Marcel Proost: back from the dead

I see Marcel Proost coming down Buckshot Creek Road in his old battered Toyota truck. It’s been a wet winter on the north coast with lots of fallen trees and power outages. I haven’t seen Marcel since early January, at which time he told me he was planning to write book reviews for the Independent Coast Observer.

“Yo John, howya been?” Marcel brakes and rolls down the window. “I hear you were in Tahiti for a spell.”

“No…I just tell people that. Let’s call it ‘Tahiti of the Mind.’ I’ve been home since December. But I started a new piece, and that just sorta sucked the air out of Hellmouth.”

“Yeah. I know the feeling. I heard you started writing a novel. That true?”

“Yes, afraid so. But where have you been, Marcel?" I say, changing the subject quickly. “Haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”

Jean Paul Sartre, Marcel’s favorite pit bull, sitting on the front seat, cocks his head and looks at me quizzically.

“Herb Schreiner and I went down to Baja for some sport fishing. We drove the whole trip in his SUV. Herb had this here map of ‘California Breweries and Nude Beaches’ and we followed it all the way to the border.”

I notice that next to the empty wrapper of Redman Tobacco on the dashboard Marcel has what looks like a Kindle.

“No Marcel, don’t tell me you bought one of those Kindles from Amazon!”

“Oh yeah, John. Great to have it. I took all my reading to Baja with me on it.”

“So what you got on it?”

“Ah let’s see. I got ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace, plus a book of his essays, ‘Consider the Lobster.’ You gotta read his essay on Dostoevsky, John. It’s the best piece of writing on him I know of. And I got “The Communist Manifesto” (that cost me all of ninety nine cents). And I downloaded “On Writing” by Annie Dillard. Plus a Balzac novel and some Howard Zinn. And I got “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom.

“Howard Zinn and Allan Bloom on the same circuit board? Whoa, Marcel, that must have blown your batteries.” Isn’t Allan Bloom the patron saint of the Neocons, the crank who wanted to bust the heads of those folks who wanted to expand curriculum beyond DWM’s?”

“Yeah, well I read ‘Ravelstein’ by Saul Bellow, and I wanted to find out what it was that made Bloom such a hit back in the nineties.

“And what do you think?”

“I dunno. He was sort of a self-made intellectual Tea Partier, railing against multiculturalism and political correctness in higher education. He saw serious philosophical learning goin’ down the tubes, a hostage to relativism. I ain’t made my mind up about him yet, but I sure did love ‘Ravelstein’ by Saul Bellow.

“Oh yeah, that’s the roman à clef about Bloom. You didn’t read that on your Kindle, didya?”

“Naw. You can’t get a lot of good contemporary novels on Kindle. No Thomas Mann, no Faulkner, no Bellow. I suspect the publishers are holding out for a better royalty deal and that Amazon is too cheap in paying royalties.”

“I think maybe I might buy one. I got a long trip coming up— concerts in London and then two weeks in Paris. It might be good to have one rather than lug around twenty pounds of books.”

Marcel turns the ignition on and revs the engine. “I gotta go. Rita drove her Nissan into a ditch and asked me to pull her out. See ya around.”