Perhaps it’s the afterburn of Edward St Aubyn’s Bad News, the Melrose novel in which hero Patrick spends a few mightily drug-addled days in Manhattan (with a junket to the Bronx), but I’m feeling as though I’ve been on some sort of non-traveling trip, induced by immersion in a lot of other people’s creative imaginations.

The Melrose books themselves — I’m not too far into Mother’s Milk — have induced the now very rare feeling that I am living in alternate worlds, my own and the novels’. Almost everything that I do is internally reported in a voice that distinctly belongs to an English writer who is twelve years my junior. There is nothing grandiose about this; I’m not wallowing in the notion that my life is the stuff of great fiction and worthy of being written about. (It is worthy of writing about, but by me, and as nonfictionally as possible.) It’s just that the novels have me noticing everyday things and routines as if they were captioned, and my job were to fill in the words. That’s how intensely St Aubyn’s prose has clicked with my way of being conscious.

(Not my way of writing, certainly. St Aubyn writes strong but lean sentences, in which dependent clauses almost always signal facetiousness, as if only idiots required explanations. Isn’t that what you’d expect, though, of a fictional voice preoccupied by the opening line of The Myth of Sisyphus?

***

How about a bit of housekeeping? Things are always changing at these sites of mine, and it’s hard to keep up. I tweak and fiddle with “improvements,” but then I don’t tell anyone about them, and then I get cross when people don’t figure things out for themselves. As if nobody had anything better to do.

But first, two items that I left off my Morse Questionnaire. I watched Remorseful Day at last last night, and so now this Morse jag is really done. Because I had watched the shows in order, I understood Morse’s heartbreak at losing Adele, the music teacher with whom he almost got something permanent going; she went to Australia and decided to stay there. The heartbreak becomes quite literal in the ensuing episode, and the final shot, to the strains of Parsifal, is a pan of Oxford’s dreaming spires in a mist. 

• Indoor swimming pool (Y/N).
• Institutional election (Y/N).

There. Back to housekeeping. If you are a regular reading, I recommend that you bookmark not this site but the old Daily Blague. There you will find an entry that bears the same title and image as its corresponding one here, but also, a link to that corresponding entry that is set to open The Daily Blague / reader in the same pane of your browser. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a default setting that opens links in new windows, but I’ve chosen the alterenative setting in this case to make it easy for you to return to The Daily Blague and post comments on what you’ve read here, if you have any. (Comments, not corrections; write to me privately about the latter.)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 9:43 am.