Recognitions ch 2 and link to cover for 93 penguin edition

[Paul Mackin]

On 4/15/2011 8:47 PM, edmoorester at gmail.com wrote:
> "in the room the women come and go talking of Michellangelo"
> TS Eliot snippet from "Love Song for J Alfred Prufrock"
>
>
> I get the feeling narrator has a lot of contempt for Paris
> "Paris lay by like a promise accomplished: age had not withered her,
> nor custom staled her infinite vulgarity"p63
> "far spaced posturings of haute couture" p64

In addition to comparing her with the Bard's Cleopatra he might have 
thrown in Keats' Grecian Urn for good measure.

A thing of beauty will annoy forever; it just can't get over itself . . .

Maybe it's  a 50s thing.  Americans had always felt outclassed by 
European culture, and wasn't this especially pronounced in the 50s? One 
way to compensate was to make fun of what you feared.

50s Americans tended to be culture whores.

P






>
> but I also feel he despises the Americans
> "You'll like Venice. It's so like Fort Lauderdale"p66
>
> hmm. . .Wyatt seems to not relate very well to people who aren't artists
> but he doesn't seem too happy himself
> "The streets, when he came out, were filled with people recently 
> washed and dressed,
> people for whom time was not continuum of disease but relentless 
> repetition of
> consciousness and unconsciousness, unrelated as day and night, or 
> black and white,
> evil and good, in independent alternation, like the life and death of 
> insects."p69
>
> I really did like this passage
> ". . .they had gathered as transcripts of their seducers who were not 
> known in this
> land, and stood now stricken in erect silence up and down the aisles 
> of the avenues,
> surprised that those they had known in conglomerate childhood had also 
> travelled,
> had also been seduced, and that, in this shocked instant, by lovers 
> more beautiful
> than their own"p68
>
> btw sorry if forgot link for previous post
> http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/2101/The_Mellow_Pad
>
> man I hate it when my posts come out in code
>
>
> ed