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1 | A Short Introduction to Anneliese Literary contest — All the unsolved contests are in red — | ||
2 | Starting in July 2024, I've been posting a literary puzzle every week on social media. These are all passages from A Short Introduction to Anneliese, a novel about the fascination of long, complex books, out next June. Each of these has a hidden allusion to a book, film, song, or poem. They are designed to be Google-proof, but if you know what's being alluded to, it will jump out at you like a Magic Eye puzzle. A free copy to the first person who solves any of the contests that are still open. If you have an answer, just post it wherever you saw the announcement (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky). Good luck! A Short Introduction to Anneliese is one of a five-volume set of novels. The first is out: Weak in Comparison to Dreams has sheet music in it and comes with a vinyl record. Lots more information and clues are here. The numbers are a countdown to the pub date. | ||
3 | Number and date | The passage with hidden allusions | Solution |
4 | 53 July 12 | We were seated at a table overlooking the river. Three swans came into view, straining in the shiny black water. "It’s been ages since I’ve seen Catherine, she said, maybe two years?" She looked in Paul’s direction, but her gaze missed him and rested momentarily, and with visible disapproval, on a bright red pen in the server’s apron. Paul nodded as if he had actually been asked whether it had been two years, and smiled as if to say, This is how it is. I ordered sparkling water, and soon the evening was underway: a monologue from Anneliese, covering her acquaintance with Catherine, their years in England, Catherine’s sudden departure, her own return to Switzerland, the little summer house she and Paul rented in a forest near the Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg airport, how lovely it was and yet how remarkably infested with spiders, how their cousin’s daughter Luzia loved it there, despite her allergies—and then Anneliese asked if I noticed the odd way the swans on the river outside were trying to stay in place despite the swift current. "Why do they do that?" she said. "It’s hopeless." "Maybe there’s something to eat just under the water." "No, Paul. The river is too deep, they can’t reach anything down there." The three swans were borne steadily backwards until they went out of sight. | The Great Gatsby |
5 | 52 July 19 | And then just when I was wondering about that he tells a bizarre story about an Irish man who was famous as a wit, but secretly he was in despair, he did everything in threes, he had three cups of tea every day, he called himself by three names, he wrote three books, the second had the number two in its title, the third had the number three, he had a great laugh, ha ha ha, three times, his wife said it was a good laugh, full of despair, and one day he took a razor and made three cuts in his wrist, and as he was dying he wrote a letter to his wife, good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. | Two prizes: Flann O’Brien, At Swim-two-Birds. Also a remark Harry Mathews made about Georges Perec ("a good laugh, full of despair") |
6 | 51 July 26 | "I had just been hired by the University of Basel. It felt like a honeymoon, and for a couple of years it was, but it turned out to be the usual sort of job, dull, unrewarding, demeaning, debasing, bewilderingly depressing, hopeless, soul-crushing, brutish, and pithing, and so humiliating it made me shiver, I actually shook with fear and revulsion when I arrived at work each morning. My so-called colleagues Sybille, Andrei, Basel, Spadella, Marcel, and Grettina, and Ludwig Hassenpflug, I always forget him, they peeled me like a turnip, especially Sybille and Spadella, they pulled vegetable peelers over my skin, it came away in strips, exposing blobs of fat, and that wasn’t even enough for them, they kept peeling, my muscles dropped off in slices, vessels were cut, I spurted blood, it went on and on, soon I was nothing but scraped bones, my job was grotesque, it was a living gasping death, my colleagues were a collection of slobbering beasts, they were like lemurs, and centipedes, and beavers, but undead, they were werelemurs, werecentipedes, and werebeavers, those are the worst, they are so unpredictable and they have bad breath, they gathered around me, and then they knelt down and licked the blood off my—" "But why? Why did they do that?" | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
