Long Days, Long Months: 26 July

Finished Waveland. As with all of Frederick Barthelme's stories and novels, the equipoise attained by the culturally-enriched living amid the debris-strewn society of the U S (in this case, literally debris-strewn, as the languorous post-Katrina reconstruction continues, supposedly) is portrayed with loving, though not painstaking enough, detail. A few informed souls, scattered about by fate, find each other, put up with each other despite each of them pestering, needling too much. The main character once worked as an architect at major firms in Atlanta and Dallas. In Elroy Nights, the main character resembled the author more closely than Bathelme had tried before: a professor who at one point even comments upon a young man's knowledge of the 13th Floor Elevators, referring of course to Barthelme's own involvement with The Red Krayola. Either way, one enters worlds far removed from the cultural metropole, expecting the exotic, only to find the exiled. And most important: those content to be exiled. The architect is confronted at one point by a young man dating his ex-wife. The dread the elder feels, having to communicate with an impetuous youth. Surely, the architect decades ago already reached the point where he began to look upon the young with little more than disgust--especially disgusted, indeed, that he once was even half-way as confused and ugly as the boy he is forced into contact with. The broader theme of the novel is aging, and more particularly the travails of a sort of early retirement, one caused by lack of success. While in many respects, it seems to offer a depressing account of beaten-down individuals in a beaten-down part of the nation, again these characters are content with exile and defeat--no, in fact, they've rejected the opposites of exile and defeat. Watched a couple of other well-known films I'd often considered but hadn't gotten to: Say Anything and All the President's Men. And started listening to Stereolab's Margerine Eclipse and Chemical Chords closely for the first time.