Marshmallow Cigar

We have a lot of exciting things to talk about. Not really. Let's see. Something was on my mind. Yes, I was reading QUINCAS BORBA yesterday and the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Pick up TOM JONES, Book IV, Chapter I." All right. So, later, I got in bed and picked up a different book, one called THAT AWFUL MESS ON THE VIA MERULANA, and no sooner had I opened it to the passage where I left off the night before than the author stepped out from behind the curtain of narrative, so to speak, to recommend that the reader "Reread the sad and atrocious tale in WAR AND PEACE, book three, part three, chapter twenty-five." Is any of this interesting? I don't think so. I do think it's funny that the author (Carlo Emilio Gadda, translated by William Weaver) assumes I have already read WAR AND PEACE at least once. And before we go on, I would like to make clear that de Assis and Gadda italicize the titles of the other novels they mention. I only use caps here because I've never learned how to italicize on the "blog," or to make paragraph breaks, either, for that matter, and I never will. Meanwhile, back in QUINCAS BORBA, the author pauses the narrative again to relate an anecdote about the distraught owner of a burning house, and a passing drunkard who asks permission to light his cigar with the flames. Now! This struck me for a couple of reasons. But first I will quote de Assis's bleak commentary: "you don't have to be drunk to light a cigar on another person's misery." Anyhow! I did think that if I had read it in time, I would have found a place for it in my book about cigarette lighters, even though, just for starters, I spent God knows how many sentences tediously and pedantically (and probably inaccurately) ennumerating for the uncaring reader the important differences between cigarettes and cigars. The other thing I thought about was the cartoon I've mentioned here before, in which beatniks use a burning house to roast their marshmallows. Beatniks! When will they ever learn? But I would have mentioned none of this here had not a "handsome priest" appeared in the pages of THAT AWFUL MESS "with a pair of owl's eyes very close to his nose: which, metaphorically, between such eyes, could be compared only to a beak." Now, does that sound "handsome," I ask you? Before you answer, don't forget the book I found in the park, the authors of which seemed to consider owls very handsome indeed. All the strands of the "blog" are coming together. Soon, we achieve the singularity. (I don't know what that is.)