Footnotes read yesterday: 15
I have tried to write these reflections on today's reading five, six, seven different ways. None has worked. Usually when I blog or write a quick piece, I just dive in and begin and somehow shove and hobble my way around to all the points I wanted to hit. Frustratingly, each time I dive into this, I end up bringing up things I want to talk about... but not now.
So I will wait.
Today (well, tomorrow, because I intended to finish this on November 5, Guy Fawkes Night, but failed as spectacularly in my own way as Fawkes did) I will throw in the towel and just give you my favorite moments of today's reading. Little sweet rounded Timbits of text, fresh from the reading fryer.
"Katherine Ann" Gompert. [Her Christian names are the same as someone very near and dear to me. Shivering.]
"not always unless carefully titrated pleasant". Beautiful locution, if you are me, which most people are not.
"I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself."
"Momentumizers"
"they have given you ridiculous tits, and now they point differently"
the footnoted translation of "te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est"
"Hope springs eternal"
"fluttery and slack" [a beautiful turn of phrase, that sentence]
"not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair"
One final cavil. Why is Wallace's French so thrashingly helpless? Is this some sort of wink that I don't get? It must be. I mean "fauteuils de rollents"? That is horrid. Are these snippets of German equally helpless, and I just don't realize it because I have next to no German? But then his Québecois English is also way off the mark, not so much barking up the wrong tree as digging a bone-hole to Indonesia.
