City of dreadful joy

My Olympic survival strategy by going underground to literature (and sometimes overground with said book in hand) is proving rewarding beyond what I had imagined initially it might take to deflect the elbow from this invasive behemoth. Much as I have been out and observing periodically,  I’ve also enjoyed the deep peace of withdrawing and have alighted on the perfect text to contain my fermentation.

D.M. Fraser Ignorant Armies has provided rich enhancement to my ongoing preoccupation: the episodic. It’s wonderfully fractured. Yet his sentences are long and 40 strength. I have no desire for the fragments to add up in anyway. I am interested in the idea of them all being individuals or neighbours like a long line of bricks. It’s also interesting to see what happens when he elongates to longer fiction. His shorter fiction is trap tight. Pnematically drilled into itself. And in his longer fiction sentences are plank like, there’s a carpentry to his construction. Planks that manage to seesaw. Ignorant Armies was published posthomously, compiled from Fraser’s papers. So there is something of a randomness to its gathering up. The process is detailed in the back of the book and the descriptions of what was discovered are delightful.

I also read Ernest Hemmingway’s Cross Country Snow to the Small Man this evening, he, being compelled by the snow, and confident on his skis. I was delighted with how well it worked. A way to place some of the things happening outside the window in another spot that does not involve multinational corporations telling us all what to think. Lovely transitions in that story. And full of the technicals, which being likely one of the few people in history of ski-ing who qualified for a refund due to an indisputable incompatibility with every aspect of it, I am unable to ever provide. His ski-ing prowess and dippy swervy nervy whatever it looks like, are the results of his devoted father.

Outside the 11pm nightly firework rumble has begun. It has taken 9 nights for my heart rate to accept we are not under attack from cannonballs. That this is apparently desirous for someone, somewhere, with their eyes glued upwards, nose drenched by the rain.