An excerpt from Balzac...

 ...that I came across recently in his novel Beatrix, where he describes a jilted society husband (translation by Rosamond and Simon Harcourt-Smith):

He followed the same principle in everything; Nature had bestowed upon him a handy talent for imitation; but he was no monkey; his imitation was deadly serious. Thus it was that, though lacking any natural taste of his own, he was adept at adopting new fashions, and being the first to drop them. The unkind accused him of giving too much time to his dress and of wearing stays; nevertheless he was the perfect type of those characters who by dint of embracing the notions and the imbecilities of the commonality, give offence to no one, and[,] who moving always with the times[,] never seem to grow old. Such are the fine flower of mediocrity.

Just delicious, and, as my one (professor) friend who studies (modern) (Czech) literature has observed, probably so much better in the original (French).

I also texted a photo of this passage to my one (grad school) colleague who went into social work, and he immediately texted back --

Why is this novel describing [a young tenured professor at where we went]?

. . .

Three recent interactions at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) My one (Pentecostal) (Guatemalan) coworker is wearing an AERO NYC t-shirt, and I point to it and ask, "Porque no se dice AERO [name of small Midwestern town that we live in]?", and he just purses his lips and gives a quick shake to his head and seems on the verge of slightly laughing but doesn't, and then he goes back to what he was doing and simply walks away.

2) My one (Asian-American) coworker says that a lot of his friends have graduated from college but have just been living at home for two years applying for jobs -- he's like 24 and is originally from New Jersey, and is slightly behind cohort-wise since he took some time off of school and dropped down to community college and went there part-time -- and he says that he thinks he can never really live in a city, but will have to live in a town like where we live now, since if he gets to the $50K salary that he hopes to get through his degree, his margin of saving would be too small to live in a city, and he could never save up enough to afford to buy a home there or even anywhere near one. 

He also said his friends can't really afford to live in a big city either, unless they get a good job in one before deciding to move there, and all otherwise just stick around wherever they went to college, or move home, which most do, since most are kind of marginally employed right now, and have been for several years after graduation.

3) When "Vogue" is playing over Spotify, I pull up the lyrics on my smartphone and show it to my one (older) (Thai) coworker who's a whiz at the phones, since she likes classic Hollywood.

"Monroe like Marilyn Monroe?", she asks me.

Then, as she reads along, she nods her head and is like, "Jimmy Dean."

Some (Germans) at work.

So, the other week at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, a (young) (vegetarian) (German) professor who I've met before was in again with her (ponytailed) (German) husband.

So, like I sometimes do with foreign-folk, I tried to speak some of their language with them.

"Achtung!", I was like, after setting down a plate of egg rolls. "Das Essen ist heiss."

("Careful, the food is hot.")

Later, she pulled out her smartphone and showed me pictures of a jigsaw puzzle that she got at a "cool" store in a neighboring state, with a trippy and vaguely futuristic mask, rendered in metallic ink, one thousand pieces.

She does jigsaw puzzles a lot for fun, she said.

A dream uniting past and present.

The other week I dreamnt --

I'm somewhere and I realize that since lime juice is used in bookbinding, I should gather unused limes at work at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, and give them to this bookbinder that I know. But, since that's like feeding into another place's business, I think to myself that I should check with the restaurant owners, first.

. . .

(The bookbinder who I know from decades ago is now dead.)

A view of the tenured...

...at an online talk that I attended the other day, where someone who was tenured used their time to go in a slightly different direction from the topic of the panel:

In part because of academic scarcity, power structures like peer review are increasingly being abused to take down competition, and people rising through the ranks are much more hesitant to issue big ideas, for fear of eliciting a dogpile that will end their career.

. . .

More whack structures in Balzac.

Never seen this one before, in any of his like 10+ novels I've read:

As the marriage breaks up due to the husband's cheating, the book becomes a series of like page-long chapters, giving small moments of passion and confusion as the wronged wife tries to deny what's happening, and then adjust to it.

And, it's just like page-long chapters, forever.

Somehow I think Balzac got bored pounding out all of his novels, and spur-of-the-moment he was like, "Heck, let's just do this," and went with it.

Interestingly, too, he describes all these society wives as graceful and elegant and then the competitor as aging and having to adjust indoor light to hide her wrinkles, and then like twenty pages later he mentions that the wife with a young kid is like twenty-two and the competitor is like thirty.

Erp.

Balzac's whack structures.

I'm still reading that one Balzac novel, and like three-quarters of the way through, it turns into an epistolary novel for like twenty pages or so, though only with the letters that a new wife sends her mother!

And, it's the same book where the namesake character doesn't even appear till a third of the way in.

It's just structurally wacky, but I kind of like it.  Very random, and not all that big a deal and actually kind of interesting if you just roll with it.

I feel like you wouldn't get that sort of thing from someone who tortured themself over their prose style, instead of his focus on social detail and social situations.

I like the generic freedom.