Le Monde 100: Froth on the Daydream

This is what I've been waiting for.

Not only has this book been my favorite book on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Twentieth Century, but it's possibly my new favorite book OF ALL TIME.

Boris Vian sets the stage by underpinning the entire book with a haunting song by Duke Ellington.

This song is so unique that Vian invents a dance that can only be danced to it and one other song called the "oglemee," a dance that requires dancers to undulate a certain distance away from each other at a certain tempo in order to create "a system of waves that present, as in acoustics, nodes, and antinodes, which contribute more than a little to the ambiance on a dance floor." As one advances their skill at the "oglemee," they can, in time develop the skill to produce "parasitic waves by separately putting certain of their limbs into synchronic vibration."

This is all very interesting but the beauty and concepts of music are taken to a more insane level with the invention of the Pianocktail.

I have no doubt that if someone built a Pianocktail in Brooklyn right now, they would dominate the cocktail scene.

Basically, a pianocktail is a piano that has different liquors, spirits, flavorings, and mixers attached to every key. Depending on the length of the note played, these drink parts are dispensed into a glass. So, every song will have a unique drink signature. Amazing!

Here is a rough sketch of a pianocktail.

Honestly, Froth on the Daydream is so good you don't want to end. It's exuberant in its anthropomorphication of everything without coming off as dopey. Plus, the cartoonish quality only amplifies the love story at the center of it.

It's the first book I've read that I've immediately wanted to re-read.

Instead, I'll just watch this pianocktail video.

Le Monde 100: Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Estate)

What's wrong with Romanticism?

I failed a certain test of childhood that was presented to me when i was around eight years old. My father worked for a few months on the sprawling estate of Godfrey Rockerfeller. It was a place right out of a Merchant-Ivory film with endless gazebos, stables, and fox hunts. The older couple who were the caretakers were quite taken with me and gave me all sorts of trinkets from the vast stores of left-over throwaway items, buried in the corridors of the basement of the manor. An ornamental jar of vintage marbles makes a particularly vivid memory In my brain.

As I was poring over these colorful orbs with my father, he saw what was perhaps an obsession forming in my eyes about the estate and the mansion, both of which seemed endless. He said to me "The couple who live here like you so much that they asked me if they could adopt you from me." To this day, I don't know if this was true or not.

"They did?", I replied.

"Oh yes. They want you to come live here on the estate. Do you want to do that? Do you want to leave Mom and me and come live with them?"

"Oh yes!" This was without hesitation.

Don't get me wrong. I loved my parents but, at the time, the pull of the estate seemed like the right decision. The look on my father's face taught me a big lesson in maturity and I instantly regretted it. I think that was probably an uncomfortable ride home.

When the Enlightenment sprouted up in the world with its enormous klieg lights shining on reality, it resulted in a certain bleakness that developed in society. The mysteries of life that gave it a certain spirit and soul were disappearing and taking a sense of the divine away from man.

This phenomenon happens to everyone on a smaller scale as they grow older and become more realistic about their ideals. This results in higher intelligence and better decision-making. But, the trade-off for matured wisdom is often a muted passion or, at the very least, an internal fire that is less visceral.

An older man I knew who had just had his first child told me once that the purpose of existence was to have a childhood. No matter how long you live, you can never go back to the state of wonder you have when you first start to coalesce into a conscious being.

This place in ones life is turned into an amazing chateau in Le Grand Meaulnes, where Meaulnes a young boy witnesses a magical fete and encounters a mysterious girl before returning to his real life at school.

He obsesses about returning to the chateau and meeting her again but he has lost the way back to the estate and bemoans his regular life afterward.

Fortunately, he finds the virtues of adulthood and the beauty that can exist outside of perpetual awe. But, it's odd to think of the diminishing returns that come from dreams as they draw closer to reality.

I guess whats wrong with Romanticism is that some people never escape from the bubble that it puts them in. Ideals should be expected to bloom and then fade into reality. Accepting the beauty of both is the way to happiness.

Le Monde 100: For Whom The Bell Tolls

The closest thing I have had to a Hemingway Experience was with my friend M in Eastern Europe. We stumbled upon what I'm pretty sure was a murdered body in the dark, just outside the reach of one of two street lamps on the clay street outside the tenement house where we were living in the basement. At the same moment, the other streetlamp framed the lurking shadows of two men whose demeanor smacked of the all-pervasive Russian Mafia and who we were fairly sure were the murderers of said body.

They were looking right at us.

As our friends encountered the same situation, having to go so far as to sell their cars and move out of the city, we were waiting for this exact thing to happen.

For Whom The Bell Tolls was included in the Le Monde 100 for the impression it made on its readers, which, in this case, impressed them with the theme of man's relationship with death. Hemingway could speak of death so intimately because he was, no doubt, quite acquainted with it due to the fact that, not only was he an ambulance driver and a soldier who was seriously injured, he also miraculously survived a plane crash. When you look death in the face so often, it may become a friend or, at least, a respected acquaintance. The fact that Hemingway ended up killing himself testifies to his recognition of the usefulness or the lack of fear of death.

