authors under the influence

[Paul Mackin]

Dunno if it's been mentioned but one of  the most medicated of  
authors on record was Marcel Proust. His great (if not too-fucked-up)  
desire was to live long enough to finish "A la recherche du temps  
perdu."  (now there's an addiction) He tried everything in the way of  
drugs available to him to keep a failing body going long enough to  
complete the task. Prominent were shots of pure adrenaline obtained  
from Swiss manufacturers. And to tie this thread to the Starbucks one  
he also ingested plenty of good old reliable caffeine. He had  
virtually stopped eating to the point of starvation but managed to  
keep some nutrition coming into his body from his favorite beverage,  
cafe au lait, sent in from the Ritz no doubt.

I've been reading a new book about the last days  of Proust called  
"Proust at the Majestic" by Richard Davenport-Hines.




On Oct 19, 2006, at 10:02 AM, Otto wrote:

> That's been the part I liked too, but I never went past page 120 I
> admit! I didn't get it!
>
> 2006/10/17, Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net>:
>> I do think that the passage about the
>> guy waiting for his (dealer?) and wondering if he should call his
>> dealer, being torn about it, is real a brilliant -- not necessarily
>> just a portrait of drug feeling but a portrait of fucked up desire of
>> any kind at all.
>>
>
> Is this the major pattern of the book? I was wondering what the
> literary function of this part might be when I read it first.
>
> And did I only miss to apply the "message" of this to all the other
> stories in the book? That nearly everything in the post-postmodern era
> is done out of "fucked up desire"?
>
> Not that bad, this observation! But is there anything new in the  
> message?