Reviews

Notes p38 - But I felt bad about hitting him. You know how you feel when you hit a drunk. TB: No, Hem, I can’t say I do. p62 - “God looks after rummies,” I told him and I took the thirty-eight off and stowed it down below. p98 - He was mean talking now, all right, and since he was a boy he never had no pity for nobody.. But he never had no pity for himself either. p107 - Well, I got something to think about now all right. Something to ddo and something to think about besides wondering what the hell’s going to happen. Besides wondering what’s going to happen to the whole damn thing. Once they put it up. Once you’re playing for it. Once you got a chance. Instead of just watching it all go to hell. p128 - “His goddamn face,” she thought. “Every time I see his goddamn face it makes me want to cry.” p144 - “What’s the matter with your old woman?” asked Harry cheerfully. “Why don’t you smack her?” || “You smack her,” Albert said. “I’d like to hear what she’d say. She’s some old woman to talk.” Little casual domestic violence for the vintage Hemingway fans. p174 - I guess it was nuts all right. I guess I bit off too much more than I could chew. I shouldn’t have tried it. I had it all right up to the end. Nobody’ll know how it happened. I with I could do something about Marie. … I wish I could let the old woman know what happened. I wonder what she’ll do? I don’t know. I guess I should have got a job in a filling station or something. I should have quit trying to go in boats. p176-177 - TB: there is a great little scene here where a writer observes a woman crossing the street. He has an internal monologue where he talks about how ugly she is and calls her a battleship. He starts to use her in his writing immediately and constructs a whole little tale to explain this woman that he’s seen crossing the street in tears. Hemingway does a great little smash cut at the end in the last paragraph identifying her and the reader immediately understands her tears and there is a new dimension to the mental cruelty of the writer. One of the phrases that Hem puts into this writer’s mental scribblings is, “It was good. It was, it could be easily, terrific, and it was true.” Probably Hem’s most central piece of writing advice is boiled down to, “write one true sentence.” This is how I know this little two page vignette is an artifact of self-hatred. There are a lot of artifacts of Hem’s self-hatred in this book. p185 - “I was so sentimental about you I’d break any one’s heart for you. My, I was a damned fool. I broke my own heart, too.” TB: this whole paragraph is fantastic. More: “It’s broken and gone. Everything I believed in and everything I cared about I left for you because you were so wonderful and you loved me so much that love was all that mattered. Love was the greatest thing, wasn’t it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have. And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I’m deaf with it. Love is that dirty aborting horror that you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It’s half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like Lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to any more. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I’m through with you and I’m through with love. Your kind of picknosed love. You writer.” (TB: emphasis mine. Another artifact of Hem’s self-hatred. It’s no mistake he puts these words in the mouth of the writer’s wife.) p191 - “Well, it’s all over, so why be bitter?” (TB: really great emotional stuff from a Hemingway male character… Fuck this guy.) p195 - The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there. p202 - TB: there’s an exchange with some vets in this area, I guess 201-203 and maybe a little past that. I feel like there is more than what’s on the page. I expect I will re-read this someday. But here are parts that stand out to me: “Let us in,” the bloody-faced one said. “Let in me and my old buddy.” He whispered into Richard Gordon’s ear, “I don’t have to hand it out. I can take it, see?” … “I can take it” … “It’s a secret.” “Sometimes it feels good,” he said. “How do you feel about that?” “First it was an art,” he said. “Then it became a pleasure. If things made me sick you’d make me sick, Red.” TB: Clearly they’re talking about pain, the context is basically taking punches. But it’s got to be a lot more than that. I think it’s Hem talking about being able to take emotional pain. That “Sometimes it feels good” seems to me like something a ruminator says. I’m a ruminator. Sometimes you imagine terribly dark things and you imagine people you love being very cruel or saying things they would never say. It doesn’t feel good. But I understand exactly what he’s saying. It feels terrible, but there’s something to it. Like smashing in your tear ducts. There’s something to it. p206 Related to previous note - “Because we are the desperate ones,” the man said. “The ones with nothing to lose. We are the completely brutalized ones. We’re worse than the stuff the original Spartacus worked with. But it’s tough to try and do anything with because we have been beaten so far that the only solace is booze and the only pride is in being able to take it. But we’re not all like that. There are some of us that are going to hand it out.” (TB: emphasis mine.) p212 - As Richard