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1 | A Short Introduction to Anneliese Literary contest with answers | ||
2 | From July 2024 to June 2025 I posted a literary puzzle every week on social media. They were all passages from A Short Introduction to Anneliese, a novel about the fascination of long, complex books. Each passage had a hidden allusion to a book, film, song, or poem. Here's the "answer sheet," with all the allusions. Congratulatons everyone! In several of these, the challenge wasn't to find hidden allusions, but to find more passages in literature similar to these. I got lots of great suggestions, all too late to put into the book: but changes can be made when it comes out in paperback, and if I add the suggestions I received, I'll also weave everyone's names into the novel as thanks. A Short Introduction to Anneliese volume 2 of Five Strange Languages. Volume 3 is Weak in Comparison to Dreams. It has sheet music and comes with a vinyl record. Lots more information is here. | ||
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. | Ending of 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. | Flann O’Brien, At Swim-two-Birds. The line "he had a great laugh, ha ha ha, three times, his wife said it was a good laugh, full of despair" was said of Georges Perec by Harry Mathews |
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?" | Pynchon, Mason & Dixon |
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?" | (This was posted for ideas about similar texts.) |
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 | 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. | (This was posted for ideas about similar texts.) |
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 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. | (This was a competition for new names to add to the list. Got lots of great suggestions.) |
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. | Bob Dylan, "Nettie Moore" |
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. | Mallarmé, Un coup de dés "Dripping in Quiet Places" by Intestinal Disgorge |
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... | B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry "unfortunate moment of my conception" is from 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. | Book of Job Finnegans Wake (passage about Shem's house) |
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. | Kafka, "Before the Law" |
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. | Joyce, "The Dead" |
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" from Borges "Eileen Oge" (Irish folk song) |
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 | (This was a contest to find more ducks in literature. Again, lots of great suggestions.) |
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. | 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. | (This was a contest to find similar mood, typography, or ideas. (Several people suggested Raymond Roussel (New Impressions of Africa).)) |
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?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. | Roussel, Impressions of Africa |
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… | Walter Benjamin's idea of the dialectical image |
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... | (This was a contest to find books with similar mood and ideas.) |
29 | 28 January 17 | (For mood and affinity) 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. | (This was a contest to find books with similar mood and ideas.) |
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. | Four models, all texts on barbarians: Buzzati, Grecq, Cavafy, Coetzee |
31 | 26 January 31 | Do you know about engastration? It is when you stuff one animal inside another one, for the purpose of having an especially delicious meal. This is how my thinking sometimes goes: I stuff perfectly nice ideas inside other ideas, I sew up little ideas inside bigger ones. A cook might put a songbird into the belly of a quail, that would be engastration, or a songbird into a quail into a chicken, or a songbird into a quail into a chicken into a duck, or a songbird into a quail into a chicken into a duck into a goose, or a songbird into a quail into a chicken into a duck into a goose into a turkey, or, here is one from a recipe I read, a cook might place a single caper into a small anchovy and stuff them into a large Greek olive and put that in the stomach cavity of a little garden warbler, stuffed into a bunting stuffed into a lark stuffed into a thrush stuffed into a quail stuffed into a lapwing stuffed into a plover, I always thought a lapwing was a plover, maybe it is supposed to