What a relief — I’m not going mad yet after all. A couple of days ago I was experiencing a kind of “flashback” effect, hearing a spoken line over and over again, without having a clue where to place it. It was about breasts. About armoured breasts, and this really drove me crazy since I had written about “weaponising” my breasts in that Dec. 3/04 post. The line, which was driving me crazy as it careened through my head during my day of inane chores, sounded (to add insult to injury) like poetry, and I wondered whether I’d read it at Maria‘s other blog or …where?!? Finally, I remembered: it was in Elfriede Jelinek‘s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Don’t worry, there’s an English translation, too, but you have to see the original first.):
Aber man wei
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I haven’t read anything by Jelinek. My last bout (marathon?) with uniterupted writing that required extraordinary efforts of concentration to read was Hermann Broch, another Austrian. Some of his sentences went on for something like 9 pages…
As for weaponized breasts, or hardened ones … I was actually working on something for my next post on that poetry blog that did have to do with ‘stoned’ bodies, Medusa and Daphne, and silicone and all… But I have plenty of inane tasks today to attend to myself before I can ponder the weight of all those other words.
Oops, make that “uninterrupted writing” and not “uniterupted,” which, come to think of it, might be a more descriptive adjective, after all, to try to characterize the experience of reading that Broch book.
I haven’t read Broch — I read less and less fiction, sadly, and even theory needs to be parsed in smaller doses to make it into my cranium these days. But it sounds like Broch is right up there with Jelinek & Weiss in terms of challenge to the reader.
I’ll keep a lookout for your silicone rocks and rolling Medusas, haha! Did you get a chance to read over Jelinek’s essay, “Sidelined”? It’s really unusual — it’s all about her in one sense (i.e., utterly narcissistic), about her problems with language & expression, and yet it constantly makes that problem (hers) into something very nearly universal. Or apposite for today. Very interesting and oddly annoying, too.
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