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After enjoying these for years online, reading this is like meeting an old friend for coffee and they're out of milk so you triple up on sugar. These feel more refined in bound book form, a bit less anarchic and continuous. White space is their new shirt. I'm interested in the sequencing. I'm going to have a few more cups. "So, what else is new?" It's great to catch up.

I saw Rob Spillman talk about authority in fiction recently. How swiftly and unequivocally Lock establishes his--lures us into his Mississippi, free-floating yet rooted, like duckweed: "What I hope to tell if I can find the words and can bear the sometimes bitter recollection is terrible: an abomination dragged up from the mind's reeking bottom like a dead woman asleep inside the closed petals of her sodden skirts."

The prose is a bit jarring but the subject matter is compelling enough that I'm likely to persist. As The Periodic Table is one of my favorite books, I'm particularly intrigued by how the author incorporates it. But my opinion of this one is as yet unformed, an unstable isotope.

There's something cinematic in this book that belies its monologue form. It feels too easy to fall back on this, but I'm reminded of the opening credits of "Raging Bull" where we encounter De Niro's character alone in the ring, caught in the perennial grappling dance with the self. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXdvq1...

Easily the best cycling conspiracy book I've read since The Third Policeman.

I've never read a book so local in its terrain--I feel like I could buy a megaphone and lead "Traveling Sprinkler" tours. This is the Planet Fitness parking lot, this is the Margarita's, here's the used book dealer, here's Fort McClary. It's doubly uncanny because one effect of reading all of Baker's work is that you start to see things from his vantage point. Everything's getting twice-Bakerized for me.

I'm seeing a lot of kinship between this and Renata Adler's Speedboat. Wonder if Baker's ever read her, or if it's simply a case of convergent evolution.

Just finished the chapter called "Decisions, Decisions" --I am spending a week in my Contemporary World Lit class focusing on literary translation--its challenges and aporias and rewards--and this chapter is a perfect series of forays into the topic. Invaluable.

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