I’m at a point in Proust’s “The Captive” that’s been very fun to read -- dramatic, funny, revelatory. You don’t get many moments like that in Proust. Charlus, the blustery, blowhard homosexual who’s had covetous designs on Morel the musician, has finally been exposed, his plans thwarted by Mme Verdurin. Such a character Charlus is. He’s absurd in all things, full of himself, haughty, pushy, delusional in his fancies. Yet you rather like him nevertheless. At a party he spouts off about the homosexual culture of the time—which he claims to know intimately, though of course he believes no one suspects he might be a homosexual himself. He’s speaking to a professor about these matters and at one point blurts out, “It seems rather deplorable, I must say, that I should have to teach a Professor of the Sorbonne his history. But, my dear fellow, you’re as ignorant as a carp.” Hehe Proust uses this phrase many times—being as ignorant as a carp. One does imagine that carp are dumb. I need to start incorporating it into my talk—My dear fellow, you’re as dumb as a carp.

At one point Charlus is speaking about the new generation of gays, how audacious they are, and he says in the tone of “Claude Monet speaking of the Cubists,” that “I don’t condemn these innovators. I envy them if anything. I try to understand them, but I simply can’t. If they’re so passionately fond of women, why, and especially in this working-class world where it’s frowned upon, where they conceal it from a sense of shame, have they any need of what they call ‘a bit of brown’? It’s because it represents something else to them.” What I thought was interesting was that phrase—‘a bit of brown.’ I’ve never heard it before. What is the origin of that? What does it mean? Am I being to crass in thinking that it refers to shit, to butt fucking?

Charlus has a habit of becoming infuriated at the most innocuous things. You never know when he’ll lash out. And he can be brutal when he does. The protagonist had been on the receiving end of Charlus’ inexplicable rage before, and yet he saw it for what it was—all display and effect without the underlying conviction of his heart. He liked Charlus for this reason. The protagonist witnesses Charlus’ undoing and says, “My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and Verdurins pulverized by M. de Charlus. For a thousand times less than that I had been visited with his furious rage; no one was safe from it; a king would not have intimidated him… M. de Charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity, when, seized by a rage which had been simmering for a long time, he reduced someone to despair with the most cruel words in front of a shocked society group which had never imagined that anyone could go so far. M. de Charlus, on these occasions, almost foamed at the mouth, working himself up into a veritable frenzy which left everyone trembling.”

Don’t we all wish we had this skill? Upon being wronged or slighted in some immeasurable, even imperceptible way, we launch a ferocious counterattack, eloquent to the ear, infallible and relentlessly compelling in its logic, and fierce in tone. We unfurl this fiery diamond from our tongues, cast beyond our audience a look of distraction, as if to signal we’ve already moved on to more interesting subjects, and exit the room with all the quietude of a Roman bishop, our victory assured. But of course, we only ever stammer until the moment for unfurling anything has passed, and we shrink back into ourselves as the words we should have spoken reverberate mockingly in our heads.

He’s a new idea on how to capture the heart of the one you love. Genet writes in Our Lady of the Flowers, “I have heard it said that one wins the devotion of dogs by mixing a spoonful of their master’s urine in their mash every day. Divine [the drag queen character] tries this. Every time she invites Archangel to dinner, she manages to put a little of her urine into his food.”

As I’m writing, I’m listening on the radio to what the announcer says is the missing, original second movement to Mahler’s first symphony. It’s a great symphony, a 4-movement symphony. I knew that it had originally been 5 movements, and that Mahler at some point had excised one movement from the final, published symphony, but I had no idea the extracted movement had ever been found. The announcer says it was found in the 1960s. A hole pops up in my otherwise nearly complete Mahler collection.

I despise the pretty music of John Rutter. Christ, the seemingly endless supply of that sweet choral music is constantly being thrust upon us.