The following is a list of observations muttered to no one in particular by the part of my consciousness that wasn't occupied reading a very large book this morning. This part isn't connected to my eyeballs, isn't following the plot, and spends most of its time attending to stuff like page turning or coffee sipping or leg itching or all of the other little environmental concerns that crop up during a really productive hour of reading. This part is also easy bored and has some serious attention deficit disorders, but fancies itself something of a deep thinker regardless of the fact that it's not, technically speaking, capable of thought. It is also extremely envious of its more prominent counterpart, who is in charge of all the fun stuff like stimulus appreciation and eyeball control and front-of-brain-type thinking, and who seems to take all of these more glamorous brain functions (not to mention credit) for granted. Ahem. • Apparently, if you allude to metaphorical relationships between objects/characters and weighty concepts early on the the story, you will sound profound and complex no matter how things play out. Fiction writers must just depend on people failing to keep up. Random example: consider Beauty and the Beast. And so now Beauty is Democracy and the Beast is Communism and the stereotypically significant bits of kitchenware with thick accents can represent European heads of state. Shazam! I'm sure an elaborate allegorical interpretation could be teased out of all that, but who could keep track? Maybe I'm just easily impressed. (• Related: This must be why fiction writers often seem to be such good journalists (but might not actually be). Attaching metaphorical significance to various actors and/or objects in a story gives the whole thing a broadly applicative quality, as though big philosophical questions are cleverly being addressed through a more accessible medium.) • Ah Ha! A thought: To make any sense of clever &/or meaningful references to older books in newer books, those older books (ALL of them) need to be read in a certain order. (And boy oh boy do I like ORDER) Which is to say that if you're reading Book A, which references Book B, but Book B needs Books C & D to have been read for Book B to make any sense at all, a certain order reveals itself. I wonder if anyone has tried to map this out. It would look like a tree diagram, right? Or several tree diagrams. How would they end up breaking apart? AND if certain authors can scamper squirrel-like from tree to tree, does that make them more likely to win a Pulitzer? • So this slight, slightly balding bespectacled guy just pushed a stroller up to the front of the coffee shop and left it there while lining up for his morning Joe. Jesus! Ok, he's back, kid must be asleep. He's writing postcards, and has Jonathan Lethem in German (Die Festung der Einsamkeit) on the table. White patent leather shoes, pastel patterned shirt, gray pullover. Quiet. Minutes pass. So then these two women come outside speaking German and he looks up from his postcard writing and stares at them very intently, which looks weird and sort of creepy until you figure that this guy might be absolutely starved for some familiar sounding morning chatter, and thanks to the Lethem clue, this really intense/creepy staring is explained, and even gives us a tiny one-sided/unspoken bond; I too have looked up hopefully as what I think at first to be natives of some foreign locale break out in to a familiar dialect of english. It's incredibly reassuring for some reason. I feel very sympathetic. • Speaking of feelings: It just occurred to me that the extremely positive nature of the comments made by my fellow scouts in Troop 319 of Canaan, New Hampshire (in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and probably around ninety or ninety one) regarding how impressed they were by my crisply rolled-up shirtsleeves - comments which induced an intense pride in my 7 yr old self, which pride possibly manifested itself thereafter by my insistence on sheathing both arms in crisply rolled up shirtsleeves for the next, like, fifteen years, might not have been as genuine as I was first led to believe. Assholes. •(Related thought on Google: Given The Search Algorithm's awesome power and the average Bored Bob's penchant for using it to dig up instances of their own name online, I'm afraid to properly identify the short-sleeve-fold-commenters, all of whose names I can still recall for some reason. Google's role in this feels Big Brotherly somehow. Definitely not not evil.) • Scratch leg.

Comments

Carla
Had to be.

I went to Russia with you
I'm eating some fake peppermint patty mints, bite-sized. I like this voice who is talking. A little Manic (with a capital M), but fun to watch playing in the fountain while wearing its business suit. Also, they were totally sincere about your shirtsleeves. Had to be.

m.
my pithy comment has been derailed by the fact that you are posting in the FUTURE according to the date/time thingy but how can that be perhaps it's one of your superpowers but that's a different entry and I should comment on that entry instead but then it wouldn't be the future and my current comment wouldn't be relevant and I don't have another comment, at least right now, and furthermore the if I hadn't read post A i wouldn't have made the connection with superpowers in post B and the does the order of comments also depend on the order of entries posted? or entries read? or both? or neither? nevermind. i'm going to try clipping toenails into my trashcan.

Nate
This is such a blog.