This was the classic tactic of the would-be escapee: Attack when your opponents are weary and off-guard, attack at the moment when they are weakest and have least will to respond. Race when no one else wants to race.
A few years ago, I was good enough to do that. Or at least try that.
Picked up Matt Seaton’s book from the shelf over the weekend while I was delirious fatigued sick in the basement. I opened it one time only and read one paragraph, and this section was in it.
Who knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov’d
might secretly be indifferent to him.
Reading Whitman to the goats in the rain. It is a strange winter for them; they are eating their goat shed. Upon consultation, Bonnie Jo Campbell recommends a grass block, but also advises that, “they have their own way of negotiating the world…usually it is by eating it.”
He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real, he waited to forget who he was and to become the person doing it . . .
Finished the mss for my Lance book four days ago. Picked Roth’s latest up. I have almost a whole shelf from this guy, which surprises me. I didn’t know I liked him that much.
The only thing cool about this is that it proves I once worked with Phil Liggett. I have no idea who posted it or why. I guess the tips work, more or less. And, jeezus, I miss Marco.
As George lay beside Rachel, the world seemed to him vaster and more complicated than before, and he finally understood the gravity of what his grandfather Harold has tried to tell him all those years ago, that once you had forsaken the simple rules about right and wrong and set out on your own, the universe was a humbling place.
You have to read it a few times to appreciate that all of that happens in just one sentence. I did, anyway. And she — Bonnie Jo Campbell — still leaves so much for the reader to fill.
Two galaxies collide—
I think I need an aspirin.
Since 1985
the number of people
with no one to talk to
has doubled,
and here
I thought that I
was all alone!
From Franz Wright’s new collection, Wheeling Motel. He must be as good as ever but maybe I am no longer as good a reader.
