bonds

I am reading Genet's Thief's Journal. It's rather lurid (I think that's the word anyways), but there's a quote or two that have caught me.

"Between them and me there will be even fewer bonds, and the last will be broken if to their contempt for me I oppose my love of them."

Reminds me immediately of Apollinaire's Calligrammes from this summer (the poem "Liens") ... compassionate futurism, heh.

"We know that our language is incapable of recalling even the pale reflection of those bygone foreign states. The same would be true of this entire journal if it were to be the notation of what I was. I shall therefore make clear that it is meant to indicate what I am today, as I write it. It is not a quest of time gone by, but a work of art whose pretext-subject is my former life. It will be a present fixed with the help of the past, and not vice versa."

This works with my notes on nostalgia and what not ... the projected past makes a stabilized present collective subjectivity kind of thing.

There are also some images that I like (a proud rock in a river of contempt, the tube of used vasoline [an untouchable object of police contempt and yet/thus powerful; also, a parallel to Proust's madeleine]). I have gotten a little bored with it though so I think I will be skimming the rest of the way.