Taking things apart

Still reading The Descent of Alette and also holy moly Petroleum Hat by one Drew Gardner. (Y'all might know him. More on that one when I'm done.)

And I just finished My Life in CIA by the charming hero Harry Mathews and it is the bomb; read it just for the couple of times Georges Perec appears if you're into that Oulipo jazz. But you should read it for more than that. For one, the sex scenes are great. There's not much poetry in it. But poets who don't read novels kind of freak me out. I love tuna fish and arthouse documentaries but tuna fish forever, or just one kind of movie? Nah. Go flip some pages in a more rapid fashion. Read paragraphs just once for a change. Pay a different kind of attention. Harry pretended to be a spy! He makes covert drops with one hand and pulls your leg with the other!

The ongoing temptation to tinker with AN's quotation marks is a tough one to overcome, for me. (Don't forget what I am doing here. I read and uh, write about reading, like a writer, not like a reader. This is why I don't write reviews.) I want to take the thing apart and wonder about those parts and imagine a new arrangement and completely ignore the author's intention. That this particular author's intention is so insistent makes me all the more rebellious. I earned my first D in conduct at 10 yrs.

Again, snatch an Alette if you have a chance. And if you live in NYC or some other city with a subway system, read it there. Each poem is a car, then a cave. I recognize the multiplicity Alette experiences--the kind of intensly asserted self-awareness harnessed to utter anonymity. It's city living. And it's also, agreed agreed, feminine.