Brad Nelson’s Reviews > Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love > Status Update
Brad Nelson
is on page 91 of 127
Our culture sees anyone at an economic, social, or psychological vortex as a figure of despair.Despair informs all social dealings with them.It is impossible to show this despair is part of society's own perspective—unless you can convince people not as society but as individuals to come much, much closer; society wastes so much ability to reason, so much ability to laugh. Before laughter and reason, despair vanishes
— Feb 06, 2021 12:28PM
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Brad Nelson
is on page 126 of 127
The commune is a more delicate organism than the co-op, more sensitive, more vulnerable, possibly shorter-lived. Maybe it's the compulsive desire for things to be permanent that's neurotic. After all, nothing is. Humans are an evolutionary advance over the sea turtle, even though the sea turtle is tougher, weighs more, and lives longer.
— Feb 07, 2021 02:45PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 119 of 127
The songs came as melodies and words with feeling not to be underlined but to be created by the arrangement. In play and in work, new things grew out of the burgeoning gestalt; at a certain richness, the whole process was atomized again and each part studied and polished separately, with the hope that, on tape, when they dovetailed once gain, creation would be even richer.
— Feb 07, 2021 02:31PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 113 of 127
The information comes via light and sound: the square of the distance intervening between us must be a diminishing factor in how much information and energy crosses from me to you and back. But when you and I live so closely that touch and smell are suddenly half of what we communicate, new laws govern the interchanges as different as strong and weak particle interactions.
— Feb 07, 2021 02:17PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 108 of 127
He opened the door about a foot and stepped back. Behind him, the walls were the color of polluted sky. I stepped in. In another room, a woman and a man argued raucously. "Well then... Hello." The guy who'd opened the door rubbed his stomach the way someone else who'd just woken up might rub his eyes. His hand hit the long chains hanging from his neck and jangled them.
— Feb 06, 2021 08:13PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 93 of 127
There was only a triangle of glass in the windshield frame, shattered, sagging, and curled across the hood like a wave, frozen in breaking. The cab, set on fire either before or after it had been stripped, was dull black.
— Feb 06, 2021 12:54PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 90 of 127
As George talked, I realized he had no picture of Judy as an individual; nor did he have any understanding of the way her particular sort of tortured precision ("You say she's intelligent; that means, at least, there's hope for her." [phrase six]) reacts to socially usurped authority: with rage at its presumption, terror at its inconsistencies.
— Feb 06, 2021 12:26PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 70 of 127
"I want to get as high as possible and stay that way as long as possible. I want to have as little to do as I can with what's real," she would say with all seeming innocence, leaning on the doorjamb of the small room where Little Dave perched on his stool inside, the signal light of his soldering gun pink on his chin, nose, the ceiling of his eye sockets
— Feb 04, 2021 03:01PM
Brad Nelson
is on page 69 of 127
So many incidents: so many people.
Once they were fixed by the ordering of real time.
Now, cut loose in memory with only notebook references for data—those, for the most part, undated or scarce of detail—they come together in a new mosaic.
— Feb 04, 2021 02:59PM
Once they were fixed by the ordering of real time.
Now, cut loose in memory with only notebook references for data—those, for the most part, undated or scarce of detail—they come together in a new mosaic.
Brad Nelson
is on page 57 of 127
I followed her back into the woods, where I climbed behind her to the second tier of the falls, so close to the water, the spray wet our shoulders. Climbing, she jerked her flute awkwardly beside her till, suddenly, from the top of the silver wand, gold spilled down it, snagging keys.
I looked behind me.
The sun, up here, was still up, in salmon, its height again from the horizon.
— Feb 02, 2021 04:16PM
I looked behind me.
The sun, up here, was still up, in salmon, its height again from the horizon.
Brad Nelson
is on page 52 of 127
"Now, of course, you'll never be able to see it the other way again," she said. "You'll just get better at this one. Isn't it strange how the things we learn from new experiences change us?" She drew her hands back against the wrinkled cloth at her belly and didn't look at me. "We change—and the whole world changes."
— Feb 02, 2021 04:04PM
