» http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiyoshi_Yamashita

I suppose not, anyway.

Living in le monde moderne, one must adapt lest he be left behind. So many from the elegant age have already been trampled and forgotten; I’ll not share their fate. Like a phoenix, I continually renew myself, sans the bird’s grit, of course.

Additional to whatever exquisite consciousnesses it has marginalized, I’ve always felt time has made text one of its great casualties, pushing it aside for the immediacies and luxurious indulgences of visual culture. The world’s web has done wonders to reinvigorate text and make it radiant even. Electronic mail, this journal form, telephone messaging, and now something else. Something slightly different and intriguing:

» in a (paragraph).com

Obviously a vehicle for those evolved persons without an interest in dirty internet “mecahnic’s work” but who wish to express themselves widely, ia(¶) — as the developers refer to it — is also a literary forum that encourages users to work with, rather than against, the prized brevity of the current age.

In just one hundred years, we’ve cut our textual narrative pastimes from James-length novels to single 1,000 character paragraphs, our lyrical indulgences from The Ballad of the White Horse to the same. While part of me mourns, the other understands and offers no resistance.

Here we have a right musical set of utterances, something playful and accessible to most everyone, a cosmopolitan set of voices, and a concision that makes me think I’ve already run too long.

Market crashes, labor dismissals, trade and currency adjustments — I cough, I choke, I escape, diving wholeheartedly and headlong into bottles of les alcools des jours.

What lesson can be learned from all this? Even the ugliest, most base realities have lessons to teach. (So says my Manchurian friend anyway.) Perhaps nothing more than my pet, perennial suspicion that most human intercourse, brutality, and motivation can be traced to economic affections and income origins.

Cherchez le dollar, as it were.

I find I’m just Marxist enough to recognize this fact and just Romantic enough to have a problem with it.

Narrative is a passion of mine, and this is the dominant contemporary genre of the discourse. I create in it with no real malice or passion, leaving such preoccupations and value judgments to the small-minded and the academicians. Nevertheless, this must be said:

While I need not justify myself in any way to any man, I admit I adore the novel and other readerly vs. watcherly texts. But I’m obsessed, of late, with the graphic. It preoccupies me in the same way a gelding finds himself thinking of nothing but sport. This exercise indulged an appetite.

C’est tout! Ça suffit! Back to your dusty lairs and clean taxonomies! Leave the artists to their interests!

I am much less settled on one issue, though. After creating this, I’m left wondering: why does violence so seduce the storyteller and the artist? (Here, I’m thinking of Goya and Genet.) Why does its aestheticization cut so cleanly across class lines and interest groups and yet maintain its essential integrity and elevated appeal?

Sweeter than the syrup dripping off romance, it seems, blood renews itself with each kill. Writers and audience voyeurs know this as well as any butcher. Any opinion to the contrary seems delusory and hypocritical.

Moreover, opening a meal with the medicine meant to settle it, or piquing one’s appetite after the fact, seems fundamentally absurd. And yet, I see the integrity the two categories intentionally obfuscated at almost every restaurant and dinner party. One can imagine that even privately, in the solitude of one’s home, people have begun to drink ignorantly or, what’s worse, intentionally unmindful of the distinction.

Out the other night, at my favorite café, enjoying a helping of lamb and greens, I even saw a gentleman sipping single malt with his meal. In response, I took a large sip of my claret and eyed him with derision. The statement, I think, was sufficiently made. I did, however, later regret that the poor chap had borne so incommensurate an amount of scorn. I must admit, my frustration is with a larger society, not primarily with him. But there he was, playing into my anger and courting my displeasure like a fool!

Of course, in response to my complaint, one might say, “My dear Flâneur, why preserve the past for its own sake? Why preserve a difference or a practice simply because that’s what’s always been done?” And it’s true that the thrust of the present is toward the new. Disdain of the old is everywhere, and I’ve never resisted this or criticized this fact. A true man of my moment, I would never preserve a distasteful tradition indefinitely for the sake of the past. Rather, I’d retire it immediately, like last season’s top coat.

