Alex Kudera's Blog, page 43

bewildered

"Hesitant and bewildered students were his specialty. They posed a special problem to the institution, since these students were no longer sure what they were doing there and were no longer secure in their habits. They milled about and wondered quite openly what this place was for."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

old friends arrive by mail

 

one-leg sittings

"So I read [Thomas Bernhard's] Extinction very slowly indeed, and did most of that reading in the toilet cubicle at work. Most thinking and much else at work must be done in toilet cubicles. Toilet cubicles are about the only place where thinking can happen, I thought, where the association between thinking and [elimination] seemed entirely appropriate to my deplorable state of mind. It was unbearable to read a book like Extinction slowly. Only so much time can be spent in a toilet cubicle before one leg goes dead, followed by the other. It is easy to spot these toilet cubicle thinkers, I thought. They walk around with one dead leg from too much sitting on the pot. They think for the amount of time it takes for one leg to go dead, I thought, but not the other. Being habitual toilet cubicle thinkers, they leave the cubicle before the second leg goes dead so that they have one leg to hobble with. Becoming an experienced cubicle thinker myself, I only read Extinction in one-leg sittings."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

a danger to my person

"When I moved to open it again, I saw light and movement near the overhead lamp fastened to the center of the ceiling in the other room. And I heard a flapping noise. Golden feathers glistened against the light of the lamp. I was scared. A bird had flown through the window when I was in the shower, and it was trapped in my tiny apartment and a danger to my person!"

Last Days of Pompeii: Volume I

 

Ignatius J. Reilly

"On a book tour, [Susan] Fuentes will call Ignatius J. Reilly a 'Proto-Troll, the Mitochondrial Adam of Incels,' mention his love for Batman serials and penny arcades, his hatred for Doris Day's beauty. She will never know that [Blake] Mesman hadn't actually read the book."

~~ from Jeff Chon's Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun

the same zoo

"Friends of his had advised him that if he wanted to make it as a creative writer, he should stop savaging other people's work, but you might as well ask a bird not to fly or a cat not to hunt; and besides, what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free? And that was without even mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct  the tendency of culture likewise to err toward safety and mediocrity,  a responsibility you couldn't measure in dinner invitations."

~~ from Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Stephen Wolfram and maths

 

Letter from Istanbul

"The Spies Next Door" by John Beck is about ethnic-minority exiles in Turkey.

No one was in my life

"Adjunct survival led me to a bird that flew into my apartment only this past year while teaching abroad in Suzhou, China. Not dead yet and employed overseas again, I’d chased contract work to “the Venice of the Far East”—a mainland city of man-made lakes and narrow canals—but I was alone. I had no friends. Gardens bloomed throughout the city, but there was no housing bulletin board at an American church. I had people in the program—teachers, students, staff—that I would exchange pleasantries with or occasional chitchat, but there was no one I was close to. I wasn’t going to stay up all night discussing politics, literature, or anything else. No one was in my life, and talking all about it no longer appealed to me."