Mark William > Recent Status Updates

"The spirit is an ear" - Theroux

'... he wasn't going to be wordy because where was the damfool percentage in it?' !!!

"Yeah. That's ended. It's repetitious."

McElroy's just posted online the first chapter of his new book. 90 years old. I can't complain that he didn't give me enough time to finish this book... My refractory effort is compounded by the book length being1293 pages, not 1192....

"... a quantitative change builds up and bursts into qualitative... the evolution and obstacle quest of the spirit..." This captures the entire book for me.

This is an unintended slow read. Each page has been read 2/3/4/5 times. This is a pace I would usually criticize. Here however, I've found my evolving sense of the book subtly emulating the structure of the novel itself, as per the above quote. Likewise, I feel akin to Jim with his strange sense of time. Each passage reread evokes memories of various orders. Highly satisfying.

"Newly confused about her tales, their exact date of inspiration, their pretty weird anatomy, their topography that changed like the weather, their hinted nature of foretelling..."

McElroy notes, "In the writing of this book I have meditated often upon 'Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered', by E.F. Schumacher and more particularly upon his phrase "an articulated structure that can cope with the multiplicity of small-scale units."

"...If it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness. and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.: E.F. Schumacher 'Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

"... If economic thinking cannot grasp this it is useless. If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation;.."

Important reference, "What is the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity. standard of living, self-realisation, fulfilment? Is it a matter of goods, or of people? Of course it is a matter of people. But people can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups. Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units...

Relatively easy opening Division of Labour was stunning. Put a lot of effort into the first Breather, reading back and forth, this bit, that bit, at least five times through. Well worth it. Subsequent Mayn and Kimball predominant chapters flew by so sweetly. McElroy is a master. He tackles absolutely everything with the most phenomenal precision I've ever encountered. About 1000 sure to be exhilarating pages to go.

"And should they never meet, we have be invited no less: like we are the news either way - meeting or not meeting - as we are the relations between them. And have we not felt we are more?"

"The subject is not simply an object among objects, it is also the form of existence of the contradiction, antagonism, at work in the very existence of objects as objects."

Did you hear him say that to understand a watch isn't to watch it but to break it

- a position that effectively undermines techno-fantasies of desembodied subjectivity as informational pattern and retro-fantasies of embodied subjectivity that seek to privilege the site of the physical body as the guard tor of the autonomy and integrity of the individual subject.

By demonstrating the impact of biotechnologies on human reproduction as well as the impact of new information technologies on literary production, the novel clearly shows how bodies and texts have become indistinguishable in that they both represent "embodied discourses" -

Verily, we don't not mean all we write, which proceeds from divers superfluous meanings that occur in many of our words. Yet whether unnecessary meanings choke good seed or inrich their soil is a consideration that admits of various censures, according to the different fancies of men.

Here, every wish can seem intense and fragile -
like years of sympathy -
or the name of the author -

Even your impeccable reasoning -
with which you went to so much trouble -
completely collapses in the middle of this dream -

This is a great book. As per Brian Evenson on back cover, "the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastical flex, blur, and eventually disappear altogether."

Plus, it's FC2...

Struggling here. Pushing my limits. Keep falling asleep and forgetting what I've read. Prefer Lookout, Hind's, Smuggler's. Having an adulterous break with Lance Olsen. Perhaps the immensely gratifying Lacan studies for past six months have wasted my literary attentional capacities. Lance will give me lots of airy blank space and page turning pleasure. I'll return Imp Plus when I'm back in the swing of things...

"They pretend language is spirit rising between your lips but it is really a bony black cat with a broken back heaped among garbage bags in the alley."

"And Imp Plus knew the more that was all around came from him".

"...thousands of others on a plain of countless dusty specks across which the inhabitants of a landscape of quite a different colour might trace far longer and more challenging journeys than those of the people who think that each journey is about to bring them to some place where they may rest and be satisfied that they understand a little of what all that untrodden yellow around them means."

"He knows by now that the streets and footpaths and waterless vistas of Bassett may be no more than a plain of yellowish stuff that happens to be marked with patterns of squares that give some meaning to the continual journeying of children or men or horses to and from buildings or groves of trees that the people thereabouts call old but which are no more than a few golden grains scarcely more prominent than..."