Are You There, God? What Are You Reading In The Summer Of 2021?

Back to TUESDAY NIGHTS IN 1980: it still contains no noticeably good writing but a notable amount of bad writing, characterisation, scene-setting.

The question that starts to arise is why it was published. Commercial potential? A persuasive literary agent?

Enjoying the Alan Moore, which better be the case as it's over a thousand pages and the type is tiny.

This statement will be loaded with all sorts of literary prejudice, but after reading a generic efficient dystopian sci-fi thing it feels so good to dig into something with actual ambition, that tries to do things with language and demands the reader's attention. Lots of stuff about the decline of working class culture and, this being Moore, metaphysical shenanigans. Difficult to keep up with some of the descriptions of Northampton architecture tho, having never been.

Pinefox, ngl: Prentiss has money and connections.

I know Northampton quite well, but I can't say that its architecture, as such, made the greatest impression on me.

Hence a bit surprised to hear that AM would focus on it. But maybe he can make it interesting.

Table: that's very interesting and telling indeed, and squares with the assumptions I am starting to have to make about this novel.

My House of Memories Merle Haggard
memoir of the Outlaw country artist. So far he's not left his teens and he's already been in serious trouble with the law several times.
He's talked about trying to escape from minimal security detention homes and higher security more adult lock ups.
He's also been practising his Lefty Frizell influenced singing and playing.
THis seems to be a bit achronological since he talks about more contemporary times to his writing. I just read him talking about how he structures his band.
Quite enjoyable but I think he's not exactly the most progressive. Not the diametric opposite either it would appear but he aint exactly woke.
Have had this out of the library way too long. So trying to get it finished and back despite this having an extended lending time which they appear to have finally moved away from on the book i took out last week.

Cheyenne Autumn Mari Sandoz
Nebraska woman of Swiss extract describing the attempt by several Cheyenne INdians to return to traditional lands from the paltry reservation they had been dumped on. The book is apparently much more sympathetic to the Indians than the Ford film might suggest.
So far I've read the introduction where Sandoz talks about growing up with various indians passing through the house at different times.
This book is back to a 3 week lend after the book son my account have just been being extended continually automaticallly. Maybe a good sign for lockdowns etc, hope that doesn't change back again without reason.

The New Jim Crow Alexander
The story of how US prisons became an employment factory. So far the author has been looking at the history of the US including post Civil War days with the Reconstruction and then the birth of the first Jim Crow.
I'm noticing the font used in this version seems to be different to what I'm used to so wondering what the array of different fonts used for main text in a popular paperback is. Just finding that I'm not sure hwo much I like the way this looks on the page and it may be my eyes but not great anyway. Cos this is something I'm really dying to read.

LIving A Feminist Life Sara Ahmed
Book by black American lesbian feminist talking about how she got to her perspective on things. Pretty majorly interesting.
I should have got to this sooner rather than having it sitting around on a shelf
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After casting about for something a bit offbeat, I've been reading Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, Lyall Watson. It's an NYRB reprint, which is usually a reliable indicator of an interesting book, but I'm not particularly impressed so far. Still, it's different from Yet Another Novel, so that's why I persist.

After reading the rest of the Melville LoA omnibus, I went back to the (1770e-1820s) historical novel, Israel Potter, based on an obscure memoir, self-published by its ghostwriter, with "improvisations," as this volume's editorial essay puts it, spinning out of Melville's own observations in travel, also the papers of, for instance, John Paul Jones and Ethan Allen,both of whom take very memorable method-in-their-madness turns in American Revolutionary Wartime Europe (Allen as loudmouthed, charismatic prisoner of war). Ben Franklin's in Paree, the same BF who made D.H. Lawrence nauseous when he read Poor Richard's Almanac(you deserve it, DH).

Potter the tenacious underdog is very much the central of attention, and Melvile takes him through every time scale, up to 40 years in one chapter, perfectly timed adventures, intrigues, sojourns, with just the right, concise descriptions,comments, questions (wonders, after a *perhaps* particularly bloody battle, if civilization isn't just a higher form of barbarism). Some poetic moments, poignant ones too, plenty momentum. Can see I'm going to have to read his first, South Sea novels---and is Patrick O'Brian good? Melville's changing my mind about historicals, which I don't think I've ever read before.