Thus, his characters in For Whom The Bell Tolls face death as a necessary part of life. Robert Jordan, the main character who meets the love of his life 24 hours before he is fairly certain that he is going to die, is commited to living the embodiment of an entire lifetime in that one day. The gypsies and mountain people, both men and women, are committed to dying in the name of duty against the fascists and in the name of the common good.

This is an amazing mirror of the viewpoint of Hemingway. However, it also counterpoints my complete estrangement with death. M's coping skills and my own were revealed as we hid in the dark hallways of a completely strange house while waiting for morning, cursing each other and ourselves in this new and strange face of death.

Our coping skills had come to light and found severely lacking. My only hope is that the next time I come so close to death I will recognise and be much more comfortable with its presence.

Le Monde 100: Man's Fate

Unless one has a laser-sharp aesthetic sensibility or a unwavering passion from youth, it may be hard for most to realize who it is that they really are.

To say "really are," though, means what?

It's not like one has a mental displacement in the sci-fi sense, where one questions who they are in the midst of being cloned or being a clone or having their brain downloaded into another body or having one's memories erased by a malicious alien race and stranded on a distant moon to fend for one's self while unlocking the mystery of their origins or in the sense of the self-aware brain floating in a tank.

In reality, most people develop a sense of their need for an identity in an effort to put purpose in their life. They are in a sense looking to create the story arc that their life will traverse. This usually happens after high school, whether it's the stereotypical backpack across Europe to "find" ones self or in the listless struggle to find ones major in college.
Some figure themselves out fairly early and some never do or later in life.

Being creative is usually the hardest with the big issues as communicating is best done through a clear and focused detail and building a purpose is huge.

What is amazing about Man's Fate is the way some of character's purposes become clear through single moments in time that open their value system up for the rest of their lives.

Andre Malreaux, the author, put the conflict as centered on the massacre of Communists in 1927 by Chang-Kai-Shek, which was underpinned by the abandonment of those Communists by Stalin in Moscow. When you build your identity as a political revolutionary that is for the people, how do you process that betrayal to your body as well as your purpose? Furthermore, how do you reconcile fighting for esoteric concepts with the individual experience of killing a man?

The book opens with a man finding his purpose and identity but its not what he expected. He must creep in to a man's bedroom and assasinate him in his sleep, which he does successfully. But because he has such an intimate experience with death, his self view changes from a revolutionary to a murderer. As he cannot undo the killing, he becomes obsessed with his own death and now views every killing as the crafting of a relationship with another human just as one does in life.

Man's Fate was picked for Le Monde 100 due to the lasting impression it made on the readers as were all the selections. I can definitely see why, knowing The transformation of ones life course is lurking around an unknown corner waiting to point you in a new direction.

Le Monde 100: Journey to the End of the Night

You can just feel the cynicism steaming off of him.

Patriotism is a disease and so is everything else.

That's the basic message I get from Louis-Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night.


Oh, there is nothing that gets this guy's dander up than seeing people operate in a happy little bubble. This includes doing anything that may give someone a sense of purpose down to the "enjoyment" of sexual relations.
It's all just misery on the long slow march to death. But it pushes him to go and see something different all over the world in an effort to quench his bad attitude. He goes from a soldier in the war to an African colonist to a New York indigent to a factory worker in Detroit to graduating from medical school and settling into a small village practice in search of a context that makes sense. But, you come to ask yourself, is it to quench his negative attitude or to fuel it?

There is something really fun about Celine's misanthropy. His black and white thinking pushes him to write in huge hyperboles and puts a sense of the unpredictable in all his sentences. He wallows in irony and his writing is exciting for it.

How can you not love a book that includes a grandmother at the end of her life with nothing to live for who lives at the end of the garden who transforms into a powerful beast of purpose when she realizes that her son and daughter-in-law have tried to kill her by putting a bomb in her rabbit hutch? Her glee at being murdered is weirdly life-affirming.

Celine is the father of all contemporary writing in my opinion. If you like Jonathan Ames, Mil Millington, Tibor Fischer, or Martin Amis, you will recognize the tempo and cadence of Celine's writing. Tibor Fischer, I just found out, titled his book Journey to the End of the Room, a book about a woman who loves to travel but hates leaving the house,  in a nod to Celine.

Although, I think this book is fantastic, I can NOT get on board with the fact that Celine went on to publish a series of anti-Semetic pamphlets in the 1940's. He thought Hitler was too much of a "Jew." It seems to be so unnecessarily  purposeful for someone so nihilistic.

And now I feel like those punk rock purists who  have to explain why they have the first Skrewdriver album.