On this ridiculously stoned afternoon at the pacific coast, heat slight breeze and those blues i'm not even going to attempt to describe, reading kundera, loving kundera. and this is what suddenyl occurs to me: loving kundera means nostalgic longing for that firm embrace of modernity.. I say no more, will let the don speak:

The last time he had left her apartment he suddenly thought of Hertz, an opera director in the small Central European town where he had spent his youth. Hertz required his women singers to perform their entire roles for in in private during special nude blocking rehearsals. To ensure that they held their bodies just so, he had them insert pencils into their rectums. Since the direction in which the pencil pointed indicated the position of the spinal column, the meticulous director was able to control every step, every motion of the singer's body, with scientific precision.

Once a young soprano lost her temper and denounced him to the management. Hertz defended himself by saying he never even touched them, which was true enough, but only made his pencil antics seem more perverse. Hertz was finally run out of town.

His case became famous, however, and Jan began attending opera performances at a tender age. All the women- with their overblown gestures, twisted heads, and wide-open mouths- he would picture naked. As the orchestra wept and they clasped their left breasts, he would see pencils sticking out of their bare behinds. His heart would pound. He was aroused by Hertz's arousal! (To this day he cannot see an opera in any other light, and to this day whenever he enters an opera house, he feels like a little boy sneaking off to watch a dirty movie.)

Hertz was the sublime alchemist of vice, Jan said to himself. He found the magical formula of arousal in the form of a pencil stuck up the rectum. Jan was ashamed. Hertz would never have let himself be hoodwinked into the exhausting command performance Jan had just played on the body of the girl from the sporting goods rental place.