TRTR Part I, Chapter V, Pages 175-178

[Erik T. Burns]

Party's on the fourth floor, people, no elevator...

Starts with a Gaddisian joke, the "solids in Uccello" -- love 'em or
hate 'em, simply talking about them makes you sound smart. This notion
will infect the chatter, a jokey mirror of Otto's burden of telling
jokes or dropping bon mots that no one responds to, only to hear them
repeated later to great effect by someone else.

Here's a Uccello that uses solids:
http://www.paolouccello.org/Miracle-of-the-Desecrated-Host-(Scene-2)-1465-69.html

There are flowers here, stolen from a funeral.
No one is looking at the painting which is the reason for the party.

"It looked as though the back of an honest workman's shirt had been
mounted for exhibition..."

L'ame du chantier, indeed.

Toilet Training and Democracy -- the young man in glasses with this
pamphlet will be at the next cocktail party too.
And he has his own blog:
http://eccelibertas.blogspot.com/2007/01/what-toilet-training-can-teach-us.html
(I kid...)

More queers ... even the cockroaches!

They surround literary agent Agnes Deigh and engage in some very
dated, very stereotypical "gay" banter. This would all seem a bit tone
deaf to the contemporary ear, but Gaddis fills in the flamboyance with
his typical skill: there's a reference to a masquerade and a death
mask that directly echoes the more "literary" images of the novel's
beginning scene ("I mask myself among masked people"), which the
Gaddis site glosses thusly:

177.23] Guy de Maupassant [...] Marie Bashkirtseff: young Marie
Bashkirtseff, the animated and talented daughter of Russian
aristocracy, was living in Paris in 1884 as an artist when she
impulsively decided to write to French author Guy de Maupassant
(1850-93), then at the height of his fame. They exchanged a dozen or
so letters over a month's time; hers were ebullient and volatile, his
intrigued but cautious: "I kept saying to myself all the time: Is it a
masked woman who is amusing herself, or a simple joker?" - therefore:
"I mask myself among masked people. It is straight fighting" (letter
dated 22 April 1884, in I Kiss Your Hands: The Letters of Guy de
Maupassant and Marie Bashkirtseff [London: Rodale, 1954], 40). In his
final letter Maupassant suggests they meet; she apparently never
replied, they never met, and by October of that year she was dead.

(So it's another sterile relationship...)

And the coup de grace: "...imagine plagiarizing the imi-tation of Christ."

Another joke: The Negro of the Narcissus in reference to Otto's deep tan.

"--Huh?
--You have to be so careful below Fourteenth Street, baby. There are
certain words you just can't say."

One can only wonder what Gaddis would have made of this:
http://www.amazon.com/N-word-Narcissus-Joseph-Conrad/dp/9076660115

Well, I bet he would have made ... fun of it. (Also the new
bowdlerized _Adventure of Huckleberry Finn_)

There's another funny moment in the anecdote of Deigh and her husband,
Mister Six-sixty-six (obviously the Devil) and the fact that they,
both writers, married each other to study each other for their work.
"Everything was fine until the books came out, then they found they'd
written about each other."

Occupational hazard.

Finally, the page ends with another repetition of an overheard joke,
the negative positivist / positive negativist.

Before, another mirror, another palindrome: Trade ye no mere moneyed
art -- the yek to the whole novel?