Here are some not-fully-formed thoughts on my reading in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis thus far:
• As with so many other wonderful things, I do not know why it has taken me so long to pick this book up.
• I think the above is particularly odd because I’m getting the feeling, as I read, that Davis has been a huge influence on my own work, despite the fact that I’ve never read her before.
• I expected these stories to be stranger. I expected, and I don’t know why, for them to be like the stories of Gary Lutz, or Diane Williams, or Ben Marcus. I think Davis’ name gets mentioned with theirs, but after doing a little research, I have found that Davis, unlike the other three authors I just mentioned, has never been associated with Gordon Lish.
• I expected these stories to be stranger on the surface. What I am finding, however, is that, well (forgive me), still waters run deep. Davis’ stories are almost perfectly benign until you close the book, put it down, and let what you have just read sift down through your mind and then suddenly! everything is deeply strange.

Here are some things I have marked in the book so far (completely out of context for my own nefarious reasons):
• The undertaking is ill conceived and ill-fated, for he will waste much of his time in introspection and will learn very little German.
• She thinks about how her smartness doesn’t seem to count for much anymore, the way it used to. Her smartness has counted for less and less as she has grown older.
• She is waiting for some sort of revelation, because she feels a revelation coming, but although various other thoughts have come, not one of them seems much like a revelation to her.
• And so she knew by this that these notebooks truly had a great deal to do with her, though it was hard for her to understand, and troubled her to try to undersand, just how they had to do with her, how much they were of her and how much they were outside her and not of her, as they sat there on the shelf, being what she knew but did not know, being what she had read but did not remember reading, being what she had thought but did not now think, or remember thinking, or if she remembered, then did not know whether she was thinking it now or whether she had only once thought it, or understand why she had had a thought once and then years later the same thought, or a thought once and then never that same thought again.

A sudden uptick in my usage of a Moleskine notebook I’ve been trying to fill since late November 2008, and likely due to the fact that I started reading (for realz) a library copy (which means no marginalia) of Infinite Jest, has led me here to share some of the uptick’s notes. So, with very little commentary:

•19 June 2011•
Was convinced this afternoon by a high school Latin teacher to attempt Infinite Jest again–and he read the damned thing in German, so . . .

•20 June 2011•
- The first chapter of IJ an exercise in the dialectic split. And what of my own manifoldly split (“split”) brain? This is a ridiculous undertaking.
- “It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him.” [DFW, IJ, p20]
- “The clicks of his portable clock were really composed of three smaller clicks, signifying he supposed preparation, movement, and readjustment.” [DFW, IJ, p21]
- Epic in small, tiny doses. Things that never end, that go on and into infinity. I will likely never [again] experience the feeling of floating I had that one day @ PIL.
- Maybe I should just give in and use a larger notebook, because surely some new, different piece of schreibzubehör will suddenly solve all of my problems.
- Would that there were official monsters . . .

•21 June 2011•
- “She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape.” [DFW, IJ, p39]
- “legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious.” [DFW, IJ, p39] (cf. “Strum upon me the modernity of those tennis pants. Won’t you?” in Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, p123)
- “Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week’s other faint dried outlines, so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure.” [DFW, IJ, p43]
- “the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.” [DFW, IJ, p46]
- “American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.” [DFW, IJ, p53]
- “Beyond that it all gets too abstract and twined up to lead to anything, Hal’s brooding.” [DFW, IJ, p54]
- I always read/hear [the phrase] “sweating freely” as containing the possibility that one might attempt, via some obscure inner strain(ing), not to sweat.
- “It’s one of those unpleasant opoid feverish half-sleep states, more a fugue-state than a sleep-state, less a floating than like being cast adrift on rough seas, tossed mightily on and out of this half-sleep where your mind’s still working and you can ask yourself whether you’re asleep even as you dream. And any dreams you do have seem ragged at the edges, gnawed on, incomplete.” [DFW, IJ, p61]
- Inside of a book, I never miss the internet. Inside of the internet, I never miss books enough.

