Status Updates From This Is Not a Novel and Oth...

So, ya gurl is done with the part of this we're required to read for class. This is another of those books where I wouldn't really know what to say if I attempted to create a review for it. And maybe that's the point. All of which to say I'm lazy & don't feel like, so that'll be all. Good day.

"Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?

Nothing more or less than a read?

Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?

About an old man's preoccupations."

You tell us, Mr. Writer Markson. You and your self-awareness.

"Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die.
Said Horace.

Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live forever.
Said Ovid.

"François Boucher died at his easel at sixty-seven.
Painting a backside of Venus."

Well clearly he died doing what he loved.

"Jesus did not urinate or move his bowels, said Valentinus."

That makes it sound more like he had chronic constipation & urinary tract infections.

"The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation:
Never again to sweep floors."

That is her truth and it is valid.

"Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a cantaloupe."

"Blake's insistence that at the age of four he had seen God watching him through a window."

Sounds flippin' terrifying.

"Papal censors in 1817 refused to allow the heroine of Rossini's Cinderella opera to show her bare foot. The libretto had to be rewritten without the glass slippers."

At least one of them had a foot fetish, you cannot convince me otherwise.

"The Samuel Butler who wrote Erewhon died of pernicious anemia."

And little did he know that an overpriced bougie LA grocery store would one day share its name. 🤔

"Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of Rabindranath Tagore."

Well, you might as well rewrite the entirety of Battle Hymn of the Republic, my guy.

"Ovid left twice as much work as any other Roman poet.
And said he had destroyed endless pages more, as unsatisfactory."

Ah, writing.

"I owe the discovery that I was a Jew more to Gentiles than Jews, Einstein said."

Gee, I wonder why. 😑

"Art which is not propaganda is not art, said Diego Rivera.

Writer's arse."

The juxtaposition amuses me, but also, didn't you live in New York Mr. Markson? What's with the British version of ass?

"Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire the Iliad even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?"

Some books just be like that.

"An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes.
Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?"

I mean, it'd be pretty dark, but I suppose there could be.

"Potatoes were not known in ancient Rome."

The greatest tragedy presented in this book thus far. 😔