7 | 50 Aug. 2 | "I have been building my theories for decades now. I have created an enormous castle of theories with great walls and parapets, the turrets fly exotic theory flags with tassels and serrated edges, there are massive ramparts made of rude blocks of stony ideas, a great escutcheon above the portcullis with a shield per bend rayonny concepts of gules and vert, a fetid moat filled with liquid theories, a grand entrance hall hung with the banners of many conquered biologists and decorated with their stuffed heads mounted on armorial plaques—I gave them plastic eyes instead of glass eyes, it makes them look dimmer—and the castle is well guarded, there are concealed pits studded with vinegared pins, trapdoors opening into cisterns filled with verminous ideas, hidden troughs poured full of rancor, drops into dungeons littered with splintered invectives, my theories march day and night on the castellated battlements, I have stationed my theories everywhere, armed theories crouch in the crenels of my notched battlements, bloodshot theories lurk in my machicolations, ready with stones to throw at anyone who approaches, the acute eyes of my theories can be glimpsed in my arrowslit windows, they peer down from the spindle towers, dozens of them watch from the vertiginous stacked dormer windows high on the steep pitched rooves, warm round-faced theories glow in the rose windows, odd-looking theories press their faces into quatrefoil windows, I even have triplet theories in my three-light oriel widows, do I have to go on? I don’t want to, my theories aren’t actually some cartoonish Harry Potter castle, the point is I have experience in constructing theories, I have an understanding of the architecture of thought, so given all that, please tell me: why can’t I tell a simple story?" | CONTEST STILL OPEN (The contest is for passages in other books that are similar in tone or content. The closest answer is the winner.) |
8 | 49 Aug. 9 | "I am actually looking forward to my funeral. I think I will look exceptionally good on a white slab table, dressed in a long-back coat and a felt Stetson, with shiny black straight lace shoes that pinch, well, it won't really matter if they pinch, anyway my face powdered, my hair sprayed in place, my eyes glued shut, my mouth sewn closed on the inside so it won't open if I dry out, and my shiny shoes resting on a silver bucket. But seriously, it doesn't matter what you look like when you're dead. Or does it?" | Cab Calloway, "St. James Infirmary" |
9 | 48 Aug. 16 | Relax, that’s what you’re thinking, take life easy, breathe, live life slowly, like a cloud scooting across the sky, let yourself be gently combed by the placid currents of life, like the grass growing on a weir, like the mold flourishing on a peach, like the moss swelling on a corpse, move to Guelph, Ontario, because why not, the people are as simple as diatoms, you can spend your life doing nearly nothing, why torture yourself, why not pass your days strolling in the woods, walking the fields, hiking the hills? Well, I’ll tell you why not. It’s because when you stroll you wander, and when you wander you are lost, and when you are lost your life becomes a wilderness, and the world is nothing but lonely hills and mountains, no one is there, you meander like Bellerophon, blind, lame, disconsolate, bellowing in despair, and the world is on fire around you, the forests burn, there is nothing but wasteland and smoke, you are alone, you are helpless, you are alone. | Yeats, Salley Gardens |
10 | 47 Aug. 23 | [Affinity contest] No long and complex book is sane, Samuel, it is in the nature of long books that they push away from sanity. Only short books are sane, people are safe with short books. Writers can control them, but all books are slow-acting poison, they are infected by the author’s mind, and they infect readers in turn, and the longer the book, the more time you spend turning the pages, whether you are writing or reading, the more ill you become. No one controls thoughts that take more than a hundred pages to write. Many books appear to be sane, but that is because they end quickly. Most people seem sane if you talk to them for just a few minutes. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
