Wordsmoker

Your subconscious loves tight-bodied lawnmower men making “call me” hand signals after they fix your car! Your subconscious and my conscious have a lot in common, apparently.

::shudder::

I can’t think of anything witty to say as a comment, so I’ll leave it at: I just love these. In this one, I especially love “calcs it up.”

It’s a bit Bartleby-ish, the man who transforms himself into a sign of refusal. And a bit Kafka-ish, in a “Penal Colony” kind of way – he seems silenced/punished by an outside force, and is described as being […]

I am still thinking about that! I don’t have a good answer for it. Those sections kind of hang over the novel itself, refracting it (the shirt with Snoopy being called a Hero!).

Ha ha, you said “host.”

There was a Kafka reference right at the beginning of her section, too! When she reads the email from Gen Lee (I like that Anna calls her Gen throughout, because she’s introduced to her via email/the written […]

I liked the hookup that’s not a hookup too! I’ve had that happen to me once, after a play (Julius Caesar!) I went to in Tokyo, a guy struck up conversation with me in the lobby. I totally thought I was gonna […]

I love it, but that’s a holdover from when I was a young’un and I read my first book without them (maybe Susan Minot’s ‘Folly,’ of all things) and thought it was just so bracingly avant garde and modern. I’ve […]

This is going to sound like a joke, but I really did enjoy when she shits all over the place, and then she gets cleaned in a hut. “It was marvellous what was possible in a hut these days.” Also: “If it’s got to […]

Oh, this is interesting! From the Wikipedia on The Secret Agent, it has this thing:

In the 1920 Author’s Note to the novel, Conrad recalls a discussion with Ford Madox Ford about the bombing:
[8]
[...] we […]

It also reminded me about Conrad learning English as a second language from newspapers (right? I feel like I read that somewhere) and then becoming so famous as a writer. Also, I liked that it was a fictional […]

(I unfortunately seem to have different pagination because I bought this thing in Canadia and I think this is the British edition, judging from the spelling an so on…darn the Commonwealth!)

Ha ha, Wences, yes – I noticed that too! I bet we watched the same weird specials on TV about it as kids and were like, “Oh my goodness!”

I liked the wordplay a lot, of course. “Singe soul” and stuff like that. Not exactly jokey, or even punny, just interesting and sideways. And Miles and Anna bonding over wordplay in Paris, or the little kid […]

I loved when we got to see the kid with her family. They were nice people in a very palpable way. I know a lot of academic kids, sometimes they are like that.

I missed the fact that the little girl and her family were black until the final section, embarrassingly enough. I re-read the first part this morning and it’s actually all over in the instance when they met […]

I think the transition from wanting him out very badly to kind of getting off on having this thing happening, this terribly interesting thing to complain about and have people feel sorry for her for having […]

I’m late! I was locked in a room.

This is the best Mad Men fanfic I’ve ever read.