blague!

and before i forget! proust jokes! i took that early post to heart and have been putting little hearts and smiley faces and dragons in the margins next to all of the proust side-splitters. here are a few. i´ll put them in french first because that´s what i´m reading in and then attempt a rough translation. other french speakers, feel free to correct. i´m terribly lazy and haven´t been carring a dictionary with me ever since the berlin map and grammar book supplanted it so things are a little sloppy over here.

having written all of that, i can find only one of the three kickers that i remember underlining. i´ll give you this one and find the rest later:

"´Je trouve ridicule au fond qu´un homme de son intelligence souffre pour une personne de ce genre et qui n´est meme pas interessante, car on la dit idiote´, ajouta-t-elle avec la sagesse des gens non amoreux qui trouvent qu´un homme d´esprit ne devrait etre malhereux que pour une personne qui en valut la peine; c´est a peu pres comme s´etonner qu´on daigne sourrfrir du cholera par le fait d´un etre aussi petit que le bacille virgule."

"´I find it fundamentally ridiculous that a man of his intelligence could suffer for a person of her sort, someone who isn´t even interesting - people even say she´s an idiot,´ she added with the wisdom of those who are not in love and who think that a man of spirit ought not be lovesick except for those who are worth the trouble; it´s a bit like those who are surprised that one would deign to suffer from cholera for the sake of such a small bacteria."

now that´s funny.

also, and before i forget (because i have to get off the computer now), i want to talk about these things in future posts:
sentiment-sadism
music
baking - sense of things developing under heat
illness metaphors
the shudder (damn you, adorno)
detachment, the ideal, the imaginary