The Two Roberts W

Quite a while ago, so long I don’t remember it, Jimmy sent me a book of short pieces by the early twentieth century Swiss writer, Robert Walser. I found a recent translation of Walser’s novel “The Assistant”, about a clerk who goes to work for an inventor who is going broke. For a while I didn’t think I liked it, since the only plot is the inventor’s slow inevitable descent into ruin, and I thought it was one of those books in which the reader is supposed to laugh at the character’s increasing misfortune, you know, things are so bad now at least they can’t get worse, but are really about the author feeling superior to his own characters, so why bother. But then I started really loving the straight-ahead, affectless assistant, who regardless of circumstances, pretty much likes everything: his coffee, the sunshine, the Swiss woods, his boss’s wife’s neck. It’s actually a strange and really wonderful book and now I’ve started Walser’s weirder and wonderfuller “Jakob von Gutten”. Bircher muesli, Vita-merfen and Robert Walser: these are why the Swiss will never be defeated.


I dreamed that I met the other Robert W., who had invited me to a little gathering of some sort. I asked him who did the original of “Yesterday Man” (“a bit of a music nerd question, I know”) and he teased me gently when I refused some food he offered because it had meat in it. “Everything eats something else,” he said in his adorable working-class accent. Do we think that Robert Wyatt might himself be a vegetarian? Men: he is a British hippie. De: he did once write a song from the point of view of bacon. (“I’m delicious when I’m crunchy, even when I’m almost black”.)

Expression of the day: treacle dick. A British dessert, custard in molasses sauce.