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Jan. 29th, 2010 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionIf on a winter's night a traveler I read in '98 also, in May or June, at the start of a novel-reading kick it probably had a lot to do with--you can't not love novels after reading it. I'd been into poetry almost exclusively for the previous year: discovering the Romantics, the Victorians, the Renaissance poets, tearing through Shakespeare. That was probably my best reading year, but the novel-heavy next two years were nearly as good (and nearly as full of poem reading, of course).
And yet as of a month ago I remembered absolutely nothing about the book that switched my gears, other than that it stars a reader who keeps losing books after reading one chapter, that at one point someone is waiting at a station making phone calls, that at another some Japanese people contemplate falling leaves on a walk, that "pubes" is used as a singular, and that a female reader becomes the main character briefly. I'm not sure how I'm going to teach this book--the plot is delightfully insane, but I suspect to my students it will be completely opaque. I remember trying to teach The Crying of Lot 49 a couple years ago; those were not happy faces. Actually, they simply didn't finish that one, except a diligent student from a Christian school. Surely this is a more benign kind of fun? I can't imagine how anyone can not like it, but I vividly imagine that they won't. I need to second guess my own likely disillusionments down here because they're so bitter in the event.
But they have to love it. If he hadn't been married and physically declining, pages 141-145 alone should have gotten him more laid than any author in history. Jonathan Franzen would weep if he read them, they're his holy grail. The unfinished stories are magnificent--the telephone one, the Boom pastiche, all...
And yet as of a month ago I remembered absolutely nothing about the book that switched my gears, other than that it stars a reader who keeps losing books after reading one chapter, that at one point someone is waiting at a station making phone calls, that at another some Japanese people contemplate falling leaves on a walk, that "pubes" is used as a singular, and that a female reader becomes the main character briefly. I'm not sure how I'm going to teach this book--the plot is delightfully insane, but I suspect to my students it will be completely opaque. I remember trying to teach The Crying of Lot 49 a couple years ago; those were not happy faces. Actually, they simply didn't finish that one, except a diligent student from a Christian school. Surely this is a more benign kind of fun? I can't imagine how anyone can not like it, but I vividly imagine that they won't. I need to second guess my own likely disillusionments down here because they're so bitter in the event.
But they have to love it. If he hadn't been married and physically declining, pages 141-145 alone should have gotten him more laid than any author in history. Jonathan Franzen would weep if he read them, they're his holy grail. The unfinished stories are magnificent--the telephone one, the Boom pastiche, all...