Gordon watched him he felt a sick feeling in his chest. And he knew for the first time how a man feels when he looks at the man his wife is leaving him for. p221 - What he was thinking as he watched him was not pleasant. It is a moral sin, he thought, a grave and deadly sin and a great cruelty, and while technically one’s religion may permit the ultimate result, I cannot pardon myself. On the other hand, a surgeon cannot desist while operating for fear of hurting the patient. But why must all the operations in life be performed without an anaesthetic? If I had been a better man I would have let him beat me up. It would have been better for him. (TB: emphasis mine.) p225 - “A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.” He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it. p229 - TB: line here about a side-character being impotent. Interesting. Hem seems to have a lot of impotent or rumored-impotent characters (do I only think this because I just re-read Sun Also Rises? Maybe). It’s relatively interesting given all his affairs and all his characters’ affairs and the extreme heartbreak in so many of his works. p230 - “Didn’t you ever notice any difference in nights?” (TB: character talking about how during the day it’s hard enough but at night it’s another matter. Two characters in this book have this thought and it’s the same thought that Jake in Sun Also Rises returns to. Things are harder at night. A lot harder.) Chapter 24, from page 227 to 247, has vignettes of other characters throughout the yachtyard. Just incredible. I loved all of them. p238 - Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy, and blast an exit from intolerable positions by the pressure of a finger; those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare, their only drawback the mess they leave for relatives to clean up. (TB: emphasis mine.) p260 - I don’t know what to do. It ain’t like when he was away on trips. Then he was always coming back but now I got to go on the rest of my life. And I’m big now and ugly and old and he ain’t here to tell me that I ain’t. I’d have to hire a man to do it now I guess and then I wouldn’t want him. So that’s the way it goes. That’s the way it goes alright. … I wonder if he thought about me or what he thought about. … Nothing is any good to wish. … Nobody’s going to tell me that and there ain’t nothing now but to take it every day the way it comes and just get started doing something right away. But Jesus Christ, what do you do at nights is what I want to know. … You just go dead inside and everything is easy. TB: emphasis mine. These are from Harry’s wife from pages 260 to 261 across several paragraphs of thought. Review Lots of spoilers in here. ...

Notes p2 - What Lee looked for in any relationship was the feel of contact. p7-8 - Actually, Moor’s brush-off was calculated to inflict the maximum hurt possible under the circumstances. It put Lee in the position of a detestably insistent queer, too stupid and insensitive to realize that his attentions were not wanted, forcing Moor to the distasteful necessity of drawing a diagram. p15 - The result was ghastly. || As Lee stood aside to bow in his dignified old-world greeting, there emerged instead a leer of naked lust, wretched in the pain and hate of his deprived body and, in simultaneous double exposure, a sweet child’s smile of liking and trust, shockingly out of time and place, mutilated and hopeless. p23 - Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy’s face. An imaginary hand projected with such force it seemed Allerton must feel the touch of ectoplasmtic fingers caressing his ear, phantom thumbs smoothing his eyebrows, pushing the hair back from his face. Now Lee’s hands were running down over the ribs, the stomach. Lee felt the aching pain of desire in his lungs. His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips. p24-25 - [Allerton] was forced to ask himself: “What does he want from me?” It did not occur to him that Lee was queer, as he associated queerness with at least some degree of overt effeminacy. Allerton was intelligent and surprisingly perceptive for a person so self-centered, but his experience was limited. He decided finally that Lee valued him as an audience. p32-33 - In the dark theater Lee could feel his body pull toward Allerton, an amoeboid protoplasmic projection, straining with a blind worm hunger to enter the other’s body, to breathe with his lungs, see with his eyes, learn the feel of his viscera and genitals. Allerton shifted in his seat. Lee felt a sharp twinge, a strain or dislocation of the spirit. His eyes ached. He took off his glasses and ran his hand over his closed eyes. p45 - (Baked Alaska and Lee’s dish idea.) p50- “How about dinner tonight?” asked Lee. Allerton said, “No, I think I’ll work tonight.” Lee was depressed and shattered. The warmth and laughter of Saturday night was lost, and he did not know why. In any relation of love or friendship, Lee attempted to establish contact on the non-verbal level of intuition, a silent exchange of thought and feeling. Now Allerton had abruptly shut off contact, and Lee felt a physical pain, as though a part of himself tentatively stretched out towards the other had been severed, and he was looking at the bleeding stump in shock and disbelief. p50 - (TB: around this