books recently thrust upon me

house of leaves (proving creepier than anticipated)
sandman #1
sex drugs & cocoa puffs

fun times with alexander pope

taking all but the last two words of each lines from Alexander Pope's "An Essay On Criticism (305-336)". i don't think i'm stepping on any toes, sniggering over this guy.


cares express,
for dress:
is excellent:
upon content.
most abound,
rarely found.
prismatic glass,
on every place;
more survey,
distinction gay:
unchanging sun,
shines upon,
alters none.
and still
more suitable;
words expressed,
purple dressed;
subjects sort,
and Court.
made pretense;
their sense!
a style,
learned smile.
the play,
vanity display
wore yesterday!
at best,
doublets dressed.
will hold;
or old;
are tried,
old aside.


survey says: distinction? gay.

extremey slow & incredibly tired

i am reading slowly. very slowly. partially, because i want to be reading slowly. i avoided reading jonathan safran foer's book extremely loud & incredibly close because of the post-9/11 content. what american girl in her right mind wants anything fashioned with 9/11 drama in mind? it just brings to mind all the impossibly bad poetry read at memorials and funerals.

i like him and the further i get into the second novel i've read of his (everything is illuminated) the more he crawls up my ladder of favourite writers. he is maybe-possibly hugging the ankles of steve erickson. and i am reading it slowly, because i enjoy how it swings between something like:

She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast, They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I'm being honest with myself. They are only the best of what exists. She spend an afternoon staring at their front door.
Waiting for someone? Yankel asked.
What color is this?
He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red.
Yes, it is red, isn't it?
Seems so.
She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?
Brod's life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. Table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, mollusk, Shabbos, violence, cuticle, melodrama, ditch, honey, doiley...None of it moved her. She addreessed her world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you. Bark-brown fence post: I don't love you. Poem too long: I don't love you. Lunch in a bowl: I don't love you. Nothing felt like anything more than what it actually was. Everything was just a thing, mired completely in thingness.

...and something like the second narrator (a self-obsessed ukranian translator with blue & replendant eyes, who makes a tramp of a thesarus in every way possible) fighting with the narrator about why shouldn't he say "I dig negroes"?

if there's anything i hate more than not being able to read as often as i like, i don't know what it is. i try before i sleep, but that usually winds up with me slipping off into some dream where i am still reading the book. of course i wake up and have to backtrack in the actual book to distinguish what i actually read and what i actually dreamed. sometimes this is disappointing...


other things keeping me from reading:
1. packaging design
2. information design
3. public design
4. sleeping
5. redesigning my personal website (here) -for when i take over and change the domain- and business cards (no you may not see yet)
6. advertising
7. making tacos
8. taco design

the very, very rough, very, very end of my novella:

....

He dreams of being carried through tiers of leaves by a girl who is white as a hot poker, but not at all dead. She ties him to the limbs, pressing the pale white-pink of her mouth to the bulging moon that tries to push itself out from the center of his chest and the center of each, closed eye.

o

Andrew died and the rifts, where there were roots of tugging plants, communicated between the smoke and the moon (which had departed) telling Andrew,

you are alive, after all.

To which he had nothing to add.


The universe and everything in it was suddenly gone. The ending of the universe was not methodical. It was not a judgment, no hand of God: only a descending loneliness that pulled everything apart, took every particle and pulled each one so far away from every other that the resulting ache became the cry to announce
the end.

minute note:

new to my shelves, from bookstore:
. my second (and i swear to god, final) copy of john berger's G. if any hipsters take this one? i am through.
. gideon defoe's pirates! in an adventure with communists. he has the best footnotes.

maybe doesn't belong

Perhaps this doesn't belong here, but it IS book-related...

Have you ever written notes to yourself and then found the notes a long time later, at which point they made absolutely no sense, having lost their original context? I do this all the time -- but my notes are all related to various creative projects. Anyway, I just found this note/passage. It's apparently somehow related to a book project I was working on. However, the project is now a rather melancholy collection of short stories. How, then, did the following note have anything to do with it?

This is my book, and I can say whatever I want. Something true: I am the world's only champion Yak-binder. True, there were others, many better than myself, but these practiced in the days before Yak-binding became recognized as an Olympic event.

anything but that

I just finished reading A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut. I hadn't even known until monday night that there was a new Vonnegut book....surprise! I thought he had stopped publishing long ago. Anyway, it's an interesting book of essays. Downside? He seems almost stereotypically a curmudgeon. Not that Vonnegut was ever an optimist, it just seems trite to be old and believe that the world is going to hell and that the damn kids are too involved with computers. (That is not just because I am way, way too involved with my computer).