Time and taste simply seem out of joint when ends come before beginnings, beginnings after ends, or when such bookends are ignored entirely (as was the case with my single malt friend). The intellectuals and artists of our moment have done much to highlight, and even create, this radical reinterpretation of reality, and I simply wonder if drink and repast shouldn’t be the last holdouts, giving us some grounding in a chronologically distorted world.

Indeed, drink has always, for me, proven a grand refuge against all manner of distortions, the rhythm of a meal even more so. It is, after all, the greatest tonic for a rollicking day.

I suppose such a distinction is more cultural than geographical anyway. Indeed, I’ve felt airs of Mediterraneaity, and seen affectations of the same, in deserts and on mountaintops. The shore has almost nothing to do with it.

The warm spring sun was just beginning to transform itself into a hot summer one; and amidst these comfortable transition days, I found myself stripping down and wading into the salty deep. On one occasion – this past Wednesday, I believe – I swam out a bit father than I’d intended to. Fish darted freely around me as did other orders of sea life. And as they nipped at me, I felt, oddly enough, like a part of the food chain rather than the capital of it. I did not enjoy this sense of things in the least, unused as I am to being preyed upon.

In disgust, I kicked at the horrid creatures; but I soon realized just how out of his element man is in the water. Making my way through through the offending fauna, I swam vigorously and eventually reacquainted my feet with the ground. I spent the rest of the afternoon brooding on the beach, sipping cocktails and glaring at the ocean.

In a cooler state of mind, writing this now, I suppose I must admit the folly of my action and take some responsibility for it. Swimming in the ocean is, after all, a bit like taking ones constitutional on the Serengeti. When casually recreating in wilderness spaces, one shouldn’t be surprised when nature reasserts itself over the natural order.

It’s only in the city that man dominates, myself most of all.

These arcades are theatrical spaces, everything dolled up and on display. There’s an undeniable sense of artificiality as well, representation even. As such, they have less in common with Medieval markets — bustling places of necessity and trade, subsistence and labor — and more in common with the Palais Garnier. The arcades, in fact, almost completely oppose their “market” forbears, filled as they are with excess and currency, surplus and leisure.

Indeed, like the arcade shops, l’Opéra and other performance spaces exude conspicuous indulgence, leisure, and surfeit in its most decadent sense. At the theatre, people buy access to representations of a perfectly good, albeit gritty and asymmetrical, material world. At the arcades, people in perfectly good frocks and suits, ties and cravats, dresses and hats buy more of the same. Necessity is no part of either, and performance is all.

In the arcades, though, the bourgeois themselves perform: for each other and for the shopkeepers, dangling cash and coin like marionettes, twirling and sashaying like prima donnas, acting out the images they wish to be, playing out visions of how the world should be and the way man would make if only he had the power to do so.

To my eye, however, they achieve naught but penumbric selves. I see beyond the vacuous show playing out before me on kaleidoscopic floors. On work days, they’ll return to banks and politics and mercantile enterprises of their own. The performance will cease. I, though, will play the the part I always play. My true self, the disconnected dandy, the cultural aesthete, the camera-eye in the city. The arcade is my space. They are just poseur trespassers.

In contact with them today, this late Friday afternoon, frotting my way through the crowd, I felt as if I were making love to mannequins, offering those I brushed hot, lively flesh but receiving only cold porcelain in return.

In truth, I’m as much of a stranger to myself as I am to others. And it seems likely that everyone’s desire for clarity, with respect to personal persuasion, proves eternally elusive. We take our damned sense of confusion to the grave, I suppose, and that’s that.

Even so, it would be safe to assume I’m intrigued by both men and women, but I never court and am most often described as asexual. As for the banal question of intercourse, I feel that’s an institution best bought and sold, even purloined from time to time.

Within the context of commerce, you see, the world is a wonderfully arrayed sexual marketplace. Find the right merchant, and as long as one has enough pennies in his purse, he can have anything he desires, no matter how fleeting that particular persuasion proves.

Other contexts obfuscate this particular clarity. Therefore, I avoid them.