Having a Cup of Coffee

Last night I saw the wonderful series of Sherlock Holmes starring the late Jeremy Brett. The particular tale was the one about the red headed league which was a "red herring" for the evil scheme of Professor Moriaty to rob a bank of French gold. What struck me was the fact Holmes said it was a "three pipes" case. I am sat in a railway cafe and this short essay or prose piece, is a one cup of coffee piece. I will write it up later. At the time of writing I am using a cheap 3 kr notebook and of all things a red felt tip pen. It looks as if everything is incorrect - I mean one maths teacher of mine used to use red and scrawl all over my geometry. If it was wrong. She tore the page out - like those torturers ripping out innards in Singapore's Tiger Balm Gardens! I do recollect, probably incorrectly, that Balzac was a sixty cups of coffee a day man - it killed him. One strong espresso gets me jittery. However, one coffee in the morning usually wakes me up. Was it King James I or a Sultan who banned coffee? These monarchs! They suddenly take a dislike to something and then they ban it. Now of course if I were a supreme sovereign ruler, I'd ban lemon curd. Jars of that toxic substance would be carted down to the sea and tossed in. Of course I would not really do that, because as much as I abhor this vile yellow substance, I do like fish and marine life more. As I sipped my coffee and look around at the usual bunch of station types, I thought of Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women (1965/2010). It is all to do with the problem of the erotics of the content and the text. Does a reader get excited and skip the "padding" to go straight to the act, without any textual foreplay? Is that not a form of zapping? In this particular book, there is not much explicit sex - so is the male reader disappointed? What do they do? Flick through for the horny moments, then read? Is that how an adolescent reads D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller? Flick through. Or do they maturely, read the book for the pleasure of the text? It's one of those Sex and the City questions. Was it just a case of the failure to understand that the reader seduction is not the commonplace realist description of organ going into organ, but the words? Henry James and Marcel Proust knew all about this. They courted us with suggestiveness that never led to consummation. We remain virgins! This aesthetic pleasure is a kin to the inner laughter or buzz we get from a witty comment rather than the belly laugh we get from a bawdy joke. I can see that sitting down which is by the way in a IKEA wannabe cream white ceramic mug - without saucer, so with me the napkin is soaked as if some little imp had bailed out some coffee. At this juncture I turn to Lin Yutang and ask myself whether coffee has the right properties for meditation as against green tea? Probably not. I think also of the details. The magnifying approach of Nicholson Baker whose Mezzanine (1988) has me wondering whether this hyper-attention to the minute is a tad too much. I am horrified at the prospect that if I were to write a novel, I would not get further than the crud on the rim of my cup. Then I might look up that cup on the internet and wax lyrical about its manufacturing procress, even discuss all the people who drank from it! The horror. The horror! But after a judicious moment. I think, heck no, leave the darn thing on the table.