Best part? The plot graphs made of famous novels where the x is beginning to end and the y is good fortune and bad fortune. Kafka's Metamorphosis immediately rockets downward into an infinity symbol. Hamlet absolutely flatlines. Trust me, it's amusing.

One more point of interest. According to Kurt Vonnegut, if you have not read the following, you are a twerp.

"Occurence at Owl Ridge" by Ambrose Bierce.
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.

I'm going to get on reading these because I am sure that similar to I, you often have nightmares of finally meeting Kurt Vonnegut and having him call you a twerp.

to do: based on the first couple chapters of everything is illuminated

1. start describing my eyes as "blue & resplendant".
2. insist on describing my eyes before i talk about anything else.
3. say, "i swear on my lily-white name".
4. make t-shirt that says "officious seeing-eye bitch"

savage for the sweep

in light of the impressive democratic sweep this week, i thought i'd dust off an old recommendation. dan savage's skipping towards gomorrah: the seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in america. you can't help but wonder if this guy managed to bring down santorum in a way no democratic campaign would (if there's anything democrats can't do, it's sell themselves).

if you're even remotely left-winged in nature, this book is kind of preaching to the choir. but once you get past the "who are you trying to win over, dude?", it's pumped full of the smarm, sass and obscene/factual material you'd expect from his sex columns (if you read his columns. if you don't, you can/should/definitely should. right here. besides the sass, there's generally everything you could possibly want in a couple hundred pages of amusement:

greed gamblers reveal secrets behind outrageous fortune (dan learns/wins/loses)
lust "we're swingers!" –you won't believe who's doing it
gluttony dan meets gluttons with attitude at a pro-fat conference (a skinny white guy gorging himself in a group of doting, obese women)
sloth leave it to dan to find a way to celebrate the sin that will get him in trouble with his mother. (not to spoil the surprise but- recreational drugs)
envy meet the rich–and then be glad you're not one of them.
pride you'll never look at a gay pride parade the same way again.
anger texans shoot off some rounds and then listen to dan fire off on his own about guns, gun control, and the second amendment.

because he writes such amusing, but brief, columns, i was worried it couldn't carry over so well into a more verbose genre...well, it does. if anything, the extra space ups the smarminess, the snarkiness, and the kind of cute-as-a-dirty-slut-button attitude of the savage love breed.

"but don't take my word for it!"

{note: also finished reading/enjoying/getting little goosebumps over coraline by neil gaiman & started on everything is illuminated by jonathan safran foer. liking it? oh, yes.}

what would a house-pi(e) look like?

i love all this controversy regarding Life of Pi. I suppose when you get down to it, liking or not liking the book is a matter of personal taste. I didn't find the story boring at all. However, I will admit that the implicit questions about theology were much more interesting than the explicit ones. so perhaps i am projecting onto the book a little bit, thus heightening my enjoyment of it.

i own a copy of House of Leaves but have not yet read it. i will have to bump it up the list some. many many people have raved about the book and whenever i talk about my novel-to-come The Crow Murders people tell me that i should read House of Leaves (thus explaining why the book is lying on my bookshelf).

for the moment, i have just finished Beckett's Murphy which i will have to post on later, and am busy enjoying Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller. the latter of which seems to be a favourite amongst this blog's bloggers.

two questions

1. what is the earliest written work that you think is worth reading?

2. what is your favourite book and how much money would someone have to offer you in order for it to be stricken completely and forever from your memory?

hi, kids !

so this is exciting! thank you for the invitation. i do so very much enjoy arguing about books.

so; to start, and to clarify:

house of leaves is my favourite book (and i say this with very little hesitation) because it fits all of the criteria that i have for enjoyment of a book (i should say 'artform' when it applies to this particular novel).

