Bruno > Recent Status Updates

...for who else calls us back from every one of death's delusions, if not the life that *doesn't know how to die*...

How odd to include "doesn't know" there. The life that doesn't die, sure, but doesn't *know how* to die? Or maybe the life that doesn't know death. But the incapacity of not knowing how seems odd. Zombie-like, too.

"The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads."

"It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time."

It has the sounds of "bank and shoal of time," from Macbeth. (I'm reading an edition without notes; no doubt others have seen this.)

"I dreaded death: I didn't want the one I had loved so much to die in his entirety when I died."

Apart from the implication that he got over this and people stopped dying, I really like this.

Also in book 6, on the topic of fate entangled with the fact of the poem's existence, at the end Hector, who enters book 6 pitying the women who don't know the men are dead, does a 180, imagines a compensatory fiction: "In future times/ we shall make this all turn out right..."

In book 6, fate becomes entangled with the fact of the poem's existence, that all those hearing it/reading it know what happened already. Other discrepancies of knowledge: Hector returns to the city, can't bear to tell the women that the men they pray for are already dead. Helen rails at the lot (fate) of Zeus making "us topics of a singer's tale/ for people in the future still unborn."

I picked this up on the strength of John Keene's praise for Mabanckou. Keene was on a panel about his own Counternarratives when he mentioned Mabanckou, said he was one of the most important writers today.

I'm giving up during the (literal) pissing contest between a customer at the bar and a character called Robinette ("Faucet" in French). Not "quel horreur," just can't vibe with the exaggerations. Not right now.

Chatty, breezy. Still, I can't not like it. It's good he was able to document such times, such mores, before he died.

Kind of speed-reading it, in advance of a class on it. I'm listening to it while I read along. I don't know Greek, and I've read Emily Wilson makes some odd choices at times, unpoetic ones, but for sense, I really like it.

I'm not sure I'll finish this, this time. It's remarkable, but I can only drift along with it just so far.

I never thought I’d witness something like this. I thought that other generations would live through these kinds of experiences; that they would happen first in other countries.

Amazing. The main character is uneducated and laconic, and yet part of what makes the book so compelling is his inner life.

Not the right book to follow Robert Glück's About Ed. There's something anesthetized about the tone. For all the book's focus on the real (summer heat, sweat, sex), there's a realm of experience that seems foreclosed: loss, doubt, sorrow.