•22 June 2011•
- “At some point it starts sounding like the crowd’s roaring at its own roar, a doubling-back quality like something’ll blow.” [DFW, IJ, p66]
- “as complex an convolved as a sculpture of string.” [DFW, IJ, p67] (cf. Oliveira’s string sculptures in Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar)
- continuation of prev.: “There are lines going every which way, and they run oblique or meet and form relationships and boxes and rivers and tributaries and systems inside systems: lines, corners, alleys, and angles deliquesce into a blur at the horizon of the distant net.” [DFW, IJ, p67]
- deliquesce: 1. to become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air, as certain salts. 2. to melt away. 3. Bot. to form many small divisions or branches.
- Adorno: or Barrett Watten on Adorno?
- Mice Parade
- “Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet.” [DFW, IJ, p70]
- “Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients’ own minds to chew them apart.” [DFW, IJ, p72]
- “‘It’s like I cant get enough outside it to call it anything. It’s like horror more than sadness.’” ff. [DFW, IJ, p73]
-”. . . with its own eye-cup of apothecary-blue plastic that’s downright gorgeous when held up to a window’s light.” [DFW, IJ, footnote 30, p994]
- bra-eating dog

Eventually, I find a place to stop, but I don’t know why.

There are some very young women here. And tables and chairs. At some point, more people show up. Sporadically. Rich white people. It is a party. A party weekend and a small group of people (me, the young women, a female friend from Germany, other people I know and don’t) are being initiated into some kind of group, but what? Old people with big white fake smiles congratulate me, start to form a receiving line but break it up immediately. I shake lots of hands, but never learn any names.

There are children wearing chess piece masks. Have I seen pictures of them in the house? (Somewhere in the house is a giant room filled with giant toys all looking out giant windows which I saw from the mountaintop before entering the house as a spy.)

I find a sheaf of photos of the two young women. These photos are from magazines and have been creatively cut. Are the women porn actresses or just models? RDH shows up. We try to find a place to sit and eat, but there’s nothing available/workable despite the fact that all the tables are empty.

reading:

an historic time of world wide massive immigration
it will probably be all right
jobs of small movements
proofs vs. Prousts

lecture:

oblique dialogic
impossible speech
into the reader’s ear and mouth
potential endlessness
trying to be as fast as thought • a quality of graven-ness
simply had to discontinue
all of our lieders are mute here
we should think about what we’re doing
speed as memory aid
walking across the street is a story and then we’re always to break out of those stories
memorization of what we write
they actored them
you kind of [gaze] into the computer
does thoughtfulness equate to strong fingers?

workshop:

the poetry pole / rhythm vs. cadence
rate
you feel as though you have depth and surface @ the same time
your interior is always surrounded
and sometimes always that surrounding is surrounded
in the moment (Buddhism?) • coming from the poet head
one has to allow one’s friends to break up
anything that affects you deeply / and yet we’re talking about surface
your = one’s
yr = thine
deliberate vs. deliberative
making a mistake and deciding to save it is genius
diction: there’s that word again. does it yet have a meaning?
always read aloud / always read aloud
prose can use variation of a line length, but you must know you’re working with lines.
poetry distracts you from meaning
Content?
Mediterranean Homesick Blues
das Wochenende (ich lebe fürs Wochenende)
“the whole bent of the 20th century was to make things sound natural”
working w/line and sentence in simultaneity
Witmanic impulses
everything I know how to do
you can’t do it without doing it
in the music of the paragraph, you have to be aware of where you want the breaks (in the rhythm?)
so many people have died around her and she is aware is aware and steeped in it and unforgetful
true civilization lies in the symbolic sacrifice
music is the art of grief (have I been grieving?)

surface is content
it’s always good to bang your head against the wall of a form
I recommend it as a sound

—Dubravka Ugresic, from her essay, “The Aura of Glamour,” from her book Thank You for Not Reading.

These from the 18th annual Virginia Woolf conference, held this last weekend at DU:

Queer Fragmented • fragment never finished • Orlando through German Romantic lense • Schlegel: Progressive Universalpoesie • ∞ fragments • alphabet as fragmentary (?) • monosyllables as fragments • fashion—fascia—fasces—fascism—etc. • publication as de-fragging? • human life and the volume (Jabès?)

useful statements • as she speaks of words • Evelyn Haller quoted • class and the question of

one who glosses or smooths over • amoricle • I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction –Virginia Woolf • facts are a very inferior form of fiction –V. W. • implicit hybridity

apparatus • pure vs. impure biography • where the eye is forced to dive • create unity out of the fragments of a life • biography as curation • landmark vs. mindmark

intuition + form (careful) = androgyny • “Robed Indians Ahorse”