Bravo Richard!

Silence is a great book. I have already finished it. Awesome. Thoughts to come....

The View From Here: Lynda Barry : Poetry Documentaries : Video : The Poetry Foundation

The View From Here: Lynda Barry : Poetry Documentaries : Video : The Poetry Foundation

from "Four Walls" by Ian McGilchrist

I read this this morning in the current issue of Poetry magazine:

When I left the world of academic English literature it was not because I was any less passionate about poetry, but because I did not want to spend my life operating on my friends. I thought I might kill them. Later I learned of Ted Hughes’s dream about the fox that came to him, singed and smelling of burnt hair, put its paw on the essay he was writing, leaving a bloody mark, and said, “You are destroying us.”

for more of the article on the effects of poetry and psychology go here

...for futher reading

I know you purists out there are only interested in finding the true meaning behind the author's purpose via your own inquisition to the novel. However, if you're interested in some interesting fact-finding, insightful background, and simple allusions DFW kept secretly hidden, then go to google books and look up "Understanding DFW" - you can read it online. Go to the "Broom" chapter.

I love finding the back channels...I'm just sayin.

His non-sequiters

What I really enjoyed was Rick's sad stories that he reads to Lenore for entertainment. I laughed because the guy put more detail into narrating the story than the college student put into writing it. Talk about false identity! Too bad his sexual potency wasn't as long as his story-telling. Poor poor pitiful Rick.

Current favorite Quote, Still Early in the Book

". . in even more liquid hues the ghostly scene of Lenore and me running toward each other in slow motion through the pale gelatin of our respective inhibitions and various troubles." p. 61.


Yes, it is part of the over-the-top diction of Mr. Vigorous. That whole chapter "5 - -1990" cracked me up with the wildly weird sappy language that guy uses.

"Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed."

". . . not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in a kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become wholw, two now utterly superflous fleshly stems of overblossomed flora,trailing hoes on the ground, husks."


and on and on and on.

I highlighted the parts that sent me into stunned laughter.

Dig the new upgrade!

I'll have some stuff to talk about on DFW. I'm half way done, so be ready...(this is a note to myelf, you don't have to be ready.)