On a day when I was feeling rather – I don't know – bored – by either writing or not writing, by the smallness of my life as it is... by going to restaurants or staying home, by all the things I'm not doing on this Labor Day weekend, by the holidays and end of summer and such –
and have been thereby thinking: how do people stand their lives, why aren't they all incredibly bored, even the ones who are so much busier than I am?...
and I'll admit that I'm also probably a bit hung over after an evening out celebrating with Catherine that she got her PhD; and meeting a very sexy bartender, who probably didn't notice my existence, except for tips, but whom I thought about afterwards; and then today not getting up until noon, then doing things around the house for four or five hours and only leaving the house by main force and finally eating a meal at 5 pm... which probably explains feeling kind of uninterested in existence and stuff, as Wittgenstein didn't say but probably should have...
but still wondering about other people, and how although I don't want lives like theirs perhaps their lives seem more interesting from the inside, and wondering whether they're bored too, and...
and I am answered, I suppose, by finally finishing, desultorily, Noël Coward's Semi-Monde, a play he wrote in 1926 and never staged. Apparently because it was too overtly gay, but probably also because it is overtly rather experimental (Coward as closet avantgardiste?), consisting largely of fragments of different people's lives in a French hotel bar: gay and straight, men and women, they marry or form couples and are unfaithful and jealous and break up.
And the ultimate point, that you are supposed to draw from the complexly overlaid chatter, is that it is all essentially circular, repetitive: that the entire complex pattern of night lives and loves are always the same, only the players change, and for the most part they only change a little bit. Glasgow Citizen's Theatre first performed it in 1977, and they were probably hard put to make it fascinating – it is essentially Waiting for Godot for the cocktail set, for what used to be called the jet set; so they tried to make it hyper-decadent, in a production with lots of mirrors. But it's not really decadent, it's just... well, it's about empty lives; and it's fairly empty.
And well, all right, I'm clearly influenced by Coward's dialogue style (except without the brilliant wit – which is in any case sparse in this script, it's not that kind of play, it's more sentimental-slice-of-life, though supposedly many slices of what are on the surface brilliant lives, but sorry about the lack of wit in any case); but I am thereby reassured, I supposed, that my boring little academic life is no worse than anything else....
But, hell, I already knew that.
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