More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
its white as dreamy and vaporous as clouds’ white.
She can make even German sound lush and postcoital.
Daily Meditations for the Semiphobically Challenged,
most of the books are the sorts of books you see on the coffeetables of older people who live in condominiums near unchallenging golf courses:
Managed Fun,
Winston agrees. “It’s where it’s all going to be at. The Highway. Interactive TV and shit. Virtual Reality. Interactive Virtual Reality.” “I can see it now,” I say. The game’s almost over. “The Cruise of the Future. The Home Cruise. The Caribbean Luxury Cruise you don’t have to leave home for. Strap on the old goggles and electrodes and off you go.”
Written in the mid-90's
Captain Nico’s 109 English is not going to win any elocution ribbons, but he is a veritable blowhole of hard data.
cornucopiae
strabismic left eye, and askew swimcap
this occasion is a real two-handed head-clutcher,
then to place the stock of the weapon against no not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm—my initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.
weird dentally asymmetric grimace
Jonathan (“This Isn’t Nearly as Bad as One Might Have Expected”) Franzen,
There was a “Singles Get Together” (sic) on the Nadir that first Saturday night, held in Deck 8’s Scorpio Disco, which after an hour of self-hypnosis and controlled breathing I steeled myself to go to, but even the Get Together was 75% established couples, and the few of us Singles under like 70 all looked grim and self-hypnotized, and the whole affair seemed like a true wrist-slitter,
*
I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage;
12 is on top and laid out for serious heliophilia.
personally start to attribute this oversedulous busing to the reign of Hellenic terror the waiters labor under.
the only two English clauses she seems to know, one or the other of which clauses she uses in response to every statement, question, joke, or protestation of undying devotion: “Is no problem” and “You are a funny thing.”
this is small agorapotatoes,
aesthetically problematic
1009’s bathroom always smells of a strange but not unnice Norwegian disinfectant whose scent resembles what it would smell like if someone who knew the exact organochemical composition of a lemon but had never in fact smelled a lemon tried to synthesize the scent of a lemon. Kind of the same relation to a real lemon as a Bayer’s Children’s Aspirin to a real orange.
audibly aggressive
death-denial/-transcendence fantasies
Nixonian paranoia
innocent if puerile fascination with hermetically-evacuated waste;
for about a day and a half, begin to fear that the Nadir’s Greek episcopate will somehow contrive to use the incredibly potent and forceful 1009 toilet itself for the assassination —I don’t know, that they’ll like somehow lubricate the bowl and up the suction to where not just my waste but I myself will be sucked down through the seat’s opening and hurled into some kind of abstract septic holding-tank.
at a narcotized underwater pace.
and then they appear in the 5C.R. in clean tuxes all over again at 0630h. the next day, always so fresh and alert they look slapped.
