Portrait of a passing snauzerA new variety of blind-call on the telephone today. There is nothing by a long silence followed by a woman's voice concluding the call. All I hear is the word "goodbye". It could be sinsister except that the voice still has that hopeful confidence implying that in the long run it hopes that I will pay for something.
When I first read Jay McInernerny's novel Brightness Falls about the success-fuelled conoscenti in 90s New York I don't think I fully realised, as I do now reading it for the second time, how witty it is. One of the characters Victor Pop is a novelist who has written one succesful novel and constantly postponed the second one because he is too busy promoting the image of himeslf as the great American writer. "Semi-colons aside," his publisher Russell Calloway thinks not without irony, "He is a master of the question mark."
1 comment:
Brilliant portrait! Dogs sometimes look almost disturbingly human. This is a case of that I think. One wonders whether setters might also make good sitters?
I have checked and find that "brightness falls" is a quotation from James Joyce who has Stephan Dedalus meditate, "Brightness falls from the air..." which is in fact an alleged misquotation from Thomas Nashe who in the 1590's wrote in a poem: "Brightness falls from the hair.."
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