1) the subject should be interesting. a matter of subjective interpretation, sure, but i think we can all agree that if a book is about something that's been discussed ad nauseam, that no one is going to want to read more of it. although i guess that can be challenged by saying "what about reinvention, what about that one book that says it better than all the others?" so maybe that doesn't apply. i have to be encouraged, i guess i should say, to delve into the book. this encouragement comes from many things -

a - a visually interesting cover. i'm a geek. i have two copies of some books because i thought the revised cover was so much more evocative of the story.

b - the style of the writing on the first page: the "hook." usually this can be assessed by both the phrasing of the sentence & by the words used. sometimes i'll read the last page. i know, it's a sin. i'm trying to get myself out of it.

c - i guess these are more criteria i look for when i pick up a book at random from the bookstore, or the library. although one is different from the other - choosing a book to BUY as opposed to BORROWING one holds different importance & value. enough of that.

2) the style has to be original. i'm tired of reading the same sort of thing. i am interested in writers who show me, via their craft, that their brain works a little bit differently, who think in a new way, who aren't afraid to challenge the common notion of pulp.

3) it can't have ever been in oprah's book club. ... and i'm not sure if i'm kidding on this one or not.

house of leaves is such an interesting book to me because it is, essentially, a puzzle. i picked it up from the shelf at random years back, maybe, gosh, 5 years ago?, and was intrigued by the design on the spine of the book: photographs of houses. i noted the "of leaves" reference & i think drew a walt whitman parallel. i looked at the cover, found the 'labyrinth' design appealing, and then opened it to read the jacket. flipping through the pages had me encountering the bizarre pieces of danielewski's formidable novel, and the clincher was encountering, at the end of the book, an index. confused, i flipped back to the cover, where it clearly said: A NOVEL below the title. that's what did it for me. the index in a novel. that, and finding a random staff of music in pages of pages of blank space, somewhere within the book.

it's a puzzle is why i like it. i like things i can work at, things which get more solveable. i like using intellect & analysis to get at what things are doing. i like it even more when the book eludes me & triumphantly shows me what the truth was all along. i like it even more, i discovered, when the truth is never revealed, or is too deeply hidden, but i still find the narrative enjoyable.

danielewski brings something new to the visual structure of the novel: he transforms it, and perhaps caters to the ADD generation, but it complements both his style of writing & the content of his narrative. i've heard it, the typographical presentation that is, dismissed as 'gimmickry,' but i call bullshit on that claim because, technically, although it is pejoratively viewed, a gimmick is a 'an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, esp. one designed to attract attention or increase appeal.' according to the dictionary. i don't think the typography is to attract attention. it's not jumping up & down for you to see it. danielewski could give a shit. it's there to enhance the reading experience, not try to ruin it. and i think it's lovely. it's confusing, it's immersive, it's incredibly conducive to re-reading ... i can't see a reason not to like it.

secondly, the structure is so complex and mysterious it's like reading three agatha christie novels in one setting, where everyone knows everyone and someone is the bad guy but no one knows who it is. layers of reality, stories within stories, another favourite of mine: meta-fiction (c.f. italo calvino's if on a winter's night a traveler) - and this does it quite well.

i'm sorry, i felt the need to explain myself because i've met so many people who count that book as their favourite, or one of their favourites, and they turn out to be pretentious little dimwits who've never even completed it or understood one-fourth the mythological references, or even really enjoyed it and just say they did because it's "cool."

i am not one of those.

SECONDLY -

life of pi.

there is one thing, and one thing only, that i loved about this book, and it was the fact that you will never know whether the story told is true or not. i love the 'torment' aspect of it, as you called it, mr. ball -

the only problem is have with the book is that the story told is boring. who cares if it's true or not? it was like watching a saturday morning cartoon trying to introduce one to the concept of theology. no thanks. i like my philosophy to be upfront with me. if there's words i don't know, i'll look them up. it's called learning. yann, your book doesn't do that - it suits up your parable in a nice little allegory tuxedo and marches it around. too bad that it had such an interesting conclusion. this is one of those books, like ishmael, and the celestine prophecy, that i just want to mash up into paste & feed back into the sapholes of the trees that suffered to make that dreck available to the public at large.

cheers!

submitted for approval of the midnight society:

chris.

my darling, erudite friend (who i've known for almost a decade). the playwright, novelist, book enthusiast extraordinaire. if he's not too busy writing his damned novel, i am considering adding him to balance out the pi lovers/pi haters. here is his current Favourites List. as you'll notice, there's no winfrey-lovin' going on.

