Thursday, May 17, 2001

Summertime and intellectual endeavors don't usually go hand in hand--at least, not down here in the subtropics. Attempting a poolside read of The Archaeology of Knowledge in New Orleans in July, for example, is a task no less Herculean than reciting multiplication tables while carrying a Bosendorfer grand piano up five flights of mouse-narrow stairs. (Not that I'd ever do either, mind you.) Luckily we've got the frosty, meticulous Germans and Swedes to pick up the navel-gazing slack during the warmer months.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm no scholar, that's for sure. Since I turned my back on academia, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I've mentioned Foucault in a sentence. But even my thoroughly insipid middlebrow tastes can't stand up to the summer sun. During those hellish months, I tend to slouch toward dime-store romances and People magazine.

So, to prepare myself for the next few months of shall-we-say lighter fare, I've begun re-reading Mr. Capote's Music for Chameleons. I haven't even so much as thought of the book since the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, when I spent the better part of every day getting stoned, going to an obscenely facile level-two French class, smoking up, having a swim, getting baked, and reading the afternoon away. I guess in my altered mental state, I failed to notice how thoroughly genius the man could be--the ease and simplicity of the narratives, the well-drawn characters. I'm finding I also managed to forget some pretty amazing passages, too. Speaking of Jackson Square in the French Quarter, for example:

A lot of fey folk have strolled about this square. Pirates. Lafitte himself. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Huey Long. Or, moseying under the shade of a scarlet parasol, the Countess Willie Piazza, the proprietress of one of the ritzier maisons de plaisir in the red-light neighborhood: her house was famous for an exotic refreshment it offered--fresh cherries boiled in cream sweetened with absinthe and served stuffed inside the vagina of a reclining quadroon beauty.

Certainly makes me hungry. Or thirsty. Or confused. Or something.

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