11 | 46 Aug. 30 | “It’s true that I still scream,” he writes, “but not as much as I used to. And it’s true that during the night tiny people drift down onto my head and dissolve into my skull, hoping to turn me into a woman, causing my penis to slowly retract back into my belly, a process that might be completed in a hundred years of sleeping, and I admit that I don't like the asylum garden because it is illuminated by two suns, the familiar one and another composed of the stars of Cassiopeia drawn together, and when my wife visits I do not perceive her as a living being, and I have spent time as an Alsatian girl who defended her honor against a French lieutenant, and also as a Jesuit novice in Ossegg,” actually he means Osek, I looked that up because Ossegg is the one who found out the truth about Hansel and Gretel, but that is another story, “and unfortunately it is also true that I feel a blow on my head simultaneously with every word spoken around me, and this causes variable degrees of pain, compelling me to scream at night and occasionally by day." | Scheber, Memoirs of My Mental Illness and Ossegg, Hansel and Gretel |
12 | 45 Sept. 6 | These are disturbing ideas. I’m sorry to ask, but have you been talking to anyone? Paul says that sometimes. But psychiatric medicine is only a century old and it is practiced by teenagers. I have read too much to make me trust any twelve-year-old psychotherapist. I have read the DSM, all five editions, and the series The Clinical Interview Using DSM, volume 2, The Difficult Patient, and I’ve read Freud’s Collected Works in 18 volumes, all of them, and the collected letters, and Fliess and Abraham and Binswanger and Ferenczi and Lampl-de Groot, and I’ve read Jung and Adler, and Rank, and Horney, and Sullivan, and I’ve read Lacan and Reich and Perls and Janov, Bass, Davis, Fromm, and the philosophers from Popper to Grünberg and Kusters, and the scientists from Eagleman to Solms, he makes great wine, by the way. I am like Francis Spiera, you will hear about him later. I have read everything, I know all the arguments, no one can convince me, no one can comfort me. I know this does not sound likely, but you will understand later. | CONTEST STILL OPEN (The contest is for more names to add to this list.) |
13 | 44 Sept. 13 | The pain of not hearing an answer raveled me. Night came two thoughts after sunrise, I could see darkness in flowers, I could feel cold under my fingernails, when I spoke I heard flies, my walls thickened, walls grew around my walls, all sounds suffocated, the well was quiet and the black water down there glistened. Parking lots emptied, winter was gone, the river rose, there was no one left to tell, the wind came from the north and then from the south. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
14 | 43 Sept. 20 | People in despair, Robert Burton wrote, nothing can cure them, they know everything, but they are punctured like comets, they cannot be cured. Right in the middle of his book, six hundred pages into it, all of a sudden Burton writes: “Perhaps I am a comet, I flow helpless across the heavens, doubting, shining, rolling on my way toward oblivion, spitting the glistering viscera of my words behind me, before I finally stop.” That’s what he writes, in the very middle of his book. I realized there is an orifice in Burton’s book, a gaping hole, and his diseased imagination spews out of it. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
15 | 42 Sept. 27 | This concludes my introduction. I wrote it very rapidly, ten pages a day for six months. I can only hope that the details of my life—starting with my ignorant grandfather Emil and my obstinate grandmother Clara, including my mother’s report of the unfortunate moment of my conception, when she could think only of the clock that had stopped, the precocious experiments performed when I was six years old, in which I killed algae and small animals by exposing them to bleach, and the experiments using freight trains to crush poisons and glass into powder, the shocking day a train driver stopped his train and threw pieces of poison and colored glass aggregate at me, my indiscretions as a teenager and their consequences for my boyfriends Urs and Willermus... | Sterne, Tristram Shandy |
16 | 41 Oct. 4 | Okay, so you think, She really does have fundamental issues, way beyond my pay grade, she isn’t reachable or curable, or you think, I really do feel sorry for her, but oh my is she hard to listen to, I never really know what she’s talking about, half the time I’m lost, and to tell the truth a lot of the time she’s boring, she’s the most self-indulgent person I’ve ever met, self-involved, self-absorbed, she imagines herself sitting in compost, by anguish and darkness beset, she complains bewails and bemoans, her rash burns and throbs, she is rippled with running sores, her mouth is full of bitter and arcane laments, her mind is a land of allusive gloom and thickest murk, the muddest thick that was ever heard dump, but you know? she seems to be doing okay, so really, give me a break, I just can’t feel that sorry for her. | Joyce, Finnegans Wake and... CONTEST STILL OPEN (Double contest: there is another allusion, so far unidentified) |