area, Lee begins to really press on Allerton. He starts offering him money to spend time with him, but it’s not phrased like that. He says things like, “I subsidize non-production. I will pay you twenty pesos not to work tonight.” He is surprised and hurt when Allerton rejects this. It doesn’t stop him from repeating it a few times later.) p51 - He got up and walked out. He walked slowlly. Several times he leaned on a tree, looking at the ground as if his stomach hurt. Inside his apartment he took off his coat and shoes, sat down on the bed. His throat began to ache, moisture hit his eyes, and he fell across the bed, sobbing convulsively. He pulled his knees up and covered his face with hands, the fists clenched. Towards morning he turned on his back and stretched out. The sobs stopped, and his face relaxed in the morning light. p52-53 - He forced himself to look at the facts. Allerton was not queer enough to make a reciprocal relation possible. Lee’s affection irritated him. … [Lee] had no close friends. He disliked definite appointments. He did not like to feel that anybody expected anything from him.. He wanted, so far as possible, to live without external pressure. Allerton resented Lee’s action in paying to recover the camera. … “I liked him and I wanted him to like me,” Lee thought. “I wasn’t trying to buy anything.” || “I have to leave town,” he decided. “Go somewhere. Panama, South America.” … A feeling of cold desolation came over him at the thought of arriving in another country, far away from Allerton. p56-60 – (TB: an extended “routine” from Lee, initially to Allerton and his chess partner and implied lover, Mary, and concluded after they have left. Lee is telling stories and it isn’t clear to me if he is sharing memories of real things or just making things up. It is basically irrelevant as the ‘routine’ on Corn Hole Gus’s Used Slave Lot - a fantasy(?) of Lee taking a slave boy and seeking to trade him in for a pure Beduin. These are children, by the way. In the appendix/original introduction by Burroughs, he describes these as flights of fancy, routines, Lee settling into his writing. Okay.) p65 - (TB: Lee is so pining for any attention from Allerton that he contemplates buying a stake in the bar where Allerton keeps a tab, so that the man could not ignore him. Awful.) p72 - (TB: At a point in the story where Lee and Allerton are more or less traveling outside of Mexico by themselves, Lee sets up a contract where Allerton will sleep with him twice a week. This feels abhorrent and unreal. Why would Lee want this if he loves Allerton? Doesn’t he want there to be some warmth? At no point does Allerton ever express anything but disgust for Lee. Anyway, on page 72 Lee shows him where to buy sex from women where they’re at, and encourages him. I really don’t understand Lee at all. Isn’t he haunted by that thought? It’s so bizarre.) p79 - [Lee] had an arm around Gene’s shoulders. They were both wearing swimming strunks. The sea was glassy. He saw a fish rise in a swirl of water. He lay down with his head in Allerton’s lap. He felt peaceful and happy. He had never felt that way in his life, except maybe as a young child. He couldn’t remember. The bitter shocks of his childhood had blacked out memory of happy times. p80 - “While we are in Ecuador we must score for Yage,” Lee said. “Think of it: thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste. Anything about somebody bugs you, you say, ‘Yage! I want that routine took clear out of his mind.’ I could think of a few changes I might make in you, doll.” He looked at Allerton and licked his lips. “You’d be so much nicer after a few alterations. You’re nice now, of course, but you do have those irritating little peculiarities. I mean, you won’t do exactly what I want you to do all the time.” (TB: Holy shit, can you imagine someone saying this to you? This is insane! How can you think that way about someone?) p113 - I have dreamed many times I was back in Mexico City, talking to Art or Allerton’s best friend, Johnny White, and asking where he was. Dream about Allerton continually. Usually we are on good terms, but sometimes he is inexplicably hostile, and when I ask why, what is the matter, his answer is muffled. I never find out why. (TB: this is from the last chapter, 2 years after the events of the book, and notably the writing has changed from third-person to first-person. Anyway, I recognize these dreams. Have had them. But for Lee to think that hostility from Allerton could be inexplicable demonstrates no insight.) Appendix, Burroughs’s original introduction: p131: “I glance at the manuscript of Queer and feel I simply can’t read it. My past was a poisoned river from which one was fortunate to escape, and by whicih one feels immediately threatened, years after the events recorded—painful to an extent I find it difficult to read, let alone to write about. Every word and gesture sets the teeth on edge.” p135 - I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out. Review I picked this up recently because I wanted to read this before watching Luca’s adaptation with Daniel Craig. Also because I have been reading a lot of McCarthy and Hemingway over the past year or so but am desperately sick of reading straight relationships and reading Love, Leda made me yearn to read more gay writing. ...

