The Dance Party & Milan Kundera

Friends,

The incredibly loud neighbors are at it again this afternoon with the jacked up volume of their shitty music. There is an apartment between us and I can understand the lyrics from where I'm sitting (it is near the door, so this does skew things a little).

Usually, it's some random world dance party shit, like house music from an eastern European discotheque where people with thick accents, unbuttoned shirts, heavy gold chains and tight white slacks dance around...like Al Pacino's Scarface via Poland.

But just a second ago, they were playing Don't Speak by No Doubt. That's a song I'd love to do karaoke, but only if I could get myself to sound achingly earnest to pull it off. Chest beating and the whole lot. Now though, I wonder what the hell are they doing in there with this loud fucking music all the time? When I was an angsty, zitty teen I used to listen to Tool at volumes that loud because I was just so hormonally angry and my stupid, stupid dad...but not this kind of music.

Right now, it sounds something like Kelly Clarkson or one of those identity-less pop-40 girls...angsty googan (you know, girls with the bad blond hair dye, the fake tan, the big dopey sunglasses, the ugz boots where they shuffle their feet like their ankles are chained...that's a googan).

* * *

As for Milan Kundera, while I think it would be pretty interesting to run into him at an eastern European discotheque whilst he's grinding on some Baltic piece of jailbait, and him decked out in his Miami-Vice best, I decided that's what I'm going to write the critical piece about for my PhD stuff. It'll be expanding on a little something I did for Diana back in her contemporary prose class, comparing the Brechtian "alienation effect" in theater to the the authorial intrusion and magical realism in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, though it will require ample expansion, it's probably the best thing I got that could be expanded with research. So, I have a question for ya'll, do you know of any interview or places where Kundera spoke about writing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? In the Art of the Novel, he speaks about TBoLaF briefly, but not too much if I remember right, so have any of you...oh, who am I kidding...Diana, have you found any Kundera interviews where he talks about TBoLaF? I'll be doing some research, but I thought maybe there "someone" knew something right off the top of her head.


viva el mustache