Thursday, November 28, 2013

WITHIN THE SHADOWS OF DESIRE


Each morning upon waking my good friend David Schoffman sadly (but with great nobility) resists the overwhelming temptation to go back to sleep. He struggles daily with what he calls "the blinding ineffectuality of effort."

He stays in bed as long as possible and it is only the grating sound of his grey Brazilian shorthair Minou that spurs him into something resembling action. 

He lives on a nondescript street on the outskirts of Los Angeles where the highlight of each week is the collection of the neighborhood's recycling. 

People wonder why the cosmopolitan Schoffman chooses to live in an area that has about as much charm as a Parisian parking lot. Why, people wonder, does the militant aesthete whose strident manifesto The Senses: A Polemic, an essay that single-handedly sparked both the slow food and the dilatory foreplay movements, voluntarily reside in an area so void of charm?

Schoffman has a curious, some might say superstitious approach to his work.  He likes to quote T. S. Eliot's famous prescription that "art is an escape from emotion" and he prides himself on his ability to peel away even the faintest joy from his life. Like the bride who guards the jewel of her womanhood for her betrothed David suppresses his rage for beauty, ransoming his instincts for the benefit of his work. He feels that in order to reach the highest level of artistic refinement he must surround himself with what he calls 'the barren vacancy of the monotonous.' 

And so to Schoffman, every day is long and each morning a renewed struggle against the scourge of pessimism and lassitude.


I think he needs a vacation.

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