Bits of books I have bookmarked for one reason or another; it will not always be specified
The Cold - Joyce Carol Oates
My husband has urged sleeping pills of course. When in doubt, prescribe the wife/female pills.
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Figlia del temporale - Valentina D'Urbano
«Ho pensato che non ti rivedevo piĂč. Che tu e Astrit restavate qui, voi due, nel bosco, e io non ero piĂč niente, non ero piĂč della famiglia, GiĂ non sono piĂč della famiglia, mentre tu e lui siete una cosa sola. Ecco, a pensare a queste cose, Ăš stato facile mettermi a piangere.»
Indossavo i suoi abiti, le sue camicie, il suo giaccone. Avevamo lo stesso passo, ci assomigliavamo nei modi, nell'odore, nei tratti spigolosi. Era molto piĂč me di quanto io stesso lo fossi.
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Ada or Ardor - Vladimir Nabokov
(we simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate)
[...]and rare and lapturous was the sight of my beloved trying to quench the lust of her precious skin, leaving at first pearly, then ruby, stripes along her enchanting leg and briefly attaining a drugged beatitude into which, as into a vacuum, the ferocity of the itch would rush with renewed strength.
âLook here,' said Van, âif you do not stop now when I say one, two, three, I shall open this knife' (opening the knife) âand slash my leg to match yours. Oh, please, devour your fingernails! Anything is more welcome.'
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.
When our lovers (you like the authorial possessive, don't you, Van?) happened to look out again, [...]
I am weak. I write badly. I may die tonight. My magic carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and gaping nestlings, and her rarest orchids.
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Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
In the bathroom his throat suddenly closed and he wept hard for two or three seconds before the weeping stopped abruptly and he could not get it to start again.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he's as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.
Your first nightmare away from home and folks, your first night at the Academy, it was there all along: The dream is that you awaken from a deep sleep, wake up suddenly damp and panicked and are overwhelmed with the sudden feeling that there is a distillation of total evil in this dark strange subdorm room with you, that evilâs essence and center is right here, in this room, right now. And is for you alone. None of the other little boys in the room are awake; the bunk above yours sags dead, motionless; no one moves; no one else in the room feels the presence of something radically evil; none thrash or sit damply up; no one else cries out: whatever it is is not evil for them. The flashlight your mother name-tagged with masking tape and packed for you special pans around the institutional room: the drop-ceiling, the gray striped mattress and bulged grid of bunksprings above you, the two other bunkbeds another matte gray that wonât return light, the piles of books and compact disks and tapes and tennis gear; your disk of white light trembling like the moon on water as it plays over the identical bureaus, the recessions of closet and roomâs front door, doorâs frameâs bolections; the cone of light pans over fixtures, the lumpy jumbles of sleeping boysâ shadows on the snuff-white walls, the two rag throw-rugsâ ovals on the hardwood floor, black lines of baseboardsâ reglets, the cracks in the Venetian blinds that ooze the violet nonlight of a night with snow and just a hook of moon; the flashlight with your name in maternal cursive plays over every cm. of the walls, the rheostats, CD, Inter-Lace poster of Tawni Kondo, phone console, desksâ TPs, the face in the floor, posters of pros, the onionskin yellow of the desklampsâ shades, the ceiling-panelsâ patterns of pinholes, the grid of upper bunkâs springs, recession of closet and door, boys wrapped in blankets, slight crack like a creekâs course in the eastward ceiling discernible now, maple reglet border at seam of ceiling and walls north and south no floor has a face your flashlight showed but didnât no never did see its eyesâ pupils set sideways and tapered like a catâs its eyebrowsâ \ / and horrid toothy smile leering right at your light all the time youâve been scanning oh mother a face in the floor mother oh and your flashlightâs beam stabs jaggedly back for the overlooked face misses it overcorrects then centers on what youâd felt but had seen without seeing, just now, as youâd so carefully panned the light and looked, a face in the floor there all the time but unfelt by all others and unseen by you until you knew just as you felt it didnât belong and was evil: Evil.
And then its mouth opens at your light.
And then you wake like that, quivering like a struck drum, lying there awake and quivering, summoning courage and spit, roll to the right just as in the dream for the nametagged flashlight on the floor by the bed just in case, lie there on your shank and side, shining the light all over, just as in the dream. Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the windowsâ snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure youâre not missing something thatâs right there: you lie there, awake and almost twelve, believing with all your might.
âListen,â she said. âHave you ever felt sick? I mean nauseous, like you knew you were going to throw up?â
The doctor made a gesture like Well sure.
