Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Sharing Party Secrets


5 comments:

Σφιγξ said...

In Nabokov's Transparent Things, the narrator, Hugh Parsons finds:

"a very plain, round, technically faceless old pencil of cheap pine, dyed a dingy lilac. It had been mislaid ten years ago by a carpenter who had not finished examining, let alone fixing, the old desk, having gone away for a tool that he never hound. Now comes the act of attention.
In this shop, and long before that at the village school, the pencil has been worn down to two-thirds of its original length. The bare wood of its tapered end has darkened to a plumbeous plum, thus merging in tint with the blunt tip of graphite whose blind gloss alone distinguishes it from the wood. A knife and brass sharpener have thoroughly worked upon it and if it were necessary we could trace the complicated fate of the shavings, each mauve on one side and tan on the other when fresh, but now reduced to atoms of dust whose wide, wide dispersal is panic catching its breath but one should get above it, one gets used to it fairly soon (there are worse terrors).

Transparent Things, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, pp. 6-7.

Σφιγξ said...

The bag contains Monopoly pieces I excavated from the ivy of a prospective house my parents were reviewing with a realtor (20+ years ago)...the appointment was cut short when I fell ten feet off the porch into the ivy. I knew it looked like a dime bag...

Σφιγξ said...

These environs that have since then changed.

Σφιγξ said...

I can still remember being winded from falling backwards off the porch, and finding a metal jack in impressed in my hand; although, I was unhurt on all counts, except my pride. I remember being wobbly and falling up stairs a lot in my youth.

Σφιγξ said...

The Party flask was obtained in a thrift shop in New York, for novelty's sake.

If there is an observation about accumulation, then it is noted. I am ot perfect this part of my personality, and I am not a hoarder. The photo here suffices. The novella excerpted here is very the epitome of non-transparent things.

I would not snoop in your drawers because I know it would bother you.