Welcome, meine Damen und Herren, to what, if you're not going to be extraordinarily long-lived (and ergo old and lonesome) will be the last palindromic year of your life. I didn't have time to get sentimental this morning; I worked at nine, which was punishment enough. What would have brought me to tears this afternoon is, of course, New Year's from Vienna, hosted by Walther Kranckheit (er, Cronkite), a family tradition, sure as racism at the dinner-table and my mother's shortbread. Maybe I should be listening to Strauss right now, rather than Charm of the Highway Strip, since CotHS is ripping my guts out and replacing them with synthesizer keys and notebook pages full of poetry.
Last night was great; attended a couple cool parties with cool people. Cheers to SW, without whose company standing on the balcony for my smokey treats in the ballsblistering cold would not have been quite so enjoyable. Also appearing for a limited time from NYC was HS, for whom graduate school has gotten suckier. I saw the new year in with Messers Gin and Tonic, dressed in my tux and best mascara. It was originally my dad's dinner jacket, which he brought from Swinging London in 1968. Because the only thing worse than being overdressed is not being overdressed. I felt like a lord among the schlumpfy B*st*n young-professionals on the T in their blue-jeans and fleece sweaters. Where has real class gone, I ask you.
Damn, I should listen to myself more often. Magnetic Fields ended a few sentences ago and, daring myself to be miserable through it, I put on some Johann Strauss. Sure as death, it perked me right up: just a few be-schlag-ged strains from the Kaiserwalzer, and I'm on the verge of being happy. When I hit the zither solo in Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald, I will weep like an orphaned kitten and all my sorrows will melt away like icing-sugar on day-old Linzertorte. Hey, maybe once in a blue moon I'm dealt a card that isn't the Tower.
Another kind welcome today came at JK and MB's, where they fed me breakfast on my way back from work at sundown. If any of you have ever worked in a service industry, I'm sure you understand how precious it is when somebody else pours you some coffee and asks if you want anything. O those cunning medievals, making noble lads the domestic servants of noble men; lo, they knew that an entire life of being served and never serving hard-wires one's brain for insufferable entitlement. (Strauss update: I've just had to take a minute to polka around my messy room in my underwear to Unter Donner und Blitz, which, for the non-German-enabled, has nothing to do with sex with reindeer.)
Lines from a bohemian pre-party-party: "I get knocked up / but I go down again / You're never going to keep me down..."
So I found In the Shape of a Boar, finally. Observant readers may remember Lawrence Norfolk from such classics-flavored fripperies as Lempri�re's Dictionary, to which my uncle the vicar introduced me. [Interestingly enough, that same year, he gave me Amis p�re's bizarre the Alteration]. The first chapter of ItSoaB is at least one-third footnotes, citing auctores and ancient vase-painting. Exhaustively. In the richest sense. It was hell to get through, skipping from long lists of Greek Heroes, with genealogies and sources, into a description of the Calydonian Boar Hunt which reminded me of nothing so much as the parody-modernist writing in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, where she's trying to think like an animal or a peasant, I forget which: "He scraped his sex against a tree and growled, so intense was his frustration. His muscles strained and glowed. His haunches ached. It is hard to be a boar." variety. It's easy enough to be a bore, though. But somehow I trusted Norfolk, don't ask me why, and when I got into the second part -- a Jewish boy's perspective of the occupation by the Nazis of a town in Romania, it got interesting again. It may let me down again, but I have some hope that some of the schlockier parts of section one will meet some clever redemption.
Seid umschlungen, millionen *sniff* I wish somebody would give me a hug. Ach, but here comes good young Johann. I shall take him for a ride through the woods, stop off at a caf�, where we can smoke our pipes together and read foreign newspapers. Perhaps some strudel thereafter, no, Johann? Ernstl, would you have the sleigh brought around, please?