Evidence of Myself

Packing, I keep running across evidence of older selves. Trashed paint brushes in a metal can; a catalog of Ted Godwin tartans; SM101; Jack Kirby's Kamandi (40+ issues!); Lowry's October Ferry to Gabriola; Paul Simon CDs; climbing guides for the Scottish mainland; the typescript of what was once the third chapter of an aborted science fiction novel, set in Montreal, in the snow. "Your head's not even there," snapped one of my staff on Saturday afternoon, surveying the blizzard of papers on my office desk; the various handwritten drafts of Evan's talk; the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal; the till tapes and half-full cups of mouldy jasmine tea; the bills and catalogs and brand new copy of SGB's EK Modernism monograph, fresh off the plane from Glasgow. Well, no shit. Look in the mirror at 5am, the silver at the sides of my close-cropped skull, the creases in my skin, the wide-eyed, slightly haunted look that long since ceased to be an affectation and is now a permanant facial fixture, some essential self welling up from below. An impatience, too, beating just below the surface, such as that expressed here, in yesterday's conversation with Annoying Yuppie Man:

AYM [brandishing a copy of Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist]: Would you recommend this book?

CJB: Would I personally recommend it?

AYM: Yes.

CJB: No.

AYM: Why?

CJB: Because its style is a blatant rip-off of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's.

AYM: OK, recommend something else you like to me.

CJB [vainly trying to salvage some semblance of customer service]: Name a few books you've read recently that you really liked.

AYM: I'm not, y'know, really a reader. I want your opinion. A book you really liked.

CJB [still trying to salvage the encounter by recommending "popular favorites"]: Hunter Thompson...Kurt Vonnegut...Tom Robbins...Anthony Bourdain.

AYM: No, I want something really good. Really life-changing.

CJB: Here ya go! [Proffers copy of Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life]

THEODOR ADORNO: Those who won't take advice can't be helped, the bourgeois used to say, hoping, with advice that costs nothing, to buy themselves out of the obligation to help, and at the same time to gain power over the helpless person who had turned to them. But there was in this at least an appeal to reason, conceived in the same way by the supplicant and by the turner of the deaf ear, and remotely reminiscent of justice: by following shrewd advice one might even occasionally chance on a way out. That is past.

AYM: Huh. This guy is a bit like Ayn Rand.

CJB: No he isn't.
- posted by cjb @ 8:42 AM