be a golden lapwing or a northern lapwing, those are rare, you would have to pay people to go hunt one, maybe it is supposed to be a black-bellied plover or a golden plover, those are bigger, but not much, and what if you went to all the trouble and expense of having someone shoot a northern lapwing and it turned out to be too big to stuff into the golden plover, or if you had someone shoot a golden lapwing and it was too big to stuff into the golden plover, then what? The whole thing seems difficult and expensive, and some of those birds must be protected. I ate a lark once, it was horrible, tiny and greasy. Paul ordered a pair of rabbits, by the way, coated with full-strength mustard, cooked in a casserole with bacon, carrots, tomatoes, and spring onions, covered in button mushrooms and breadcrumbs, which I thought was much less appetizing, but when he saw the lark curled up in its little clay pot with its beak and its feet sticking up he left the restaurant and stood in the parking lot until I paid and came out, and then he drove me to a pharmacy and bought me a bottle of wintergreen mouthwash, anyway, some kind of plover stuffed into a partridge stuffed into a woodcock stuffed into a teal stuffed into a guinea fowl stuffed into a duck stuffed into a chicken stuffed into a pheasant stuffed into a goose stuffed into a turkey stuffed into a great bustard, do you know what a great bustard is? It is a very big bird, the only bigger birds you could stuff a bustard into would be cassowaries, emus, or ostriches, and that would make a single enormous multiply engastrated illegal expensive bird-forward dish. | Paul's dinner is from Georges Perec, "81 Easy-Cook Recipes for Beginners" |
32 | 25 February 7 | And then I will turn to the Latin concept of lucubrationes, that is work done at night, even though I also like to work in the day, but I recognize that certain solemn and unsocial projects, certain unhealthy states of mind and body, are best nourished at night. My book is a lucubration, figuratively concocted in darkness even if it was actually often written in sunlight. I have had nights without darkness and many days without light. Night is when silence leaks out of the walls and pours into my ears. Even if it is a sunny morning outside, my work is done during the night: these notebooks are die Dunkelheit im Inneren meines Herzens, there is darkness inside even when when burning white beams of sunlight fall directly onto my notebook and my writing hand is warmed and casts a deep blue shadow. The shadow of old age, the blankness of failure, the darkness of history, the silhouettes of words, the pooling doubt. | Michel Leiris, Nights as day, days as night (Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour) |
33 | 24 February 14 | It’s dark. I see a chest of drawers, they’re interesting, I wonder if anything is in them, but I am not allowed to look. There’s a woman lying on a bed, she’s looking up at a man who is standing there, and there's a nightstand, it has a sandwich on it, and the sandwich is wrapped up, and yet it’s lying on a wrapper, so it must have been double-wrapped, but who does that, I mean it’s not an especially large sandwich, it’s not the kind of big sloppy sandwich that might need to be double-wrapped, so what’s the point? Maybe there were two sandwiches, and they ate one, but even if that is true, why did they fold up the wrapper for the first sandwich and put it underneath the second one? I mean think of it, Samuel, why did they fold the wrapper for the first sandwich, and then put the second sandwich down right on top of it? Behind the sandwiches there’s a tray with a pitcher of water and two glasses. Next to them there’s a bottle of soda and a cup of coffee, but neither one has been opened, so that’s also a little interesting, because they ate one of the sandwiches, but they didn’t drink anything, or maybe they just unwrapped the first wrapper of a double-wrapped sandwich and then gave up. There's the man again, he’s holding a towel and smiling at the woman. That’s naughty, I mean what did he need that towel for? | Hitchcock, Psycho, opening scene |
34 | 23 February 23 | I used to have ideas, they were just things you throw on compost pile like banana peels, eggshells, garters, old letters, leather shoes, I tossed them onto the compost of my notebooks and they became dirt. Humus, mull, moder, mor. I am a warm lump now, without much capacity to understand or observe myself. Midges land on me, a chicken picks at me, maggots tunnel through me. My thoughts are muddy, smeared and splotched. I am self-fermenting and self-lubricating. I think in gasses and sprays of fungal hyphae. I no longer have arguments or even words. I write pages and I look at them and I see clay. I am compacting, returning into substrate. | Finnegans Wake |