(Oh I did read Vidal's Julian and a Hugo set when I was maybe 14, don't remember a word. Do remember being disappointed by original I, Claudius after the TV series. But enjoyed "Lord John and The Plague of Zombies," a spin-off of Diana Gabaldon's Highlander series. LJ is a fixer, discreetly summoned by another member of the Gay Old Boy Network, and seeking the assistance of a community of maroons, escaped slaves, in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.)

is Patrick O'Brian good?

It depends on what you enjoy. There's a ton of accurate historical detail woven into his books, along with some mild humor and some very taut adventure. The characters are pleasantly drawn, but they are all of them men & boys (or very nearly so) as befits his subject matter. O'Brian's knack for describing ordinary humans and how they behave is well above average, so his characters feel real enough, but he's no Melville and doesn't tempt one to make the comparison.

Sounds good, thanks.

Only read half a dozen of the Aubrey maturin books but they were pretty much perfect afaict and I mean to return to them when we get childcare back (lol pandemic) and I can read the print versions (the audiobooks are dreadful. Same goes for Wodehouse btw.)

Really? Thought I found a good Wodehouse audiobook once.

I think I struggle with comedy in audiobooks rather than it was an especially bad performance of the text

The more a book relies on style the less an audiobook will do the job imo, especially if you've read the author before and thus have a voice in yr head already.

I've never listened to an audiobook

I finished Anna Tsing's 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' this morning. Still plowing through the Prynne chapbooks from the past year, though am unsure as to what will be my next morning read... Tsing's book was perfect because I could read a chapter with breakfast and coffee, and it sort of carried me through my day nicely.

I've never listened to an audiobook

Audiobooks read by the author can be amazing; Spike Milligan's war memoirs for example.

I'm not making a value judgment, btw. Just stating something about myself...I also read mostly poetry and non-fiction, tho, so there might be a dearth of options for me.

I ditched Heaven's Breath, the book about the wind, about 70% of the way through it. It was a mass of poorly integrated facts, many of which were moderately interesting, but none of which were developed into anything longer than a Mark Trail cartoon. The author also had a bad habit of overstatement and drawing unjustifiably broad conclusions from a single suggestive fact.

I finally realized that I wouldn't retain any of what I was reading and trying to retain it all would have required at least five times the time and effort I was willing to expend.

I went straight into the ancient potboiler The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan and finished more than half last evening. It has some shameless anti-semitism in the first several pages and calls the fictional leader of Greece a "Dago", but I just winced and went on with the story, which is swift paced and a bit silly.

I finished Amis' I Like It Here, another cranky-funny-misanthropic short novel about how awful foreigners are.

just started One Thousand Ships, which is about the 5th Iliad-adjacent thing i've read in the last 2 years (without having read the "original")

finished north and south (thanks to lily dale for encouragement to persist). at times a little bit centrist in its politics (the unmoored "the right way is half way between the two 'extremes'" variety of centrism) but a good yarn nontheless. "darkshire" was a bit fucking much as a name though tbh!

now finishing up how to do nothing by jenny oddell which is already a little dated in places and the prose is very plodding and academic, but it's got a lot to say and i would recommend it (or at least chapter 1, which is available here https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb).

i already know how to do nothing

https://d2e111jq13me73.cloudfront.net/sites/default/files/styles/share_link_image_large/public/screenshots/csm-movie/cvaokxq83fxpmhfdw5894rq510f.jpg

the ring and the book, which i have never read.

just read the first three lines and it’s such a delight to be back in the distinctive company of browning.

Do you see this Ring?
‘T is Rome-work, made to match
(By Castellani’s imitative craft)


the opening interrogation, the sense of being accosted by someone in the street, sonic and intellectual spring and delight of “Castellani’s imitative craft”, unfurling a suggestive world of what i will call anachronistically “borgesian magic”, the sense of stumbling upon a hidden alley of history, opening into unexpected piazzas.

and also of course the slightly ludicrous such as the phrase

“sundry amazing busts”

which feels like a good love island line.

