Pictured aside, waiting for Hemingway and Picasso in a Barcelona bar, thinking about Walter Benjamin... in his essay, 'The Storyteller', Benjamin says, 'What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature - the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella - is that it neither comes from the oral tradition nor goes into it.' Is this so? Some novels take on that mythical route into the oral, surely, Of Mice and Men ('...tell them about the rabbits George'); To Kill a Mockingbird ( 'Scout,' said Atticus, 'nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don't mean anything - like snot-nose...') I could go on and on but I know what Benjamin means, especially when he says, 'The storyteller takes what he tells from experience - his own or that reported by others.' Although, while I can no longer agree that, 'The novelist has isolated himself...' since this is an opinion from another age, I really do agree that, 'In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the potential perplexity of the living.' I have a new project coming up which combines myth with a new and novel narrative alongside additional essays in a three-way dialogue and this quotation should be displayed on the book proposal - and I suspect it will in time. But such is the thinking in an academic life - moving seamlessly from the municipal dump to the perplexity of living, sigh, sometimes I wish it weren't so. There is a famous saying written somewhere, I first saw it on a t-shirt, my mate Rocky circa 1972, it says 'fuck art, let's dance' - well that needs music, Los Lobos, I saw these rocking zydeco boys play at a wedding in Southern California and that's another story, and Paul Simon ripping them off is another story too, so many stories, but like I said, fuck art, let's dance, I love it when the accordion cuts in and what about the ukulele and the fairground at the end - desk dancing, car dancing, its all the same, its fairground music, get your shades on and dust down your two tone brothel creepers, I defy you to sit still:
