Status Updates From The Mezzanine

This is a book I suspect I can only tolerate in small doses. The initial charm has definitely worn off and I’m starting to dislike the vaguely self-satisfied, knowing tone of this narrator, which is unfortunately because I really really wanted to be charmed and delighted by the narrator’s voice

“In my first year of college it became widely believed that “milk makes more mucus” and hence should be avoided when you have a cold— that was the beginning of my disenchantment.”

Our narrator is too easily swayed by random bullshit because he has no sense of discernment. He makes imaginative associations and has a child’s sense of wonder, but hes yanked around bc he cant separate the meaningful/mundane

“Any sadness I felt was overpowered by an embarrassment that we had associated ourselves with the losers, services that could be grouped with horse-drawn ice and coal trucks.”

This is the second time the narrator has applied his extreme sensitivity to social conventions, the first time being the get-well poster signature placement. I want to be charmed but I feel secondhand embarrassment whenever it happens tbh

“… after she had finished her plain donut, and had frisked the crumbs from her fingertips into the piece of plastic wrap that the donut had come in, and had folded the plastic wrap in around the crumbs until it formed a neat whitish pellet, and had thrown the pellet out…”

this is an absolutely nightmarish sentence im sorry to say. it also wouldn’t fit in the length of three status updates so

“good morning,^{11} ___?”

{11} Though by then it was by Tina’s own desk clock 12:04 P.M. I was always touched when, out of a morning’s worth of repetition, secretaries continued to answer with good mornings for an hour or so into the afternoon, just as people often date things with the previous year well into February; sometimes they caught their mistake and went into a “This is not my day” or blah blah

“It was conceivable, though scary to imagine, that the pull-fray model and the walk-flex model mingled their coefficients so subtly that human agency would never accurately apportion cause.”

Excerpt From
The Mezzanine
Baker, Nicholson
This material may be protected by copyright.

Oh god, my face when I saw the footnote next to “concave metal doorknob” and clicked it and it was four pages long. This book is such an exercise in patience

“When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices… is too large; but when your brain loses… the ambition to do things that don’t suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well”

GR char limit cant contain the power of these insane sentences so I must hack away. Strange how this dumb braincell death theory does mirror my experience

“pre-bunching can leave… pieces of grit that have embedded themselves in your sole from the imperfectly swept floor you walked on to get from the shower to your room; while the cruder… method… does detach this grit during the foot’s downward passage, so that you seldom later feel irritating particles rolling around”

WHAT is bro saying. do u not have slippers. just clean ur foot before putting the sock on

“… the almost sonic whoosh of receptionists’ staggering and misguided perfumes, and the covert chokings and showings of tongues and placing of braceleted hands to windpipes that more tastefully scented secretaries exchange in their wake.”

I’m so confused by this line ngl, why are the secretaries choking themselves?

One chapter into the book, while eating a cheesecake at a restaurant, I found myself thinking explicitly about why I’d rather eat cake with a fork than a spoon: it’s easier to get all the cake residue off the fork with each bite so it feels neater. This was something I knew subconsciously but never verbalized to myself until this moment, given the choice of a fork or spoon to eat my cake with… thanks I guess.

Amazing, UNserious noticing.