I've picked up The Ring and the Book twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

and the colour and interlingual sound effects of the last line here - “gl” being one of the loveliest italian sounds, softer than english makes it.

A wreck of tapestry, proudly-purposed web
When reds and blues were indeed red and blue,
Now offered as a mat to save bare feet
(Since carpets constitute a cruel cost)
treading the chill scagliola bedward : then

and the glory of that “then”! and the typical household economy of the moan about cost, reminiscent of up at the villa down at the square, and the resonant simplicity of “when reds and blues were indeed red and blue” - a line that has lasted, for its perfect expression of the vividness of nostalgia.

I've picked up _The Ring and the Book_ twice in the last three years. I did read the Pope's monologue.

i should have glossed the previous excerpt - the narrator is browsing a second hand market in florence (as browning did when he found the original story that provided the framework for the ring and the book) so that “then” actually only leads on to more second hand items, but coming after the brief flight of fancy of “bedward” is a wonderful moment, the small imaginary vignettes that flit through your minds eye in the second hand market.

are you a fan of browning, alfred?

Mightily. "Andrea del Sarto" and "Love Among the Ruins" are two of my favorite 19th century poems.

ah god yes. absolutely that whole period of browning is perfect imo.

the sheer delight of reading words you have not read before by a poet you love.

trust browning to truffle out the legal papers of a three centuries old murder in a second hand market in rome, trust him to see the essential poetry of the case. trust him to offer it to tennyson and others as robert was dealing with the death of elizabeth and moving back to england. trust *them* not to take it up, trust browning to do it years later and really *foreground* the legal aspect in poetry.

<3 <3 <3

Having finished The 39 Steps in a second gulping, I'm now reading The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis, his memoir of the Cretan resistance to the Nazi occupation. It's very much a fragmented series of incidents, small and large, for it was never written for publication in the first place, but it gives a very clear picture of how the resistance operated. Mostly they starved, hid in caves, and lived by their wits.

i mean - sorry aimless xpost - he’s taken *a whole load* of legal documents* and turned them into poetry.

I remember enjoying The 39 Steps (I read it for a great college class called The Paternalistic Thriller), but a while back I tried to read another Buchan and it was so violently racist I put it in the burn box and vowed to never read anything more by him. I can't remember now which one it was.

Buchan was wholly, deeply, reliably gung-ho for the British colonial empire, to the extent he was named governor-general of Canada late in his life. A truckload of racism came along with that kind of jingoism and it definitely shows in his writing. In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

Some of us were discussing Greenmantle(wiki:...the second of five novels by John Buchan featuring the character of Richard Hannay, first published in 1916 by Hodder & Stoughton, London. It is one of two Hannay novels set during the First World War, the other being Mr Standfast (1919); Hannay's first and best-known adventure, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), is set in the period immediately preceding the war.) on another thread, which I can't remember the title of, but do recall it was quite a time-trip, beyond dated in some respects, but can pull you in--be sure to get an edition with lots of footnotes, though. One of the main characters may have been based on Buchan's schoolmate, or fellow alum, T.E. Lawrence--who may have something to do with the Wiki article's tie-in to lide, Anthony (2003). Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century.
But o man, there's all sorts of tie-ins, for instance:
Hilda von Einem, a powerful German operative in Turkey. She is a femme fatale who masterminds a plot to stir up a Muslim jihad against the Allies. She has been described as a "glamorous but merciless female agent"[1] and a "pale-blue-eyed northern goddess".[2] Rosie White suggests that von Einem is a "trope loosely based on Mata Hari" and that she represents a "decadent, oriental sexuality...Lewis Einstein's book Inside Constantinople: A Diplomatist's Diary During the Dardanelles Expedition, April to September, 1915 refers to a German woman agitating the Muslim population in Constantinople, in the mode of Hilda von Einem, so this element of the story may have some factual basis.

I enjoy Browning and quote fragments from him a few times in my next book.

Right now my morning reading is Saidiya Hartman's astonishing 'Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.'

