block quote: we cannot skip
"Kaatu," Gladys said in a mysterious howl, and here we could skip ahead if you know what I mean. It is always tempting to skip past words we do not understand, the parts of a relationship which confuse us, and arrive at a nice clear sentence-- "They clearly weren't in love anymore," or "The yellow-billed magpie can be found exclusively in the coastal valleys south of San Francisco Bay, and there are three common words beginning with the letter A that describe it," or "She was wearing some sort of cape," all of which appeared in the report filed by the surviving and more talkative detective. But we cannot skip to that or it wouldn't be a love story. We cannot skip the way we look in photographs, or our own affectations, or the way we like our coffee, or the way the people we love like their coffee, even though they like it some bad, bad way. We must suffer through all of it, without skipping any tiny thing, and anyway it was a shawl she was wearing.--daniel handler, adverbs
this grown-up book
by "lemony snickett."
claims to be about love,
but it's more an exercise
in language for its own sake.
it interlocks carefully,
without being neat.
it interlocks carefully,
without being neat.
it layers and loops back
on itself; the vocabulary
becomes personal. i don't
recognize his version of love,
but the way he describes it
reminds me of the difficulty
of trying to describe
what any certain important
word means, like when i try
to explain what i mean by "loneliness."
this particular effort is so keenly
in evidence that i can't decide whether
or not to forgive the book
for the elements that make me
want to dismiss it as just more
annoying postmodern fiction.
the action is beside the point,
always on the verge of flippant.
the prose is stylized, too pop
and too pretentious
at the same time.
i'm on the fence.
i should reread it.
i skipped too much.
have you read it?
can you weigh in?
i'm on the fence.
i should reread it.
i skipped too much.
have you read it?
can you weigh in?
posted by self_invasion | 1:31 AM
1 Comments:
Definitely read it again. That book is absolutely LOADED in terms of allusions, references, and interconnectivity. Read it over once or twice - take your time, don't rush - and you'll see just how brilliantly everything is interwoven.
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