25 December 2019

[elflocks]

The theme of my Christmas is the Marquis de Sade. But it’s unintentional, and indirect, because indirectness is my business. I went to the library on the 23rd to check out a mess of books, and, looking for Maldoror (which was not on the shelf as the catalog said it would be, and which I wanted to read because of a reference to it in the Yukio Mishima story Raisin Bread I’d read on the weekend), saw the title An Erotic Beyond: Sade by Octavio Paz, and it was a slim little thing and I want to finish some titles swiftly while there are a few days of the years left, to pad my Goodreads numbers. So I grabbed it. And later, I went to the shelf looking perhaps for a Rikki Ducornet novel, who I loved so much when I was a teenager, and I get sentimental for my youthful reading life at Christmas, I was thinking Fountains of Neptune, since I enjoyed the film The Lighthouse that I saw earlier in the month and thought perhaps to continue along the nautical theme, but instead I looked through The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition (I flipped through each of her books on the shelf to get the feeling for which was the right one) and took it instead, to shift my theme in another direction. Another whim of a book, Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I wanted to read in my youth but never got the chance to, and I reckoned it’d be a nice indulgence for the holiday. I am thinking perhaps to rewatch the series Crimson Petal and the White, and maybe A Harlot’s Progress, to add more whores and art and visceral poetic life to the mix (and Quills would be an obvious choice, too). Got a big pot of chili simmering, sipping some weak, lightly sweet and milky tea now as I sit by the window, had a little brief, half forced cry in the bath thinking perhaps I’d offended my sister earlier, been lazy in bed most of the day, may take a walk tomorrow.