Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Another reread, because that is always good. Borges fortifies.

I think I see how Wire and String, Notable American Women, and the Flame Alphabet are actually one larger work

Yawn

Ok, this is an automatic reread—but it’s also so full of complex emotions I’m not sure I’ll be able to go back. This is fucking brilliant.

One thing nagging me: Esther presumably attends school—which would be the place of the highest child-language toxicity, and no mention that they’re not running. This is either a mistake (unlikely in so fastidious a writer) or it means that the first-person limited narrator is unreliable (or has limited intel, which, to be fair is always the case. Which yields lower doses of language of loved ones as more lethal.

🤤

An all-timer doing its thing

“… it is always easier to blame others for what we cannot tolerate in ourselves, what we cannot forgive ourselves for.” (110)

If possible, I’m finding this funnier than Reinhardt’s Garden.

Them: don’t use adverbs
Uncle Joe: “The driver had at first looked hard at me—because you’re seen for that transportational instant and no longer and will never be seen again and will never make a demand on him or his alternator bearings, you become takeable and are eye-fucked whiskily.”

This is some weird shit

Sentences like these rewire the brain:

“How well can you asleep in my landlord’s wicker chair’s network recall when you and I on the day of your guardian’s death sat in that great Heathrow waiting room and I told you about my billboard with the mobilized string bean, and you seemed to listen but we’re getting, in a word, teed off at the man using my ashtray…

“He was a sitting industry of farts and belches”

“The best reality is what we’re not invited to see ourselves in the center of, just as the best language is not an invitation to find ourselves drawn to the life at its center.”

Is this simply a work of apophenia? One for the character. While the reader cannot help it—being that a reader is already in the position of apophenia based on the relationship between reader and book?