Nick Calabrese > Recent Status Updates

Whale dick joke chapter

I really liked the first lowering section and where they end up out on the ocean in a squall. Super spooky vibe.

Oh yeah baby, whale facts abound.

Way more fun than expected. Makes a solid fart joke in the first chapter about headwinds being more prevalent than tailwinds unless you eat a lot of beans, the vibes of everything in town being whaling related remind me of BioShock, the suspense of who his bunk mate at the inn will be, and Queequeg sells heads and shaves with a harpoon. Very cool. Way more readable than anticipated.

Quentin’s chapter is way harder than Benjy’s lol. The part where he’s with the little Italian girl is so strange and exciting, and then the misunderstanding that it’s a kidnapping will be cool to see how it turns out since obviously he’s not a reliable narrator so what really happened. Still we get some clarification like who Dalton Ames is and who Gerald is to some degree.

Not nearly as bad as I thought so far. Heard the narrator was mentally disabled and didn’t understand time/cause and effect but it feels more like a puzzle in the way As I Lay Dying is kind of a puzzle. This seems like maybe a harder puzzle, but still solvable, and Faulkner just always has a good vibe so it’s a fun puzzle too.

So fun. It’s just gossip about the worst people you’ve ever met in the best way.

Reading with Leah. Actually liking it a lot. The plot is super fun.

Loved The Pedersen Kid. Claustrophobic and painful and felt like the worst days of having a family except that it was their everyday. Everything about it was surprising. Mrs. Mean, however, not my favorite. Beautiful language for its own sake, which is valid, but I don’t personally find myself responding to it often.

That thing William Gass does where it’s so good and so incredibly negative. Beginning in the house and the little things the mother can’t bear like swearing when everything else is much worse and when she’s shaking trying to measure flour. I like the style of The Pedersen Kid more than some other Gass I’ve checked out. The language is beautiful without being distracting. Less try hardy.

Finished last section before the epilogue. Young Nick sections are so good. The feeling of “oh my god why did I do that I shouldn’t have done that I can’t believe I did that” is done so well. And now there’s a lot I still remember happening in the last like 50 pages so I’m interested in how it’s paced. Unreal book.

A lot of really cool stuff coming together. A favorite is Nick noticing the bed in the woman’s apartment and then that it’s gone, and knowing Mr. Bronzini’s mother had died, and putting together that he’s slept with Bronzini’s wife.

Nick taking Matty’s hand and yelling for their mom to get hydrogen peroxide.

Rosemary’s section where the women call her the wrong name. “Who’s better than me, they said. This was a statement she couldn’t make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed… He’d replaced her life with his leaving… There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people”