The Golden Obelisk

You know me! Sometimes I have a large book and a small book going simultaneously. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm reading CIGARETTES by Harry Mathews. But I am also reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, a towering, big, giant, huge, monumental masterwork by Thomas Mann. Now, is it going to knock Wuthering Heights off of my list? Never! But it's got to be a Top 5 novel. Now! I was ruminating yesterday about whether I could even say I have been reading it, given the fact that I am not reading it in German. How could I read it in German? I don't know German. And now I am old and will never know German. That's part of why I'm reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, if I am: the oldness. Like, "I'm old, and I have never read THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN." Such were the thoughts that came to me before I began reading THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Of course, another part of me was and is like, you are old, why bother? Oldness goes both ways! I'm glad I'm reading it (in the translation by John E. Woods). It has everything! Including an owl. But! Before we get to the owl, it's so funny, I was thinking about not being able to read German yesterday, and then I read this in Harry Mathews's obituary: "His novel 'The Conversions,' otherwise in English, concluded with nine pages in German." But! That's not why we're here. I just wanted to say how weird it is that I'm reading two books, then one book has a hallucination talking about an owl and the next day the other book (THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN) has a ghost reciting a poem with a line about an owl in it! I didn't mention this yesterday, but the hallucination in CIGARETTES has a ghostly quality... it first appears in the form of the character's late grandmother. So you might say I was reading one book in which a ghost talks about an owl then I pick up another book and happen to come to a passage in which a ghost talks about an owl. So: 2 days, 2 ghosts talking about 2 owls. Now! Ordinarily, I wouldn't mash this all together. Back in the days before I stopped "blogging," I would have separated the following into its own "post." But those days are behind us forever! I went to bed early last night but couldn't sleep, so I arose at midnight and turned on TCM, where I saw Lana Turner as a powerful executive. And in her boardroom stood the golden obelisk glimpsed above! I used to keep tabs on obelisks in movies because McNeil cared about them. Now I don't know why I'm doing it. In conclusion, I had another thought about THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which I shared in emails with some friends (in this case, Ace, Bill, Jimmy, Megan, and Ashly). Feedback has been scarce, because what are they going to say? And I am certain the observation has been made by someone before me, though I am much too tired to google it. So! The TB sanitorium in THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN obtains a record player for its residents. Our protagonist, Hans Castorp, takes it over. He puts together little programs of music, with much thought (and many pages) spent on consideration of how one seemingly unrelated selection will flow into another. Only he has the key to the cabinet! Only he touches the records and decides what to play when! And thus he entertains his audience, becoming, in my limited knowledge, LITERATURE'S FIRST DJ.

Allusion Confusion

It is my self-imposed duty to publicly and obsessively record every occasion when I happen to read a book with an owl in it, which takes up a lot of my time, as every book has an owl in it. Usually, the task is mildly embarrassing, due to its obvious pointlessness. In today's case, the shame is multiplied by my nearly complete bafflement by the owl in question, which appears in the Harry Mathews novel CIGARETTES, as "the ground owl of childhood fame." Is that an allusion to something? Well, the phrase is spoken by a hallucination, a grandmotherly figure, which later becomes a white "owlish raven," if that clears anything up for you. In most cases, I would breeze over cryptic phrases uttered by a hallucination, but when you stick an owl in there, you've got my attention, pal! I was going to end this with "Well played, dead author," then I thought to check whether Harry Mathews is dead. He is. In his New York Times obituary, there is a paragraph addressing (sort of) the very concern stated above! "For readers groping to unravel the convoluted structure of his satire 'Cigarettes,' he cautioned, 'There’s no point in looking for it now because no one will ever figure it out, including me.'"