Mr. Davies > Recent Status Updates

Elegantly, deftly written death scene

250 [letter to Holly, biographer of mother from start of book]
At the moment, you blame your parents for things that go wrong. If you are lucky, you will find an intimate partner to blame instead. My husband blames me and I blame him and this arrangement has kept us both happy for a very long time.

Talking about me? “At forty-seven years of age …”

I am not allowed to ask how she is. Or what is next up. It is only proper, when you are with your mother, to talk about yourself, or about an agreed version of yourself, a person for whom you can both be pleased.

book summary —
If she was more prone to difficulty offstage, onstage she grew, I thought, extraordinary in these last years. Katherine O'Dell weathered very beautifully. The fictions got somehow thinner, the actress behind them more acutely, painfully there. It was an elaborate, slow peeling of the self, hard to watch.

In bed with husband, older, present-day —

My guilt turns just as quickly to gratitude - and this too a little fake (oh Darling!) - I roll towards you, and find the puzzle of your body moving towards mine, forearm, belly, a question that is so easily answered. My goodness, yes.

“Sure, ‘this only butter.”

Suddenly a “you” in the narration — a college liaison, rival, soon to be lover —

I was about to expose you as a fraud - yes, to the world, but more importantly and essentially to yourself. I would hold the mirror up to your fraudulence, after which you would shriek and dissolve in your own fake reflection and I would not have to sleep with you after all.

Mother’s movie accents — first, the impossible, unplaceable “trans-atlantic”, then the performative Irish

Her Irish accent was a fake Irish accent, which turne into a symbolic Irish accent and then, in time, to one tha sounded almost ordinary. I actually find it hard to remembe what she sounded like - I mean to place her socially, or put her on some map. Even in private - especially in private
- her voice was gorgeous. Like something you could eat.

What a terrifyingly affective and effective paragraph —
What she didn’t know then … he was so withdrawn from her.

One sentence, commas, colon, hyphens — and an evocation of wretchedness.

Khady-/ Cinderella

She was so terrified she felt sick.

She closed her eyes and tried to call to mind those chalky, shimmering dreams that protected her from intolerable contact with a reality that her anxious, grief-stricken heart full of remorse and doubt had made her a part of, tried desperately to detach herself from the feeble, timorous person she was, but that night her dreams weren't up to battling life's…

It made him [Djibril, Rudy’s son] look so much like Fanta whenever she dropped er mask of indifference and revealed what she commonly elt-anxiety and incomprehension—-about her husband and their ife in France…

Is the buzzard real?

Turning his head gingerly he looked at the calm, watchful buzzard perched at the top of one of the trees.

Frozen with terror he forgot to embrace Djibril. His arms hung stiffly and awkwardly down his sides.

He simply didn't wish to be good at the job.

It had seemed to him that his stubbornness was a bulwark against the complete disintegration of the erudition acquired in his former life: those arcane, those subtle bits of knowledge that he'd not had the strength, courage, or desire to cultivate and sustain and that were gradually losing their preciseness and substance.

Oh, dear, forsaken Rudy Descas — somehow reminds me of a contemporary Meursault …

It was at that point, perhaps, as he was offering Madame Menotti reassurances in the middle of the night, that he, for the first time-certainly never before so acutely and painfullythat he got the full measure of his world's collapse.

Carl Rogers, Esalen Institute — and now I remember that I discovered this book via Radiolab podcast episode “you and me and Mr. Self esteem”

Lulu Lamartine vs. council — over evicting her and appropriating the Lamartine land for “a factory that made equipment of false value. Keepsake things like bangle beads and plastic clubs. Dreamstuff.”

Lipsha's chapter really gets to me.

Gerry — justice vs. laws

Audiobook. Chapters 3-5 on agriculture, husbandry, and aquaculture evoke my PETA notes from the early 2000’s. Hahren might say she’s not taking sides, but damn she’s persuasive.

My favorite line of poetry is “Bare.” From Langston Hughes’s “Mother to Son.”

This book may have my favorite ending to a book:
“Done.”

I was getting more and more nervous. What if I had the chance of having the prefect father and blew it because I forgot the mass numbers of the three most abundant isotopes of hafnium?

No one was going to take me galloping across the Mongolian steppes. No one was going to take me to the North Pole any time soon.

One day I went with Sibylla to Tesco’s.

Sibylla out her head in her hand. She seemed tired of the words in her own mouth. At last she went on.
[in a book of languages, amid the story of “HC”]

I’ve had to learn five major trade languages and eight nomadic languages just in case. It’s insane.

Red Devlin, reporter: “Oh go on” and “sure you can”

Something about those clicking sounds woke me up for a second, and I understood that nothing had ever been wrong with Trip. Or with anything.

1990’s Kamel Ted cigarettes joke!

And I just searched up, following "Union of emptiness and clarity -- or luminosity -- is just so important," the movie "the Kurosawa Dreams thing where the little boy stole the cherries?"