Notes Author: Galway Kinnell Last read: 2025-01-26 Rating: 1 Form: Poetry Genre: Literary Fiction Times read: 1 Copies owned: 0 Fun score: -2.00

Notes p11 - “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” p26 - “Don’t you love me?” “Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.” “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” … “And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t want to go through that hell again.” p27 - “It’s funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.” p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance. p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. p34 - This was Brett, that I felt like crying about.. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. p99 - Why I felt the impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t! p183 - “Do you still love me, Jake?” “Yes,” I said. “Because I’m a goner,” Brett said. “How?” “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.” … “Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this.” p197 - “Badly cogido,” he said. “All for sport. All for pleasure.” p239 - That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back.. And sign the wire with love. That was all right. p245 - [Jake] “I thought you weren’t going to talk about it.” “How can I help it?” “You’ll lose it if you talk about it.” Review I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice. ...

Notes p189 - “I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.” ...

Review Thanks to my friend Erin for loaning me this book! Standard disclaimer about poetry: I don’t know anything about it and am rating based on my response. I liked these! Not as much as I did The Sun & Her Flowers, but still. I thought the poems dealing with themes of trust, belief, self-compassion, and acceptance were my favorites (list of page numbers at end). There are several that speak to Kaur’s experience as an immigrant, particularly as a child. While I don’t relate to the immigrant experience, a lot of them felt familial to growing up very poor. I related to those aspects, both the experiences of them and the sensitivies and anxieties the experiences leave you with. Several I really did not quite get / they did not speak to me at all. That’s okay. I bumped on a few. That’s okay too! ...

Table of Poems Title Page Flag Poem. (cornflakes) 31 Favorite Daggers. 74 Favorite Poem. (rip) 86 Favorite “Let him go in mind” 91 Favorite True Homosexual Love. 105 Favorite Dear Friend Go Away, Please. 106 Favorite There You Go Baby. 148 Favorite He is a Rose. 155 Favorite New brave wired ones. 24 Poem Queers 35 Poem How Odd. 43 Poem “soon the mind will be heavy” 62 Poem I Tell You Now. 65 Poem From Hospital. 67 Poem Bootless. 70 Poem “Two queers live on a hill” 80 Favorite “oral pictures of love” 93 Poem Nerves Blotted Out. 108 Poem “I love my arse to be sucked” 112 Poem “desert bones” 114 Poem All Sunday Long. 122 Poem Radio-Me: The Big Send Up of Everything Around Us. 130 Poem “The world is at war” 139 Poem To my mother, dead. 141 Poem Looking for a Poem. 20 Stanza Between You and Humanity. 21 Stanza “I can’t sell my penis because” 41 Stanza This Poem. 54 Stanza Answer don’t move. 119 Stanza Reatity. 127 Stanza I am frozen with knowledge. 148 Stanza Review I picked this up from the bookstore after loving Love Leda so much. I have been trying to read a little more poetry. Like my recent review for Rupi Kaur’s The Sun & Her Flowers, I have no idea how to review poetry. I don’t know what good poetry looks like or what bad poetry looks like. All I know is that sometimes words are strung together and they give me an emotional reaction. So that’s what I’m rating this collection on. ...

