Tyler > Recent Status Updates

Bailed around p. 300 because I felt like I’d gotten the experience—which I don’t care enough to detail here—that the book wants the reader to have, and I didn’t love it enough to want to keep going for 700 more pages of it.

“Bad times for lyric poetry, as Brecht said in the era of Hitler.”

Bailing.

Grueling as can be, I tell ye. Does anything happen—plot or surprising stylistic flare—in this heap, or am I just going to drown in the stormy Garamond sea for two hundred more pages?

“...[O]ne must attempt to make senselessness. ‘Because senselessness,’ I whispered to myself, ‘is sense at its peak, sense when it can no longer bare itself.’”

“...[O]ften my thoughts skip like little sparks when a knife is honed and my heart hangs inside me as if it were stuck on a fish-hook, you know, a very thin little hook, and it pierces me so and gives a thin, terribly sharp pain.” —Milena in a letter to Brod about her falling out with Kafka

“He’ll happen to think of something that’ll make something happen, something will happen that’ll make him happen to think of something.”

I started this twice before over the past couple of years and found I wasn’t in the right head-space for it. I’m thinking now might be my time.

Well this is a fun ride: “In contradistinction to the New Poets—literary attaches to the master of fine arts in poetry, a pair of disengaged numbskulls who lazily read with their eyes—I, outsider and literary terrorist in training, read not with my eyes but with my consciousness, scanning the stratified layers embedded in each text like an archaeologist in an excavation site!”

The word “craggy” appears four times in the prologue.

Ok, fine. I’ll read it.

“...[H]e would go to the desk and turn on the lamp and do some work, going over what he’d written during the day, the scant drip, the ooze of speckled matter, the blood sneeze, the daily pale secretion, the bits of human tissue sticking to the page.”

This has been a slog—I’ve found it to be so far (halfway through) either melodramatic and stilted in its plotting, or just plain boring.

“He is not telling stories; he is using the elements of storytelling to gesture in the direction of a constellation of moods, themes, and images. He is creating the literary equivalent of a Cornell box or a rock garden or a floral arrangement....He makes a point of leaving some discontinuities and detours in place. The mode of composition becomes the meaning of the book.” —from a review of it in the New Yorker