35 | 22 February 28 | That idiot Morschmulmig, he’s the rector of the university, went on and on about how wonderful “our” university of Basel is, with its “spectacular and rising” world ranking, its “brilliant” faculty who are like “pressure cookers” whose lids just need to “fly off” and their “crazy creativity” will “fill the air” and we will “write our own ticket” and be at the “bleeding edge” of international research and reach “critical density” of “genius and innovation” and achieve an unprecedented concentration of “centers of excellence” that will “push the agenda” and “set the tone” for “decades to come” on account of our “perfectly tuned organization” that works with “binding synergy” and uses “tightly limited, rapid-action feedback loops” between “creators, disseminators, and facilitators” to produce “dynamic and self-correcting research” that is “fully internationally multi-directional” and situated “at the heart” of the “bases of production and manufacture” to produce an “unprecedented exponential upsurge in intellectual interest” in “our” university, resulting in a “dramatic,” “surprising,” “exhilarating,” “spectacular,” “propulsive” increase in “our” already “amazing” ranking among all universities of the world, as measured by the Times Higher Education world universities listing, “our” ranking of, wait for it, seventy-four. And when he said that, I told Paul, I could feel the blood vessels in my cheeks bursting with embarrassment, literally bursting under the skin, producing one of my ecchymoses, my blood bruises, that’s how ashamed I was for him, my capillaries were actually perforating from the pressure of my embarrassment, I was ashamed for him, for his sake, and I was mortified too for his horribly bloated wife, who was probably trying to grow a layer of fat around her body to protect herself from him, and I was embarrassed for Paul, later I told him that, because I had invited this appalling person, but mainly I was embarrassed for myself, for living a life that involved people like that rector and his bulbous wife. Maximillion Morschmulmig is so vacuous, so endless in his self-regard, so unctuous in his pathetic allegiance to his institution, which he believes is astonishing and unique, but which is actually just a university among many others, well down on the world listing, with seventy-three universities all around the world ranked higher than it, I mean what aspiring student would look at the Times Higher Education listing and say, “Oh, wonderful, I think I’ll go to the seventy-fourth best university in the world, that’s perfect for me because I am so mediocre”? | (This was a contest for similar bureaucratese.) |
36 | 21 March 7 | The book says every house should have exactly seven gates on the east side, and if you go through the first gate, it means you’ll suffer misfortune, but that’s okay because if you then go through the second gate, you’ll be rich again, but if you go through the third gate, you’ll be paralyzed by fear, but don’t worry, just go through the fourth gate, because then you’ll be free from all doubt, and definitely don’t go through the fifth gate, because then you’ll starve, but if you do, then just rush back through the sixth gate, because then you’ll grow fat, and don’t forget to never use the seventh gate, because then your family will die and there will be a general “destruction of creatures,” so really, why even build that seventh gate, or just label the gates, NO, YES, NO, YES, NO, MAYBE, and ABSOLUTELY NOT. | It's a passage in the Narada Purana. |
37 | 20 March 14 | So just three days later the three-year-old three-day-old infant went to war. He ordered all nine hundred guardians, nine wermas, and his brother and sister to shrink down into pebbles, each one with the double lobed shape of a pregnant ewe’s liver, and to live in the double pebbles until he needed them. Then the Infant King K. crawled out onto a battlefield and met a demon named Sour Nephew White Face of the Bum Family who was standing on a plain full of corpses, chomping on a human arm, a demon so disgusting that even cannibal demons were nauseated when they looked at him, a demon so appalling that he ate living snake spirits, he just bit out their livers while they were still alive and threw them on the piles of human corpses. Sour Nephew White Face of the Bum Family stood there grinning and slobbering, and all around him liverless serpent spirits flopped around on human corpses, moaning and squeaking, with bleeding gaps where their livers had been. The Infant King K. put two of his his special double pebbles into his toy slingshot and shot them at Sour Nephew White Face of the Bum Family, and one went into the demon’s left eye, but the other one missed, and the Infant King trembled in his mighty infant armor. | The Tibetan epic poem King Kesar |