I've gotten through the Prynne chapbooks, read a few other chaps from Lynn Xu, Rob Halpern, and Lara Durback, and am now flipping between two other books during the day. The first is Ara Shrinyan's 'Flag Mines,' a conceptual poetry work of language taken entirely from a CIA sourcebook describing different countries' flags. The other is a book-length poem by contemporary surrealist poet Carlos Lara, entitled 'The Green Record'

xp Thinking about it some more, I'm pretty sure it was Greenmantle I read for that class, not The Thirty-Nine Steps. I'm not sure which book made me cancel Buchan, but my guess is it was probably Prester John.

reading & nearly done w/ john o'hara's the ewings

never knew much abt o'hara, i read he came somewhat back into fashion due to mad men which makes some sense; this novel def feels outdated in ways but i dig its directness, it is also just v richly drawn in character and dialogue

all I know is Appointment in Samarra

In this case,aving been written in 1915, the main villains of 39 Steps were those nasty German Huns, so the racism was not front and center.

I agree that it isn't in the 39 Steps (though xenophobia is, which ain't much better), but if you read Greenmantle you get to see what Buchan's anti-German sentiments are REALLY about:

That is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself amongst different types of men. He is such a hard shell being that he cannot put out feelers to his kind. He may have plenty of brains, as Stumm had, but he had the poorest notion of psychology of any of God's creatures. In Germany only the Jew can get outside himself, and that is why, if you look into the matter, you will find that the Jew is at the back of most German enterprises.

Found a copy of the Lillith trilogy by Octavia Butler in a charity shop yesterday. So started into that and read the first few chapters. I'm finding the prose pretty sublime in a way I remember noticing Hilary Mantel's was when i started Wolf Hall.
I think i heard a podcast on this a while back so wish I'd found her stuff earlier. think I will try to read a lot more of her, though somehow haven't read more Mantel despite having picked up several titles.

finished the Merle Haggard mY House Of Memories in order to get some more books out of the library. Quite enjoyed it but should have got to it much sooner. Think I had it out for a year or more.

REad the introduction to Mari Sandoz' Crazy Horse Strange Man of the Oglala.
Tnat is written by a current Sioux and goes into how accurate a portrayal of tribal customs etc she portrays.
Had read first couple of chapters of Cheyenne Autumn earlier in the week. now have a lot more time to read the recent borrowings in so not sure what I'm reading next.

am also in the middle of Michelle Alexander's The New jim Crow which is pretty great.

& Sara Ahmed's Living A Feminist Life
recognising some situations that every marginalised person goes through.
THink it's an interesting read so hope I get through it soon. it's my loo book at the moment so I'm not giving it as much concentrated time as maybe I should.

xpost in one of his memoirs, Graham Greene said that, after World War I, he set out to write thrillers that went past/vs. Buchan's pro-Empire and associated bullshit.

Where there was just this implicit, unquestioning faith in Empire, at least publicly, and all the stuff that came from and with that.

Finished the new Dennis Cooper book, "I Wished."

Still reading the book about Maine, usually before sleep, but I think today I'm going to try to tackle some chapbooks I've had piling up.

Now in the homestretch of Afterparties, the new debut book by Anthony Veasna So, b. 1992, d. Dec. 2020: 258 pages of short stories, so far hitting me like My Brilliant Friend and few other things I can think of: rowdy and resplendent and tragicomic and endlessly resourceful, with the excitement of language cruising ghosty dusty Cali "Cambo" life and lives: even-especially when you think you know the kind of thing that will happen and not happen around the next corner, here are more drive-by insights---they seem that right, so far from my own experiences and yet not: pain and pleasure and success and failure as art pop narcotic that leaves you with whatever keys you wake up with this time.
May try to say something more analytical later, but so far it's hard to believe he already did all this, and is already gone.

― dow, Friday, August 27, 2021 3:22 PM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

I picked this up this week and read the first two stories, “three women of chuck’s donuts” and “superking son scores again”, both of which had previously been published but I hadn’t read before. his work is receiving a lot of positive press and I intuited from a few reviewers a sort of debt to diaz, which I think he tries pretty admirably to justify, though neither story so far has resonated with me like some of the best stuff in drown, an admittedly high standard for this reader. looking forward to diving in further this weekend and curious to read the experiences of others

We'll need an new thread in a few days. Equinox is a-coming.

