente un malinteso di Gerber. Va bene. Non ti preoccupare."

For a long minute, there was nothing in the chat-box--then: "Sei una persona meravigliosa."

I've been walking on air ever since.

Monday, July 06, 2009

Grillé en pleine Drague





I read about it on the BBC website a couple of weeks ago, and finally saw the episode on YouTube (Français) this morning: Mme. Chirac giving a little speech about one or the other of her charities, while behind her, her husband Jacques is making such a fuss over a young woman--getting her seated next to him, making gallant smalltalk with her--that it is interrupting Mme. Chirac's speech. Mme. Chirac stops, turns around and looks at them, and yells something at them (a single word that sounded like "Gouls!"*), like someone calling a dog to heel, which causes M. Chirac to jump, and shut up for a minute till his wife finishes her speech. Mme. Chirac then steps back and sits down on the other side of her husband, still quite visibly annoyed with him, while he acts somewhat apologetically towards the young woman--whom he has never ceased bird-dogging for a second--like a kid whose mother has just publicly reprimanded him. It is, maybe, funny. It is certainly real.

Bernadette Chirac (née Chodron de Courcel) is every bit the equal--and a little more--of her husband, and doesn't mind reminding him of the fact. She has said as much in her unprecedentedly frank memoirs. She says, and says she often says to him, "Remember, when Napoléon abandoned Joséphine was when he lost everything." The reason I've been so long deliberating and reflecting on this blog is that I've been investigating the likelihood of Mme. Chirac's oft-repeated reminder's being in any real or metaphoric sense true. I have concluded that it is not true--although it might be true that, without Joséphine, Napoléon wouldn't have been given command of the French armies in Italy, and that the Napoleonic Empire would never have happened. At any rate Joséphine de Beauharnais is a very interesting person--actually more interesting, and more of a person, than Napoléon ever thought of being. 'Tis said that when she married Alexandre de Beauharnais, in 1779 (she was 18 years old), he was so ashamed of her rustic creole manners that he refused to have her presented at the French royal court; but somehow, in the years between then and his beheading (along with his cousin) in 1794, Joséphine's manners had so entirely improved that she would also have been beheaded as a ci-devant, had not the abrupt end of Robespierre and his reign of terror forestalled it. What she did in the interval between her release from prison in July of 1794 and the regaining of her late husband's property in June of 1795 I can find no specific account of, though 'tis said that this 30-something creole beauty (with bad teeth) became the mistress of "several politicians" of the Directory; one of whom, Paul Barras, then head of government, "shared" her with Napoléon--and the rest, as they say, is history. Joséphine seems to have been, for all her matter-of-fact willingness to sleep her way to the top, a remarkably frank, unaffected, and honest woman, with her own concerns and her own interests, which she would suffer no attempts to conceal or regulate. She would not, for example, much to Napoléon's chagrin, pretend that his teeny weenie ("like a child's" according to the British autopsy) could satisfy her, or disguise the fact that several others' could. And she was, much to the world's benefit, a thoroughly devoted amateur botanist, whose greenhouses at Malmaison were the first of their kind, and whose dedication to the cultivation of roses resulted ultimately in the hybrid tea roses of the later 19th century. All honor and all glory.

*"Ta gueule!" is what Mme. Chirac said, meaning "Shut up!"