17 | 40 Oct. 11 | I was also inspired by Velo Kulturman, he was a scholar who wrote a book on alphabets, it has 300,000 citations in it, so he wrote a one-page introduction, then a ten-page introduction, then a short book 400 pages long, then a full book, 1,809 pages, and then an enormous electronic version, it is all completely unreadable, only a few of the links work, no one will ever read it, it’s his life’s work and it’s ruined except for the one-page introduction. I was entranced when I discovered it. Reading the one-page introduction is like standing at the entrance to an enormous palace. The Türhüter, the gatekeeper, throws open the great lion-studded door, revealing a griffin-headed door. A second Türhüter opens the griffin-headed door, revealing a pillared courtyard, guarded by rows and ranks of Türhüter. At the far end there are still more doors, all open, all waiting just for me. I stand there, on page one, and then I just walk away. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
18 | 39 Oct. 18 | Clearly my skin, my nails, and my left lung are disassembling. I have no idea what goes on inside my abdomen, but I’m sure it’s the same in there. Little slabs of liver probably slip off, blobs of kidney float into my bloodstream and get washed away. Have you ever held a liver in your hands? It’s heavy but it’s watery. It’s easy to slice into pieces. My pancreas is like silken tofu, it isn’t holding together, it’s probably coming apart into slivers, I can feel them softly sliding, sliding softly in my omentum like snowflakes in mucilaginous darkness. I am losing tissue I used to have on my arms and thighs, the flesh there is becoming lumpy, my arms are lumpy, there is watery material between the lumps, it makes me shiver to feel the flesh under my upper arms, if I roll it between my fingers it feels like a down pillow that has gotten soaked and the feathers are stuck together in clumps. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
19 | 38 Oct. 25 | (722) whose diversion is love, (723) whose knit eyebrows are an unbreakable bow in which she fits the arrows of her side-glances, (724) whose glance cannot be seen even when she peers from underneath her shawl, and then (725) who fascinates the universe, (725) who has no companion, (726) who has a strong inclination to destruction, (727) whose looks should not be returned, (728) whose language you cannot understand, (729) who must not be thought about, (730) who must never be greeted, (731) who must never have lights waved in front of her, (732) who must never have her feet washed, and then disordered prayers, they seem to have no theme at all, (869) vivid, (870) ray, (871) spike, (872) spark, (873) gentle, (874) amber, (875) sour-blooded, (876) plum-shaped, (877) spinach-stooled, (878) plangent, (879) fabulous, (880) embalmed, (881) tame, (882) frenzied, (883) like a suckling pig, (884) innumerable, (885) tiny, (886) restless, (888) who broke the water pitcher... | Foucault's "Chinese encyclopedia" CONTEST STILL OPEN: Another prize for anyone who identifies the song in this passage |
20 | 37 Nov. 1 | Someone sings a song, another person complains about English candies, ducks float by, rubber ducks, the Lonesome Duck in Oz, the Mechanickal Duck, Old Ekdal’s duck, it’s duck soup, ducks in Newburyport, there are giggles and blushes, coughs and hiccups, toilet noises, the writers are like cooks who make stews out of delicious ingredients and then just start throwing things in: gourds, cakes with a hundred flavors, fumadoes, mane-fat and jelly-blood, marshmallows, breakfast cereal, ketchup, bions, stirring it all into a nauseating confusion, blur soup, blah soup. | Several winners who identified these ducks and added more! |
21 | 36 Nov. 8 | I walked home, and the patterns of seaweed were all around me, but they meant nothing, and the grasses on the dunes waved back and forth like people signaling, but that meant nothing, and the clouds linked in rows like old cursive handwriting, but that meant nothing, and then the stars formed bears and serpents, but those meant nothing, and later as the tide went out I heard the dark ocean retreat down the shingles of the beach, but that meant nothing, and I thought, well, obviously, I knew that, but then I thought, wait, my thoughts are the same, they swirl around in my mind and I keep hoping they have meaning, but they never do, no one’s can, thinking is only arranging ideas so they seem to have meaning. Really there is no thought, there is only our waiting and watching. | Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach |
