the comedians

ive got to write about these things that i do because if i don't i won't remember them. that's a problem because i need to know things to connect them up with other things. this is like this. and ill have a paltry web if i can't remember things.

one forgettable thing i suppose ill try to remember is the comedians, by graham greene. mr. brown is a recurring character for greene, he's a lot like maurice bendrix in the end of the affair, except more straightforwardly an asshole. the book is watching him be indifferent to things that matter and cling hideously to a few bits of pride. bendrix actually loved and so actually hated and suffered. brown's just a hard old shit.

the book's about brown's trip to visit his hotel in haiti. he inherited it from his mother who he thinks is pretty much a whore but who was, by all indications external to old shit brown, a ridiculously good person. there're some flat, farcical characters to enliven things: jones who plays cards and some black guy who never speaks, The Presidential Candidate, immensely ponderous with idealism. they're all couriers of happiness and meaning, delivering their goods to brown to more thoroughly illustrate his old shit ~ness.

because it's haiti there're the tontons macoute who are pretty interesting to read about and lots of colonialist nostalgia. i mean really though, why anchor this book with the most spectacularly flatly, even blindly hateful person? this man can't even sense! i mean i guess there's something like The Sound and the Fury where it's interesting to see through a strangely~sensing prism, but this guy's just flat. at the very end he eulogizes whatsisface by saying, yet again, how he made good rum punches. and brown himself feels an idiotic pang. but one's been reading through that stupid, self centered toff for 300 pages and self centeredness is just fucking boring when it's filtered through such a blandly, predictably life ~negating guy. i don't know why greene sticks us with him, the book couldve been a lot better if we had eyes roaming outside of his skull.