See you in the funnies,

Michael

Mike

Writing about your New Yorker Cartoon Contest comments/article I’d read a year or two ago — at least they finally accepted yours.

Look at this week’s cartoon and the caption (man and wife in bed, phone blown up) . . . insert my caption:

“Did we switch to AT&T or TNT?”

No ponder as to why they picked the three that they did, over mine.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Linda

PS – loved your blog on John Updike on Ted Williams

This was the first Bolano I read, and I have to say I’m very taken by it. What’s odd about Antwerp is that I keep forgetting I have finished it, and so I will often pick it up again and begin to read at a place that seems familiar… and will soon be in very unfamiliar feeling territory. I am very struck by how I can read this over and over again, trying to connect and consolidate the characters, trying to find causal relationships, trying to construct a timeline. Every time I read a passage it seems that there are new ways to read it. That resistance is what keeps me carrying this book with me.

To be fair, my expectations of books are a little shattered now, I’m coming at this from the direction of poetry, and am also reading Alma, or The Dead Women by Alice Notley, which is a long-form epic poem in what appears to be prose chunks, only occasionally breaking into shorter line breaks. I’m also prepared to think about the text physically and for breaking of the fourth wall in terms of an imagined audience, which is what interpret his comments on the qualities of a particular words, and his comments on applause to be. So I guess, yeah, I’m interpreting my experience in terms of unmannered meta-fiction. I’m enchanted. I wonder if I will enjoy his more cohesive works as much… perhaps just differently.