"Superking..." seemed a little amiable or something compared to "Three Women..." and then everything in there---yet it's the one that received the Joyce Carol Oates Award, h'mmm. Will have to check Drown again (which I enjoyed, though it was upstaged in my memory, in a bad way by the novel and some subsequent stories/excerpts from the apparently abandoned second novel), but So's chronicles seemed convincingly drawn from experience, incl. close and unavoidable observation, also extrapolation---at one point, he even writes from the viewpoint of a straight boy with a girlfriend, although--well, you'll see).

Reporting back from holiday reading:

Infinitely Full Of Hope, Tom Whyman - Left twitter dude and philosopher (great case of nominative determinism) writes a memoir about becoming a father that is also a philosophical treatise on how hope can be possible in our current historic moment. Lad has a lot more time for Adorno than I do.

Cherokee, Jean Echenoz - I seem to end up reading a lot of French crime fiction, partially because I'm drawn to it and partially because, I think, French acquaintances figure it's easier for me to digest as a non-native speaker. But it's really not! Crime fiction relies on keeping constant attention to details, I think I could actually get a smoother ride from literary fiction even if I needed to look up words more often. Which is all to say that I'm not entirely sure I got the resolution of this comic thriller, though it was certainly an enjoyable ride, grimy and full of strange digressions.

Variations, Juliet Jacques - Another Left Twitter star with a series of short stories painting a portrait of the history of transness in the UK. This allows her to sidestep issues of trans as a historical category, taking in characters who wouldn't have identified as such. The stories are all framed as historical documents, too - letters, oral histories, newspaper clippings, etc. which is the kind of formal trickery I love. Really enjoyed this a lot.

btw I’m now about halfway through afterparties and am now completely bought in, great stuff

the patricia lockwood novel is bad, just a pile of tweets sloshed with autofictional pathos sauce, no thanks

Finished the new Dennis Cooper (devastating), had a busy weekend so not as much reading as I would have liked but spent some time with my book about the Maine coast and also nearly finished a do-si-do chapbook by my friends Daniel and Jenn.

I today finished James Joyce: CRITICAL, POLITICAL & OCCASIONAL WRITINGS ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford, 2000).

It's an outstanding, almost comprehensive collection. (My doubt: shouldn't JJ's original 'Portrait' essay of 1904 be here? Or maybe not.)

The Introduction is very shrewd, especially re how JJ was not as unique as he would want us to think, and how we should return to eg DANA magazine c.1903 if we're interested in this stuff. It's less good in a tangential section on JJ's Aesthetics. Those are written in an irritating, superior, pedantic, repetitive, stultifying style that I think is suppose to be an example of how well Thomistic Catholics think.

The extent of JJ's political knowledge (eg of England, let alone Ireland), in many of these pieces, is very notable and would surprise some people.

I followed up by starting the Foreword and Introduction to J.C.C. Mays' edition of James Joyce: POEMS AND EXILES (1992).

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

i also read hail mary by andy weir (who did the martian). it was well-executed trash.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

I started watching the film by Max ophuls but the sound was atrocious. So I gave up , did seem a tad sanctimonious.

The Mandarins Simone De Beauvoir
Her novel loosely based on the intellectual circle in paris in the immediate wake of WWII and over teh next 5 years. She did claim it was not a roam a clef at one point . But interesting anyway.
Have had this kicking around for way too long drifting around my front room so glad to be getting into it.

Angela Saini INferior
reread this book on science and Gender imbalance. Enjoyed and was drinking way less than when i first read it last Xmas .
Looking forward to her book on the patriarchy whenever that lands.

How To Rig an Election Nic Cheeseman, Brian Klaas
book on political intrigue I picked up a couple of months ago. Looks interesting.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

The Sorrows of Young Werther. Christ what an asshole.

Agreed, really didn't enjoy reading this dude's livejournal.

