Sonnet 137

Thou blind fool, Love, what doest thou to mine eyes,

William Shakespeare

Sluggardized...hehehe, great word.

"Everywhere you looked, there was only the reflection of what was already there."

Love love love this sentence.

Highlighted 'Damascene moment' for future slipping-casually-into-conversation purposes.

I'm appreciating Cusk's ear for working-class eloquence.

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An epiphany (which I also thought immediately was the word) is an internal realization, but a road-to-Damascus moment suggests a confrontation with a force greater than oneself. FWIW

#RachelCuskTogether

Anne Carson is a top 3 for me, and my literary crush.

"le regard de l'autre" — the gaze of the other.
Again

"I imagine living somewhere completely blank..." I get this!

I work as a cook/baker, and I never cook at home. Often in a restaurant or bakery, I'll ask them to choose for me.

Mirrors of human emotional displacement? Fraying domestic order? Symbols of voiceless suffering? Degradation of our ability to relate?

I think her writing is very deliberate. Like many of her repeating metaphors, images, and symbolic roles (Buildings, architecture, and domestic Interiors, for example), I imagine the poor dogs are part of a larger conceptual framework.

I love some of his novels, others less so. I'm just having some fun with the excerpt you posted.

😂
I would guess he's writing about a type, of which Cusk is a key figure. Idk. I'm reading The Outline Trilogy now, so if he is, I'm appreciating aspects he didn't.

"His novels, perfecting the art of mistaking plot for profundity, produce the kind of fiction that critics describe as 'intelligent', by which they mean it has all the answers and none of the questions. His characters moved through their moral dilemmas like actors in a rehearsal of justice."

He is. He's wrong.

#RachelCuskTogether

Even while reading books that I'm not going to mark, I have to hold a pencil in my hand.