22 | 35 Nov. 15 | As Paul says, I open parentheses, one after another, ( ( (, and as time goes on, over a day or even, Paul says, over a lifetime, parentheses keep opening, ( ( (, but finally, in the end, they will all close, each one will snap shut with the power of a heavenly gate, ) ) ), ) ) ), and my points, all of them, from the smallest note to the largest theory, will be conclusively demonstrated and their cases definitively closed. | CONTEST STILL OPEN (The contest is to find other texts similar in mood or ideas.) |
23 | 34 Nov. 22 | He ends his book, and his whole life’s work, with a sweet reverie, looking over a grassy meadow in England, marveling that its irregularities have been smoothed by worms, as they inexorably and thoroughly passed the entire beautiful landscape through their bodies and excreted it in a more pleasing form. For me, meadows and rolling hills will be forever enhanced by my new awareness that they are soft sculptures of worm castings. And it is infinitely comforting to imagine the compost of my mind as rolling English hills. | Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms |
24 | 33 Nov. 29 | A tangle of seaweed on the beach spells the word NIEMANDSROSE. An amazing thing for seaweed to spell, clearly it’s writing, it means something, in German it is “no one’s rose,” not a word, but close, very poetic. I am no one’s rose, the seaweed says. Or, no one owns roses. Or, no one invented roses. Or, no one invented the word “rose.” Or, I am a rose blooming for no one. Anneliese, the seaweed says, you bloom for no one. You are no one’s rose. You live for no reason. I cried when I saw that. Then I thought, well, that’s selfish, maybe it means people are like roses, we all bloom for no one. No one takes care of us. We are alone in the universe. I cried again when I thought of that. Then I pulled myself together. I realized the seaweed spelled NIEMANDSBOSE, or even NIEMAMSMOSE, or just NIEMAMMZMOZM, I wasn’t sure, it didn’t spell much of anything, really. It was just squiggles of seaweed, NMZMZMZMZMZ. If it had said NIEMANDSROSE, meaning we are roses that bloom for no one, that would have been heartbreaking, but instead it was embarrassing, because I had hallucinated the word in random swirls of seaweed. No one had sent a message, nature had not spoken. And then I realized: that is what our minds do, actually. We keep arranging and rearranging our ideas, but they never have meaning. | Paul Celan, "Prayer" |
25 | 32 Dec. 6 | Movies are awful. Just think about it. First you see the name of the famous director and the famous actors, that’s okay, but the names just go on and on, I am forced to watch an endless parade of meaningless names. Why should I care who designed the sets, or put up the lights, or smeared make-up on the actors? But the names just keep coming and eventually I am thrown back down onto my own resources, I have to find a way to entertain myself. I have no idea what that means, by the way, thrown back on my resources. Did someone push me down? And what were my resources doing on the floor? Anyway I am thrown away onto my resources, even though it is a film, and I am supposed to be entertained, so I try to amuse myself by reading the lists of names. I am told Mort Mills is in the movie. Why should I care Mort Mills is in the movie? Do I need to know this Mort Mills? Is Mort Mills one of our great actors? Is that a name to remember, Mort Mills? Why should I have to think about this Mort Mills person? Why should I have to see his name? And it is a funny name, Mort Mills, I wonder what Mort stands for, is it Mortgage? Or Mortician? I don’t care, and the only reason I even think about Mort Mills is that I have nothing better to do, the director has not given me a choice, I have to keep reading, I have to keep seeing these pitiful attempts to publicize jobs that should have been done quietly and without complaining. Apparently Hollywood is filled with small-minded people with inflated ideas about themselves. Next I am told that the film is Copyright ©1960 by Shamley Productions, what is the point of that? I mean, would someone steal the film if it wasn’t labeled “Copyright ©1960 by Shamley Productions”? Of course not, it’s just that Shamley Productions wants their name in the film, well, if I ran a company named Shamley Productions, I would be embarrassed, I would keep my name off the film, and by the way, why do they say “copyright” and then put the symbol for copyright right after it, because the word “copyright” means exactly the same as the symbol for copyright, so why print both of them, was the director so scared that someone would steal his film? Did the director think there are master criminals out there who want to steal his film, and when they see “Copyright,” they think, Great, I can steal this, but then they see the little copyright sign and they think, Oh no, I’d better not, this film is really protected, it is in a safe, it is in a Swiss vault, it is in a lead-lined panic room, it is in a Class 3 reactive powder geopolymer pore-free concrete military grade retaining wall safe, only a genius could steal this film, I may be arrested just for thinking about it, I’d better keep my distance, there will be other films I can steal, ones without that little symbol. And then I see that the man who was paid to type out all these names that I have been forced to read has put his own name in the film, there he is, Saul Bass, in charge of titles, Saul Bass designed the titles, it’s another American name, like Mort Mills, Saul Bass. Good heavens, I say to Paul, “Saul Bass and Mort Mills, this is the worst nonsense, the worst. I’m going, I can’t stand this any more,” but he says, “It hasn’t started yet!" | Hitchcock, Psycho |
26 | 31 Dec. 13 | Finally, at the end of the book, he tries to explain everything. It turns out the musician discovered the “colossal worm” when he was sitting by a stream practicing the zither. The worm came swimming up out of the calm brook in order to listen to his concerts. At first he guided it by tapping it with a stick, but the worm quickly memorized the music and played the melodies by itself. That is what Roussel thinks is an explanation, you’re supposed to read that and think, Oh, okay, now I understand. It was just an enormous aquatic earthworm with a specially high degree of intelligence and an inborn love of Hungarian music, and so of course the musician did what anyone would do: instead of running away screaming and doubting everything he ever knew about worms, he built a mica tank and taught the earthworm to play. He thinks you’ll say, Oh, now I see, everything falls into place, the book is so carefully constructed, just like a detective story, it all makes perfect sense. | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
27 | 30 Dec. 20 | Mantikeis, ancient diviners, looked at sheep’s livers, they noted small pathologies, pale patches and soft red cupules, nodules and indentations, twisted arteries, irregular folds and fissures, they observed fibrous connective tissue caused by flukes, ashy necroses caused by toxic plants, cancers and cysts, all the deformities that the gods had hidden there, inside the sheep, as awkward and unpleasant signs of battles, marriages, and storms in the outside world. Eventually, after the fall of the Greek and Roman religion, after Cicero, when Christianity emerged, héxis adopted the role of mantiké. Christian héxis, later called witchcraft, was the path to hidden knowledge. In Christian doctrine there was a different way to understand the future, because the truth was given to the world by divine gift, by emanation from the original divine logos, present before creation, so no theft was necessary, no wounding of the relation between world and truth, no mysterious hooded mantises (manteis, μάντεις) or priestesses (iéreies, ιέρειες) prying into entrails or poking at ashes. The ancient mantiké was gone, divination was no longer practiced because it was no longer needed, the world no longer had secret maps hidden inside animals. God still infused the world with arcane meanings, but they were not codes seen in ashes or flaws revealed in entrails. They were hidden in plain sight: they were images waiting to burst open, to emerge suddenly, in a flash, ein aufblitzendes, an epiphany of meaning, a “sudden spiritual manifestation.” They were sparks set to be ignited by faith or insight. No knives were required, the truth was everywhere. The world was planted with spermatic ideas, lógoi spermatikoí, set shallowly in the soil, ready to spring into the light, and the great ancient crime of mantiké was finally gone… | CONTEST STILL OPEN |