Notes Introduction “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Ch 4 “‘You are the only man I ever heard of,’ Mengel said to me this morning, ‘who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in other ways.’” TB: Squaring w/ my people-inherently-good thing. Should probably condition good-at-birth and then address that when they get lost, they still want to be good. But they find other lost people who create different meanings for the word ‘good’ that are within their power. Ch 9 “It wasn’t that Helga and I were crazy about Nazis. I can’t ssay, on the other hand, that we hated them. They were a big enthusiastic part of our audience, important people in the society in which we lived. They were people. Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind. To be frank—I can’t think of them as doing that even now. I knew them too well, worked too hard in my time for their trust and applause.” Ch 13 “Those whose orders I carried out in Germany were as ignorant and insane as Dr. Jones. I knew it. God help me, I carried out their instructions anyway.” Ch 18 “Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,” he said. “I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.” He took my hand. “You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.” TB: Chilling. Remember the moral. Wonder if any of these loudmouth podcasters have read this. Ch 21 “An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz’s late wife—boys that young, and yet with men’s uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.” Ch 28 Kraft, oblivious to me in my leopard skin, fired again. He was using a Luger as big as a siege howitzer. It was chambered and bored for mere twenty-two’s however, making anti-climatic peewee bangs. Kraft fired again and a sandbag two feet to the left of the target’s head bled sand. Ch 29 “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.” Ch 39 Jones wasn’t completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. (p) Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell—keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. (p) The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in mose cases. (p) The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information— (…) That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia. Ch 43 “There are plenty of good reasons for fighting,” I said, “but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.” “It’s that part of an imbecile,” I said, “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.” Review Wow! Another certified Vonnegut classic. I have yet to read one that I haven’t liked. When I was debating what book to read next (choices were this and South and West by Didion), unanimous support for this across two Discord servers. One friend said this is their all time favorite Vonnegut. ...

Notes p10 - I had imagined the Second World War as a punishment specifically designed to deprive me of my father, had counted up my errors and, with an egocentricity which then approached autism and which affects me still in dreams and fevers and marriage, found myself guilty. p14 - …I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center. I did not much want to talk about this. p115 - I seem to have been rewarde, out of all proportion to my generally undistinguished academic record, with an incommensurate number of prizes and scholarships (…) and recommendations and special attention and very probably the envy and admiration of at least certain of my peers. Curiously, I only remember failing, failures, and slights and refusals. TB: I relate to this just a little bit. p117 - At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it. p126 - Part of it is simply what looks right to the eye, sounds right to the ear. I am at home in the West. The hills of the coastal ranges look “right” to me, the particular flat expanse of the Central Valley comforts my eye. The place names have the ring of real places to me. I can pronounce the names of the rivers, and recognize the common trees and snakes. I am easy here in a way that I am not easy in other places. Review I liked it! Reading about the South is always a little fascinating. The regionality of this country is at times hard to reconcile, especially today with this vague monoculture and supposed shrunken world. I did not grow up in The South, but I grew up in a place that was quite insistent it was Southern, and would you please remember that, everything in their character insisted. ...