Someone posted about a book recently that was written by a former professor from Queens College about a Jewish retirement home. Can’t find this despite many google searches.

This sounds like the Prince of West End Avenue by Alan Isler. Great book.

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Wednesday, September 22, 2021 5:52 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

This was it. Many thanks.

i read minor feelings by cathy park hong which i thought was great, but i'm white btw. apparently they're adapting it as a tv series, which seems bananas. table: do serious poetry people like her?

Many of my Asian poet friends (and Asian non-poet friends, tbh) take serious issue with some of Minor Feelings. Since I'm not Asian, I don't really feel comfortable explaining those issues, but let's just say that they're present.

As far as her own poetry is concerned, her book Dance Dance Revolution is interesting to me, but much of her poetry is what poets call "workshop-core"— that is, the poems seem written for a specific audience to teach specific types of innovative writing techniques. In that way, they're valuable, but qua books of poems, they're kind of "meh."

She also hasn't put out a book of poems in nearly a decade. Before Minor Feelings came out, she was probably most well-known in poetry circles for this absolutely damning takedown of the white supremacist gatekeepers of the avant-garde circa 2013-2014: https://arcade.stanford.edu/content/delusions-whiteness-avant-garde

ty

Really, really enjoying this (my first Menard) but realizing that given my pace and its size, a three week library loan isn't gonna be enough to finish it.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374722913

I guess I've aged into a 10-15 pages per day reader for stuff like this. It's just so rich, like a dark chocolate cake.

I see Menand in the link, but was primed to expect ... a vast new work by Pierre Menard.

Sorry about that

Ha, was hoping for the same thing!

Like a new album by one of these guys.

Here Comes Everybody James Fearnley
Memoir by Pogues and Nipple Erectors member. Hope i didn't already have this,k definitely don't remember having read it if I did. I think i8t was around in various places at cut price a few years ago. Like in the 2 for £5 in FOPP and i think in HMV .
Finding it quite compelling at the moment, he's been brought into the Nipple Erectors on guitar then been fired by the bassist when he's asked if he can subsitute for her on a recording opportunity offered by Paul Weller when she's too heavily pregnant to play bass. He's apparently still involved with Shane Macgowan who he's hung out with during his Nips tenure cos Shane's trying to talk him into wearng Gladiator gear on a project he's talking about putting together. From which it appears the Pogues may have been suggested thanks to connections to music being talked about Irish music resembling Arabic which is like Aegean which would have been the music in the Roman Project thingy, or so it would appear.
Enjoying it anyway.
& missed seeing the Pogues despite having heard of their existence pretty early on and meaning to go and see them in Hope & Anchor etc days & buying records off Shane when he worked in that record shop behind Virgin.

I've been distracted by the Muhammad Ali documentary lately, but I finished re-reading Hons and Rebels last night. Very satisfying book.

NB: The equinox arrived. Summer has fleeted. This thread may be put to bed now and a new edition commenced. I'll think about it later today, but please feel free to forestall me by starting one yourself. I'd thank you for it.

Et, voila: Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

Thank you.

the mezzanine by nicholson baker - first read 20 years ago. has not aged well but very good at what it does.

the kingdoms by natasha pulley - alt history (what if napoleon had won). dreadful.

the new sally rooney - not as good as the other two. much less interested in reading her opinions in epistolary than teenage soap opera.

amazon unbound - overly sympathetic look at bezos/amazon since ~2010 (there's a part 1 from 90s-2010, but i haven't read it). despite being overly sympathetic, it's crazy how bad they are for the world when you see it laid out. amoral criminality notwithstanding, some interesting business operations stuff (i work in tech).

a thousand ships by natalie haynes - i read madeline miller last year and this is follow-up from that. enjoyed it!

stubborn archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler - short debut from young brazilian british writer set in london/sao paolo. nothing really happens and i liked it a lot.

looking glass war - minor le carre. not his best obviously. very straightforward plot. i thought i'd like that, because i find some of his plots borderline incomprehensible. it turns out i like being baffled, and this one in particular felt very slight.

whoops lock thread, will repost on the other one.