28 | 29 December 27 | People have all kinds of things on their lists, she said. Luzia showed me. Americans love them. I want to skydive, they say, or I’d like to try a one-thousand foot bungee jump. Or they say, I want to travel around the world, that’s a recipe for misery, all those airports, all that diarrhea. Or Americans say, I want to learn French, Americans always want to learn French, they think if only they learned French they could lead a glamorous life, they could be a person of high culture, but the French are snotty, morveux, and their language isn’t that beautiful, I speak French, it’s full of morveux sounds, it’s the language of snot and snobisme, it’s not as bad as German, that is for certain, but it’s nothing special, Italian is far more beautiful, and Romanian is even better, I think it is, anyway, although I haven’t learned it, but I can’t put that on my bucket list, I have no time to learn Romanian. Many people put losing weight on their bucket lists, they say, I need to get down to 140 kilos, if only I could get down to 140 kilos I would be happy, I would die happy if I were 139 kilos, that’s about 300 pounds, I’d be Tinkerbell, I’d float on air if I were 139 kilos, Madame Morschmulmig probably thinks that, and maybe Rektor Morschmulmig does too, he probably thinks he could lose enough weight to jump up on a table like I can, anyway people say if I was 139 kilos I could buy a cute outfit in a second-hand store, I could dress in super sexy lingerie, I could have a signature scent made just for me, I could find the perfect black dress, I could fit into skinny jeans, I could get a bikini wax, I could get a fish pedicure, a henna tattoo, I’d get my nails shellacked, get a plasma facial, I’d dye my hair a crazy color, I’d look good at last at last at last, I’d sit in the front row at a fashion show, my picture would be in the Fabulous Locals page of the paper. Or people say, I’d like to run a marathon, that’s my main bucket list item, so they train and train and run a five-hour marathon, big deal, hundreds of thousands of people run marathons every year. Or they say, I want to be a guest on a TV show, I want to be on the cover of a magazine, I want to be a street performer, I want to be in an advertisement, I want to be an extra in a movie, I want to be hypnotized and asked to do something embarrassing in front of a big crowd, I want to have a street artist make a nasty caricature of me and show it to everyone, I want to give a public lecture and really mess up, I want to go sleepwalking down a crowded street in my underwear, I want to get a flat tire in the middle of the George Washington Bridge and hold everyone up, I want to enter a dance contest and dance poorly in front of everyone, I want to go to a white tie dinner and throw up on myself, I want to go on a plane and laugh like a moron and get hauled out by force, I want to… wait, normal people might not want those things. Okay, so people who make bucket lists say I want to belly dance, I want to eat fire, walk on hot coals, I want to ride a camel, or I want to do a full flip on a trampoline, go indoor skydiving, run a zip line, abseil down a waterfall, rappel down a waterfall, or maybe that’s the same thing, or ride in a barrel down a waterfall, or airboat across an alligator-infested swamp, or go kite surfing, bamboo rafting, fat biking, paraglide, parasail, snowboard, zorb, walk across a one-string suspension bridge, walk a tightrope, swim with sharks, swim with stingrays, swim with dolphins, with ocean sunfish, with manatees or hippos, with sea turtles, swim with jellyfish in Palau, swim in bioluminescent algae, swim with snow monkeys in a Japanese hot spring, swim with pink dolphins in the Amazon, I want to be dropped by helicopter into the path of an oncoming blue whale, I want to see a rhino in the wild, not on safari, in the real wild, I want to see a pangolin in the desert, I want to see a mandrill in the rain forest, I want to see a musk ox on the tundra, I want to see an endangered blind cave fish in its cave, even if I kill it just by swimming alongside it, I don’t care, it’s my bucket list, or no, I want to do romantic things, I want to kiss in the rain, I want to kiss under a double rainbow, under a triple rainbow, under a fogbow, under an ice halo, I want to kiss under an aurora borealis, I want to kiss under an aurora australis, I want to kiss under the Southern Cross, I want to kiss in a cave while paleolithic paintings stare at me, I want to kiss in an air chamber inside an sea cave, to hell with kissing, I want to make love on a beach at night, I want to make love on a beach in the middle of the day in front of everyone, then by the side of the road with cars passing by, then in a storefront, right in a restaurant, on top of a table right in a restaurant, in the bathroom in an airplane, right in my seat in an airplane, or no, to hell with all that romantic stuff, I want to... | CONTEST STILL OPEN (Contest is for more bucket list entries.) |
