JAN
14
The
‘city centre’ of Bateman’s Bay is one of your regular coastal shopping areas.
Seafood places, and malls, and Coffee Club shops and newsagents and post
office, and arcades full of beauty treatment places, a Rivers shop, Smiggles,
chemists galore and lots of hotel places situated right on top of the bay for a
pretty penny. It was depressingly hot walking in, but coming back there was a
really nice bay breeze. The tops of the masts of the boats marooned on the
water bobbled around a bit. I read The Sydney Morning Herald and it was just
like reading The Age. The Sydney stories didn’t interest me much.
I
am reading some Henry Miller for the first time. His first novel, Tropic of
Cancer. It’s overly long and rambling and I can’t be too bothered with some of
it, and parts of it are a bit like if D H Lawrence had’ve lived another ten
years or so, except in most places it isn’t very lyrical. A lot of sex which
gets tiring after a while, but some really beautiful and well written passages
too. In case you don’t know it, it is all about his madman experiences of being
young in the 30’s in Paris, very Holden Caulfield-like, but with lots of
stream of consciousness added, a cross therefore between Salinger and Joyce is
how I would put it (perhaps with a pinch of Dickens thrown in).
“
The windows of my hotel are festering and there is a thick, acrid stench as of
chemicals burning. Looking into the Seine I see mud and desolation, street
lamps drowning, men and women choking to death, the bridges covered with
houses, slaughterhouses of love. A man is standing against the wall with an
accordion strapped to his belly; his hands are cut off at the wrists, but the
accordion writhes between his stumps like a sack of snakes. The universe has
dwindled; it is only a block long and there are no stars, no trees, no rivers.
The people who live here are dead; they make chairs which other people sit on
in their dreams. In the middle of the street is a wheel and in the hub of the
wheel a gallows is fixed. People already are trying frantically to mount the
gallows, but the wheel is turning too fast…”
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