âBut thatâs just in your stomach,â Kate Gompert said. âItâs a horrible feeling but itâs just in your stomach. Thatâs why the term is âsick to your stomach.â â She was back to looking intently at her lower carpopedals. âWhat I told Dr. Garton is OK but imagine if you felt that way all over, inside. All through you. Like every cell and every atom or brain-cell or whatever was so nauseous it wanted to throw up, but it couldnât, and you felt that way all the time, and youâre sure, youâre positive the feeling will never go away, youâre going to spend the rest of your natural life feeling like this.â
Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly started calling again this spring was a lie. He had no idea why he liked lying to Orin on the phone so much. He looked at the clock. 'Where are you?â
'Home. Snug and toasty. It's 90+ out.â
'That would be Fahrenheit I'm assuming.â
'This city is made of all glass and light. The windows are like high-beams coming at you. The air has that spilled-fuel shimmer to it.â'So to what do we owe.â
'Sometimes I wear sunglasses even in the house. Sometimes at the stadium I hold my hand up and look at it and I swear I can see right through it. Like that thing with the flashlight and your hand.â
'Hands seem to be sort of a theme to this call, thus far.â
'On the way in from the lot off the street here I saw a pedestrian in a pith helmet stagger and like claw at the air and pitch forward onto his face. Another Phoenician felled by the heat I think to myself.â
It occurred to Hal that although he lied about meaningless details to Orin on the phone it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing. This induced a spell of involuted marijuana-type thinking that led quickly, again, to Hal's questioning whether or not he was really all that intelligent.
Son, you're ten, and this is hard news for somebody ten, even if you're almost five-eleven, a possible pituitary freak. Son, you're a body, son. That quick little scientifi -prodigy's mind she's so proud of and won't quit twittering about: son, it's just neural spasms, those thoughts in your mind are just the sound of your head revving, and head is still just body, Jim. Commit this to memory. Head is body. Jim, brace yourself against my shoulders here for this hard news, at ten: you're a machine a body an object, Jim, no less than this rutilant Montclair, this coil of hose here or that rake there for the front yard's gravel or sweet Jesus this nasty fat spider flexing in its web over there up next to the rake-handle, see it? See it? Latrodectus mactans, Jim. Widow. Grab this racquet and move gracefully and feelingly over there and kill that widow for me, young sir Jim. Go on. Make it say 'K.' Take no names. There's a lad. Here's to a spiderless section of communal garage. Ah.
Joelle van Dyne is excruciatingly alive and encaged, and in the director's lap can call up everything from all times. What will be that most self-involved of acts, self -cancelling, to lock oneself in Molly Notkin's bedroom or bath and get so high that she's going to fall down and stop breathing and turn blue and die, clutching her heart. [...] The rain's wet veil blurs things like Jim had designed his neonatal lens to blur things in imitation of a neonatal retina, everything recognizable and yet without outline. A blur that's more deforming than fuzzy. No more clutching her heart on a nightly basis. What looks like the cage's exit is actually the bars of the cage. The afternoon's meshes. The entrance says EXIT. There isn't an exit. The ultimate annular fusion: that of exhibit and its cage. Jim's own Cage III: Free Show. It is the cage that has entered her, somehow. The ingenuity of the whole thing is beyond her. The Fun has long since dropped off the Too Much. She's lost the ability to lie to herself about being able to quit, or even about enjoying it, still. It no longer delimits and fills the hole. It no longer delimits the hole. There's a certain smell to a rain-wet veil. Something about that caller and the moon, saying the moon never looked away. Revolving and yet not. She had hurtled on back home on the night's final T and gone home and at least finally not turned her face away from the situation, the predicament that she didn't love it anymore she hated it and wanted to stop and also couldn't stop or imagine stopping or living without it.
Time is passing. Ennet House reeks of passing time. It is the humidity of early sobriety, hanging and palpable. You can hear ticking in clockless rooms here.
Time began to take on new aspects for him, now, as Withdrawal progressed. Time began to pass with sharp edges. Its passage in the dark or dim-lit stall was like time was being carried by a procession of ants, a gleaming red martial column of those militaristic red Southern-U.S. ants that build hideous tall boiling hills; and each vile gleaming ant wanted a minuscule little portion of Poor Tony's flesh in compensation as it helped bear time slowly forward down the corridor of true Withdrawal. By the second week in the stall time itself seemed the corridor, lightless at either end. After more time time then ceased to move or be moved or be move-throughable and assumed a shape above and apart, a huge, musty-feathered, orange-eyed wingless fowl hunched incontinent atop the stall, with a kind of watchful but deeply uncaring personality that didn't seem keen on Poor Tony Krause as a person at all, or to wish him well. Not one little bit.