29 | 28 January 17 | I make fun of myself, a little, because I have to, my life is actually so strange and isolated that it would be hard to talk without making fun of it just a little, I do it because I am embarrassed, when I tell you about my life and my mind it sounds like a pompous exaggeration, a farce, as if I am play acting a tragedy when actually I live a pampered privileged indolent irresponsible life, letting my own brother work to take care of me, behaving like an old baby, so I make fun of myself partly because it’s embarrassing, but also I make fun of myself because it is so painful to talk about the state I am in. When I am in the well I am not a talking creature, I am like one of the slugs, swimming or writhing or drowning in the water, it is hard to tell. If you grab a slug and take a pair of tweezers and force its little mouth open, and say, “Speak!” then the poor creature makes small sounds out of its gummy mouth, and its brain gets twisted and electrified by the effort of speaking, and it emits a small slug yowl from the effort of talking, because ordinarily its mind is nothing but sticky goo, a goo inside its sticky head, and forcing it to talk ruins it, makes the slug insane, hurts it, that’s how it feels when I talk about what my life is like, it hurts, and I just want to be dropped back into the water at the bottom of the well, because writing and writhing are all I can do. | CONTEST STILL OPEN (The contest is for other books, poems, or songs similar in content.) |
30 | 27 January 23 | If you keep thinking, the world starts to look unfamiliar and barbaric, he said, you no longer like the things other people enjoy, rainbows for example, they begin to look unnecessary and garish, that’s what Descartes said, sunsets look pompous, lovely spring days seem perfumy, snowfalls are childish, the old man in the moon is scarred and misshapen. You no longer think cats are adorable once you see the hatred in their eyes, that’s what Descartes said. Everything in life becomes unappealing and strange, you no longer understand anyone, it’s as if everyone agreed to stop speaking languages that you know, they all talk in languages you do not understand, Mxyzptlk languages, you’re surrounded by barbarians, the world around you becomes a vast frightening place built by idiots of certainty, captains of industry, titans of commerce, pillars of society, heroes of labor, pioneers of discovery, barbarians like Bill, harbingers of change, giants of innovation, vanguards of progress, innovators of the future, visionaries of tomorrow, luminaries of innovation, sculptors of destiny, oracles of imagination, architects of utopia, gleaming sentinels of the impending mandatory enlightenment. Their cities are repellent, their magnificent buildings appear preposterous and misshapen, their cars look like metal tumors. Why do people like cars, anyway? They have round rubber feet, they are loud, smelly, and heavy, and they crash all the time. This is the effect of thinking, Samuel. You realize you are ringed in by barbarians like Bill, and it just gets worse, more of them are coming, Bills, Bobs, and Bens, you are waiting for them, they are coming today, they are sailing from the opposing shore, they are massing on the Tartar steppe, they are swarming over the city walls, they are pouring into the city, night has fallen, they are everywhere, and then one day you wake up and your brother says, “Good morning, Lysi, guess what, I married a barbarian last night and we’re going to have barbarian babies, isn’t it wonderful?” He turns off the electric fence, throws open the gates and says, “We’re all barbarians now, we love ignorance, violence, and money, we know what we know and we don’t know anything else, and we don’t doubt ourselves because why should we, we are swollen with idiocy!” and you say, “You’re insane, close that gate,” and he says, “How do you know I’m insane? What is sanity, anyway?” and you say, “This is my story, so I know,” and he says, “Oh okay,” but he doesn’t close the gate. | CONTEST STILL OPEN (Quadruple contest: there are four books alluded to here. Prize for each one, and one extra for allusions I'm not aware of.) |