Joseph Anthony’s Reviews > My Struggle: Book 6 > Status Update

Generally loving this book, but have been bent w/ frustration @ nearly 60 pages of what amounts to wildly pedantic sentence diagraming around a poem or two of Paul Celan. Seemed redundant & makes the poetry feel cheap/confusing… KOK is wonderful, but I felt myself shutting down during those bits, like listening to sophomoric college kids getting rigidly academic when pressed to express simple feelings/impressions.

But the authentic is a timbre, impossible to imitate.

Reading a novel after having listened to Bach’s cello suites is like leaving a sunset to descend into a cellar.

& since the proper name points both inward & outward at the same time, it is an exceptionally sensitive thing. There is a remnant of magical thought in the fact that the word is what it refers to, or may awaken it. I am my name, my name is me.

..the heart is a bird that flutters in the chest..the lungs are two seals through which our air smoothly passes..the hand is a crab & the hair a haystack, the arteries rivers, the nerves lightning..the teeth are a stone wall & the eyes apples, the ears muscles, & the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain & still. It is because we are earth, It is because we are blood. It is because we must die

Great!