My mental circus, inside and out.

on we go

Scherzer considered himself a likeable fellow.  No one, as far as he knew, had any animosity towards him.  He was the very soul of collegiality.  While he wouldn't give anyone the shirt off his back, he knew how to throw a jolly  party.  He kept up on the latest novels and films, the artsy ones, and he knew which ones to choose by perusing the reviews in the Independent and the London Review of Books, which he read daily in the bath.  He chose restaurants only through recommendations from  guides or from people he thought were in-the-know. He was not the sort to spontaneously pick up a novel at Waterstone's or wander aimlessly through city streets in the hopes of stumbling across an eatery.   His was the life of the cultured man, a cautious life, but a friendly one.  All of his careful selections were designed to make him more likeable, with either a sense of equality among his peers or a subtle air of superiority over his inferiors, never  offensive or overdone, that earned him confidence and respect.

For these reasons, he could have sat at any table and been welcomed, he knew.  But Simon Chase, visiting colleague from Harvard, who worked on generational conflict in the postwar Soviet Union, 1945-1968, was waving him over, and that was a connection that was well worth cultivating.  With him was Hannah Fenstermacher, junior colleague, on a grant from the Germania Institute, who was studying humor, sexuality, and the body in the  Weimar Republic, heavily inflected with feminist poststructuralist theory, a method he could only pretend to understand.  She was casting him dark, smoldering looks, and for an instant he imagined her tight little  gymnast's body in chains before suppressing that thought.  Gasby was there, too, engaging a conversation about the implications of privacy ethics on the use of asylum records.

 

Posted by: EmmaPele at May 27, 2005 19:01 | link | comments (2)

#1  27 May 2005 - 19:12

 

hahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Leigh

#2  31 May 2005 - 03:10

 

I like the way you've captured various things going on within the different characters.

Jackal