Thursday, September 30, 2010

WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS by David Markson (a parody)

Yesterday I found it amusing to parody the style of Wittgenstein's Mistress, actually.
This is probably because ten years ago I was mad and ate the green canvas webbing from the seat of the last lawn chair.
I mean the novel by David Markson, of course, and not the mistress of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was probably Philosophy.
And the lawn chair, that was after I ate the dog, or possibly before.
Rembrandt painted a dog in the bottom left corner of a vast canvas at the Rijksmuseum, or was that a Van Gogh in Otterlo, I don't remember.
And the lawn chair, that was before I ate the dog, or possibly after.
Wittgenstein's brother Paul, a noted pianist, lost an arm in the First World War, I think, and thereafter played with the left hand alone.
I don't recall who noted him, but I'm sure he was noted.
The dog was named Pisanello.
Wittgenstein's Mistress, the book, not the person, who may or may not have existed, the person, not the book, is like the late paintings of Philip Guston in its deadpan accumulations of cultural debris.
But unlike Guston's late paintings, Wittgenstein's Mistress fails to enthrall me.
The book, I mean, not the person, who might also have been quite an enthralling accumulation, for all I know, unless it was merely Philosophy.
Paul Wittgenstein never composed a sonata inspired by the paintings of Pisanello and never played it with either hand. So I find it difficult to explain my ecstatic response to the sonata's thundering final bars.
The sonata was not pressed into a vintage vinyl LP with a scratch that caused the needle to jump the groove twenty-two seconds into the second movement.
So when I listened for the jump while eating the dog, I must have been mad.
At the National Gallery I studied Pisanello's St. George and never thought of Wittgenstein who lived nearby, but was dead.
Not nearby, actually, but in the same general region of the country.
My cousin Heliogabalus once remarked that Wittgenstein resembled Frankenstein's monster as portrayed by Boris Karloff.
He meant Ludwig, not Paul, who looked like nobody.
This happened either before or after I read the book by David Markson.
The canvas webbing emerged soggy and green from my rectum. So I wove it back onto the lawn chair, because I was mad.
I don't much like Wittgenstein's Mistress, the book, not the person, though I might not have liked the person either, really. Even if she was Philosophy.
Sophia is a pleasant name for a dog from Philadelphia.
I have replaced the Pisanello print above my desk with a portrait of Paul Wittgenstein, or possibly Ludwig, I can't see the arms.
Later today I will possibly masturbate.
Or re-read Wittgenstein's Mistress.
It's a toss-up, actually.

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