Notes The Feminist (p1) p11 - But if agonizing about being a creep is what proves he’s not a creep, and he stops worrying about being a creep, wouldn’t that make him a creep? p13 - Taking trips and seeing movies and attending events all seem pointless without anyone to experience them with, so it feels like his life cannot progress or even truly begin until he has found someone who will return his love. Pics (p31) Interesting portrayal of texting. No bother about picking up a phone really, just hard cuts to different type and formatting. Some discussion of scrolling through… p46 - The friendship, it seems, has been quietly ruined by its reckless redistricting. … thinking about how his rejecting her to preserve their friendship is exactly what ended it, how it used to be a happy voluntary arrangement, and has now become something she is forced to settle for. p47 - Alison realizes she has nothing new to report about her life that doesn’t in some way involve trying to get over him. p63 - She knows casual sex isn’t inherently degrading, and any stigma around it is backward and boring, so it’s extra annoying that her own experiences are failing to affirm her, convincing her that she must be doing things wrong and is somehow different, otherwise she would not be finding herself reigniting the slut-shame she thought she’d intellectually smothered in college. p65 - No surprise, then, that she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how comforting it feels to hate Neil, how succulent the fantasy that the world’s full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy, and that to hate him silently, invent ways to undermine him, conscript others into this project, was to increase the world’s fairness. p71 - What hurts the most is knowing that his rejection of her was fair. p91 - And she will feel the same, nothing, and think, maybe I am nothing, and this is the best I can offer to others, my absence in their lives, though they will never notice it or thank me. Still, their lives will be better for it. Agegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression (p92) p95 - After a year goes by with his sexuality still theoretical, Kant suspects he must build his resume. The apps, everyone says, the apps! But when he tries one it feels like a minuscule butcher shop, an infinite display case of rumps, loins, and wursts. Quickly he acquires a horrid efficiency at rejecting men on the basis of a two-inch photo or two-line bio—for having close-set eyes, or long gums, or because they kayak, believe in astrology, say they have “man fur.” Even as he is vexed to discover his unjustified pickiness, what really inhibits him is imagining the men on the other end looking at his own unsmiling, gormless photo and laughing at it. p108 - So all of this caretaking is just pointless sublimation, Kant knows, he really is a genius at channeling his bullshit into laudable endeavors, and it only deepens his conviction that he’ll never be able to give Julian the easy loving he deserves, so maybe he should end things before they get any more entangled, so that it won’t hurt as much to leave him. p111 - Kant realizes it sounds like he’s fishing for compliments, and that in doing so he might find the lake empty. He apologizes and stares at his stupid face in the sideview mirror, getting sucked into an emotional gravity well where he pities Julian for dating such a loser, and resents Julian for pitying him, and pities himself for being pitied, all of which cancel out into silence. Just a ton of notes between 108-120. p125 - my note, not from book: This book having the strange effect of me seeing my anxities in others & the stuff like this and making me feel pleasantly normal by comparison. Hex code for perfect homemade simulacum - (#)F6F3E9. No comment. Our Dope Feature (p143) No specific notes on this one, just an overriding sense of what an asshole the narrator is, and how horrible. So little insight and of course that is the point. Main Character (p170) p200 - my note: Realizing this book is taking every thought and emotion that rejection unsettles and stretches them out far, far, into their maximum. Sometimes even past satire and into total absurdity. p201 - …the years I’d wasted in self-recrimination for betraying myself when there was no self to betray. p231 - I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads. p238 - my note: hilarious introduction of the author into this sort of meta-narrative in a quasi-fourth-wall break. Really enjoyed all this. Sixteen Metaphors (p244) My note: This little collection of metaphors is pretty depressing. So, basically, I like most of them. A lot of them are pretty mean-spirited about the self. Very in line with the rest of the book. p245 - There are plenty of fish in the sea. But you’re not a fish, just an ugly idiot trying to catch one. p246 - On a road trip, your friends in the front seats are enjoying their conversation; you can barely catch a single word. When you try to lean forward and contribute, they listen, kbut you can tell they’re annoyed by the effort to include you, so you stop trying. By the time you reach your destination, they’ve forgotten you’re in the car at all, and they drop the car off at the rental place with you still in it. You consider saying something about it, then think better of it, because you don’t want them to feel bad. Re: Rejection (p249) Another snicker-inducing meta-narrative. It basically summarizes the short stories and pokes holes in them. Lots of fun. p257 - Perhaps this is why the protagonists of Rejection each at some point, after restlessly shuttling between concealing and revealing, eventually retreat to isolation, their only sure defense. p258 - …the final irony, one that at least your writing seems to grasp, is that rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you–the reject–must hear, and comprehend, and accept. Review I have been habitually in the book store on Saturdays around 10 or 11am for no good reason since getting back into town. I have a 4x4 IKEA KALLAX shelf at home stuffed with unread books and a pile of books on my coffee table and on my record player just staring at me. Yet, I keep going to the store. Anyway, I saw this sitting on the new arrivals table and had a skim of the inner jacket and a random page and thought, well, fuck it. Why not. ...