38 | 19 March 21 | There is a bird in the puzzle, it sits on the finial of a gate post at the end of a driveway by a beautiful garden in front of a lovely unpainted but tastefully stained house at the foot of the peaceful blue Jura mountains, that’s the picture. The bird is like my most perfect thought, poised and calm, silent and beautiful. But then I discover there are three identical pieces with the little eye and the pink feathers of the breast of the bird. It is infuriating, I become infuriated at the company, Lots-O-Fun Puzzles, well they are not, the puzzle seems to have been designed to enrage people, to make people feel ridiculous. I look at the box, and it says the painting was done by Gaspard Winckler and is called Jura Mountain Landscape with a Single Gimpel. A gimpel is a perfectly harmless rosy-breasted bird, but it is only a small detail in the painting, so why did the artist call the painting Jura Mountain Landscape with a Single Gimpel? And why did he say “a single Gimpel”? To taunt people like me, who can see perfectly well there are three identical pieces with the little eye of the single gimpel? The title is horrible, as if it was a joke aimed just at me. I became disoriented, I wasn’t sure what to do. The Lots-O-Fun Puzzle looked good in the store, it made me think I could spend a few pleasant evenings assembling a harmless picture of a house with a garden and a gate with a post and a bird, but that was just a ruse to show me how scrambled my thoughts are, the puzzle is a heartless demonstration of the chaos of my thinking, and the worst is the picture on the box, such a nice nostalgic painting of a house with a garden and a gate with a post with a finial and a bird, because not only can I can never assemble that picture out of the absurdly mixed-up, repetitious, defective set of pieces, but I can never forget the picture of the lovely property set amidst the peaceful blue Jura mountains, I can never have the mind that I have been promised by the sneering people at Lots-O-Fun Puzzles, never be pretty as a picture, never make full sense ever again, so I get angry and begin forcing pieces together, making a perverse forced-together picture by smashing thoughts into each other with my thumb until they sort of fit, even though some of those horrible little tabs tear and even snap off, like babies’ heads, but I actually enjoy that, I make a monstrous bird with three eyes, it is the imp of puzzle perversity. | Winckler is a character in Perec's Life: A User's Manual |
39 | 18 March 28 | "Sometimes my thoughts are in bits like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, all scrambled up in the box. Then I’m muddled, and I need to sort out my ideas, get them in order. I set all the thought pieces out in piles. Edge pieces here, blue sky pieces there, dark blue in another pile, they are probably watery thoughts, cloud pieces, those are cloudy thoughts, and so on. All the pieces of my thoughts in piles. Next I arrange each pile into rows. Then I pick up a blue sky piece and run it down a row of blue sky pieces, looking for a match. Usually I don’t find one, but sometimes I do, and soon I have clumps of sky. Edge pieces are especially interesting, those are thoughts that seem to be at the end of my thinking, right at the border of my thinking, the edges of my thought, where my thinking stops, so naturally I am interested in them, I want to see how they connect." "I have an idea like that about puzzles," I said. "Samuel, everyone has jigsaw puzzle stories. Mine is infuriating and disorienting, and I very much doubt your story is anything more than a nostalgic anecdote about your childhood. We can’t all drabble on about jigsaw puzzles. So in a while I have the whole rectangular frame, which is of course a huge disappointment, because my thinking cannot possibly have a perfect rectangular frame, but that’s one of the reasons why people like jigsaw puzzles, they’re so reassuring." | From Margaret Drabble's book on jigsaw puzzles. |
