"If a man lies with another man, he should be stoned."  Leviticus 20:13.  Marriage equality, legalized pot.  Who knew the Bible was so prescient?

I thought that I might be able to enjoy a certain schadenfreude watching the Republicans after the election as they tried to re-invent the party.  Instead, it's as if nothing has changed.  Four times in the last two days, I've had to endure TV interviews with Newt Gingrich--from "Today" to "The Colbert Report."  And softball interviews at that--unlike Jon Stewart's evisceration of Mike Huckabee a couple of nights ago.  Although the Republicans may talk nice now about immigration reform, for example, it's not because of any change of beliefs (and they don't even pretend that's the motivation for their revised stances) but because of their fear (different tune, same motives) of the new demographics.  Huckabee and Gingrich are just two of the same, old, failed faces that are still pontificating.  Punditry has no consequences--except inflated bank accounts.

When Elizabeth Warren debated with Scott Brown, she was asked which Republicans in the Senate she could work with if elected.  The best she could come up with was Richard Lugar, who by that time had already been defeated in his primary by the ineffable Richard Mourdock.  Her response was widely mocked.  But if we think about it, who is there?  Is there one single Republican Senator who lives outside the bubble or who isn't afraid that if s/he makes the slightest compromise, there isn't going to be a challenge by a Tea Bagger in the next primary? 

As a respite from thinking about politics and health (and generals who go "haywire below the belt," as my friend Carol would put it), I've been immersed in two wonderful novels.  One was written 350 years ago, the other 80 years ago; one was in English, the other in French; one I had never read before, the other perhaps four or five times; one I read on my Kindle, the other the old-fashioned way.  Both were disjointed, "modernist," comic romps.  The first was Tristram Shandy, which I'm embarrassed to say I had never read; the second was Le chiendent by Raymond Queneau, one of my go-to novels that gives me pleasure every time I read it.  Tristram Shandy was familiar for its famous scenes of the narrator's misfortunate life--from his father's interruption of Shandy's conception by the mother's suddenly asking her husband whether he has remembered to wind the clock to Tristram's inadvertent circumcision by a falling window as the maid has forgotten to replace the chamber pot and Shandy is relieving himself through an open window.  But most of all what's famous is Sterne's theme and variations on human "hobby horses," the obsessions that drive human behavior and channel it into narrow but persistent routines (like winding the clock and having sex on Sunday nights).  The novel goes nowhere for hundreds of pages, but it never ceases to be sharp witted and keenly observant.  Sterne calls it at last a "cock and bull" story, but, like most human lives, one with less of a dramatic arc than with silly and repetitive diversions.

Le chiendent (literally a weed, but colloquially a dilemma, a "pickle") is equally playful, especially with language.  The main character, as much as the book can be said to have one, is Etienne Marcel (a real 14th century French politician who has a major street and a métro stop in Paris named after him), who begins the book as a silhouette, evolves into a two-dimensional being when he breaks his daily routine in leaving the bank where he works to notice rubber ducks swimming in a waterproof hat, and then into a fully human character before disappearing from the "plot" for several chapters and eventually diminishing back into a silhouette.  The book is full of characters with their own hobby horses, the most disastrous the assumption that a junkman's blue door conceals a hidden treasure.  But to try to re-tell the plot would be as futile as summarizing Tristram Shandy, and as in that novel, traditional notions of plot and character are discarded in favor of the often very funny, but completely non-linear, vagaries of human nature and the language through which they are expressed.

Since I was re-reading Queneau, I also treated myself to another trip through Zazie dans le métro, the story of a foul-mouthed young girl who is babysat by her uncle (a happily married man who dances in drag for the amusement of tourists, his tour de force being a tutu-clad performance of "The Death of a Swan") while her mother has a weekend tryst.  Zazie's sole desire during her weekend in Paris is to take the métro, which is unfortunately on strike.  This very funny (and even more playful with language) novel was made into a wonderful movie by Louis Malle. 

Friday morning, to shift topics, we have an appointment in Kansas City with the surgeon who would do the procedure if I decide to have the kidney tumor removed, either by surgery or by ablation.  Saturday's blog entry will let you know how the discussion went.