Status Updates From Ptaki Ameryki

Pretty good but going to take a break. The short stories are starting to feel a bit repetitive and I want to come back and read the rest of them with fresh eyes:)

“ it must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring. She felt such inexplicable desolation, then, such sludge in the heart, felt the season’s mockery, all that chartreuse humidity in her throat like a gag. how else to explain such a feeling?”

“ with the two of them kissing like this—exculpatory, specificity, rubric— words are foreign money. There is only the soft punch in the mouth, the shrinking and feeding both, which fills Mack’s ears with light. This, he thinks, this is how a blind man sees. This is how a fish walks. This is how rocks sing. There is nothing at all like a man’s strong kiss: apologies to the women of Kentucky.”

I really eat up lorrie moores dark humor and human observation.. “ these days, however, he seems anxious and elderly. There is a pain in his eyes, something sad and unfocused that sometimes stabs at them— the fear of a misspent life, or an uncertainty as to where he’s left the keys.”

Did not finish.

“ it was part of their effort, not to become their parents, their marriage, they knew, held that hazard. The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that look like quotation marks— as if everything she said had already been said before.”

“ I am thinking of the dancing bodies magnificent in ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed— this body, these bodies, that body— so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?”

Finished the first two short stories.. I love slightly glum depictions of women and all their idiosyncrasies.