40 | 17 April 4 | So then I read Joyce, not Ulysses, for heaven’s sake, but Finnegans Wake, I read that book all day most days for months, and then some days most months for years. I covered each page in notes, I read his letters, I bought books and books about the book, I read introductions, summaries, annotations, concordances, censuses, and indices, I read the pages he translated into French and Italian, I read the first ideas he scribbled in notebooks, really you can’t read them, but I read them, they are just pages of words, like “floods reveal,” “why bridge things,” “winding roads,” “swollen stream,” “spudfed pigs,” “angel in the house,” “thought himself sick,” “doubtful points,” “a dark spirit came in,” “what answer did you get,” “dear little girl in Boston, you fill a big hole in my heart,” “amber route,” “lying spirit in heaven / spirit lying in heaven,” “pyjamas redden the bed,” “deafness from a damp pillow,” “not even churches are sacred,” “glegg,” “mental nerve,” “gossipaceous,” “inkpot upset foretold,” “little brittle magic nation dim of mind,” “gloompourers,” “wail of wind,” “drip of noise,” “better betray with pleasure,” “kiks the buch,” we know what that means, kicks the listing bucket, but buch is book in German, so writing is like kicking the bucket, “scowl,” “maniac,” “semi demented,” “deadened walls,” “inspissated obscurities,” “longueurs,” “border on insane,” “dazzling final refinement of delirium,” “dark clouds and mud,” “mouthless streams,” “vertical rivers,” “lightless waters,” “melodious cave,” “where he ended his life.” | "dazzling final refinement of delirium" is from Anthony Burgess's critique of Finnegans Wake |
41 | 16 April 12 | Sybille Kröller, she’s the chair of the department. She is nothing short of a monster. I am glad I won't be working there much longer, because she has stewed a little hell in the department, my former colleagues are floating haplessly in it like sweating potatoes in a pot of soup, well, potatoes don’t sweat when they’re in a soup, I suppose, or maybe they do but you don’t see it, anyway she is devious in the extreme, self-regarding to an excruciating degree, and power-mad in a wildly crazy manner, to the point where she has thought up plots that would make Machiavelli dizzy, they would make Sherlock Holmes scratch his head like a dunce, they would have Agatha Christie spinning in her chair like a demented pensioner, to the point where she, I mean the chair of the department, should be arrested, except that she is far too intelligent to ever let herself say anything that could be actionable, she could out-Freud Freud, she could run rings round Lacan, there isn’t a person I know who could get inside that head of hers and survive long enough to figure out how to escape. | (This was a contest for affinities in other texts.) |
42 | 15 April 18 | "If I may speak as my own physician, Samuel, I believe I am quite sane, let's say 93% sane. I have many particles of insanity, uncountable motes of insanity, speckles of insanity, like when I said I’m 93% sane, I made that up, of course, but why did I say 93? I don’t know, it was a glitch, my thought ran over a bump in the road, a pebble of insanity, and it made me jump onto the number 93." "It’s insane to pick the number 93?" "The number 93 may be a pebble of insanity, you walk over them without noticing. The bigger ones trip you. The biggest ones fall from the sky like hailstones. The universe is full of marvelous insanity stones, purple, yellow, red, blue, orange, green, black—" "Okay, that really does sound nuts." | The movie Avengers: Infinity War |
43 | 14 May 6 | It’s amusing to walk down the hallways and see the shock on my former colleagues’ faces. Basel’s face turns from rubber to stone. Marcel turns from stone to rubber. Spadella turns from rubber to blubber. You know, Samuel, often when I get up in the morning it seems to me I am already talking. My thoughts continuously ramify and exfoliate, like a branching tree. My thoughts are arborescent, that is a magnificent word, and it fits my mode of exposition perfectly. My ideas branch and divide like whirling brooks. I live like a baron in the trees of my thought, I nest up there, I build nests made of tangled and braided thoughts. | James Agee, "Rapid Transit" Italo Calvino, Baron in the Trees |
44 | 13 May 23 | The first time we drove out to Oustic, Rosie went on about crystals the whole way. She said each one makes ripples of energy, like when a pebble is thrown into a pond. — Picture it, she said, you’re standing by a pool, it is very still, there is no wind, no ripples. You throw in a pebble. It makes circular waves. Then you throw in another. The two sets of waves make a beautiful pattern. All those intersecting waves, really complex, really beautiful. That is how crystals work: one pebble is you, and the other is a crystal. — I know what you mean, I said, even though I didn’t. — Wait, she said, you don’t understand yet. In crystals no one throws anything. There are ripples in the still water. No pebble has been tossed, and there is no wind, just ripples. When you are together with your crystal, you’re in perfect harmony, you’re both healthy. | Grateful Dead, "Ripple" |