Status Updates From Minor Black Figures: A Novel

i’m frustrated! and i fear i will stay frustrated unless something drastic happens. there is only so much profundity to found in the life of someone who is very boring.

at one point wyeth sees a little girl with a balloon sword and we spend a longish paragraph musing about what the physicality of the rubber and implied violence of the weapon could mean to her. get me out of here !!!!!!

maybe i’m not being cerebral enough but nothing’s happening they’re just talking about the human condition and stuff

“Maybe the art was an invitation into the idea that all judgments were ultimately compromised and that objectivity was really not paying attention to the matrix of relations that made the world worth inhabiting.

Viewed that way, Wyeth could argue his way into finding the show interesting, but he still thought the paintings were ugly.”

“It was a hollow time. It was a dull time. It was summer, and Manhattan steamed between two rivers.”

If he had opened with this, I would have found the Dickens allusion nauseating. Tucked away as the sixth paragraph, it’s perfect.

I appreciate your self-awareness, Wyeth, but you were getting on my last nerve.
Thoughts took a turn though !!

Wyeth really be in his own world of anxious thoughts lol

Real Life is one of my favorite books of the last decade. I'm so annoyed at myself for waiting this long to read another Brandon Taylor book.