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Thursday, July 11, 2013

confession: I am a tapeworm of wishes

I wish I could be Robert Musil. Vomit out parties and opposing philosophical structures, let myself go with sentences and boring characters, let the boring characters boringly court each other under the eyes of boring spectators yet pull it off (if only Thomas Mann could like me! another one I envy and must read with equal sense of torture, the magic mountain is waiting on a large stack of books). If I were Robert Musil I’d have been: to the military and an engineer and met Franz Kafka. Surely that would help me in a place like now where I’m standing with interconnections – pietas of the Revolution, museums in Brussels, Desnos in Auschwitz, the Pope (don’t even know which one) hung up at the butcher’s - but apart from them, only a few badly mastered tenses. Where do connections and references end, when do the characters stop leaping into the swimming pool or retrieving nectarines from the fruitbowl in a way satisfactory enough for me to stop eating tortilla chips, yes when will I write my longest sentence, somewhere between Proust and Joyce, when will someone get back with the nut chocolate, when will I leap into Robert Musil and become his own private tapeworm?