1. HOUSE OF LEAVES; mark z. danielewski
2. DHALGREN; samuel r. delany
3. GORMENGHAST TRILOGY; mervyn peake
4. THE MAGUS; john fowles
5. STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER; tom robbins
6. ON THE ROAD; jack kerouac
7. THE GREAT GATSBY; f. scott fitzgerald
8. A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD; michael cunningham
9. TROPIC OF CANCER; henry miller
10. JUSTINE; lawrence durrell
11. IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER; italo calvino
12. SIDDHARTHA; hermann hesse
13. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING; milan kundera
14. THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST; tom wolfe
15. NIGHTSPAWN; john banville

a delicious pie for rhianna & jonathan (beause i love you...

...even if i don't love Life of Pi )


vegan pumpkin pie -- something we can all hate together.

One Last "woo hoo!" for the Pi

I just feel a need to point out four things.

1. Aside from intelligent points made by Mr. Ball, this book also taught me a lot about which turtles are the easiest to eat, how to catch fish at sea, how to stream a sea anchor and the training and mangaement of large carniverous animals. This book may very well SAVE MY LIFE one of these days, and you don't want it on the Top 100 List.

2. On at least two occasions you have spelled it Life of Pie. I'd like to point out that that was a very different book, involving the adventures of a tasty Bumbleberry upon the high seas.

3. You, by your own admission, have not actually read the book. I really feel like the reading of a book is a prerequesite for hating it, unless of course it is a book on cover design with a really horrible cover.

4. That random guy you pulled off of blogger to support your twisted views also *loves* two books from Oprah's book club, one of which is She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb. I rest my case.

In Defense of Pi

I've got to jump to the defense of Life of Pi. Though I would direct Pi-haters to Martel's first book, an outstanding collection of stories called The Last of the Helsinki Roccamatios which they may enjoy even if they persist in hating Pi.

The thing I love about Life of Pi is the implicit question of religious belief: Pi offers two stories and asks us to choose between them (to choose either belief in God or belief in No God). Either choices are considered respectable, while agnosticism (the refusal to choose) is abhorred.

What is interesting to me is not this choice, but the unspoken question of choice itself: is it even possible to make this choice?

What, for example, is left to the person who wants to believe in God but is not able to, after considering the world? There is a passage in the Koran which states something along the lines of "no man may believe unless God allows him to" which is to me a fascinating claim and a truly excruciating situation. Of course everybody wants to believe the amazing, magical story of survival that Pi tells. But it impossible to believe. The other story, that horrific yet plausible story, appears to be all that is left to us. Yet the true horror of this situation is not that Pi's story is untrue, but that it is impossible to believe — and thus its telling is merely a torment.

books that were so horrible, i couldn't even finish them

it is a rare event that i start a book & just don't have the motivation to finish it. sometimes, sure, i'll pick up a book or three on the side to keep me going, but i have made my way through some really, really terrible books. some books, however, were so full of vomitous ho-hum-ness, i didn't think twice about chucking them over my shoulder.

1. Life of Pi ; Yann Martel


i know, people just love this book. intelligent people love this book! english majors, rhianna, more english majors... my brother (debatable reference. he also really likes C.S Lewis) love this book. i? i totally effing hate this book, yo.

while editing our list of top 100 novels, i wanted to strike Life of Pi altogether, but rhianna leaped to its defense with the same crazy-lady!, accusatory look i get from just about everyone. astounding, really. there are more people who are upset i don't like Life of Pie, than there are people who jump "all up in my grill" when i get frank about Harry Potter. Straight-up, yo, i even have qualms putting 'Harry Potter' in italics. it's such he bare minimum of literature...

but i digress... i consented to include Life of Pi in our Honourable Mentions section.


but dudes? i am not alone in my wrinkled-nose galaxy. chris (who has probably read more of the books on the Modern Library's list than rhianna and i put together) has got my back. it's been so long since i read those few chapters & discarded Life of Pi, that i don't remember anything other than just explicitly hating it. i sent the thus-far list to chris and he immediately picked out Life of Pi.

"there is no way life of pi should even be mentioned."
"it just seemed so condescending to the reader."
"awful awful awful book."

- chris

2. Harry Potter ; J.K. Rowling

in my 'hood? rowling bitches get smacked. times a thousand. or, i have to erase from my memory, the knowledge that people i love enjoy this bound bowel movement.

what to say that hasn't already be said (by me, usually after a couple pints)? miss rowling uses half-assed, bor-ring & not even remotely interesting writing as a catalyst for her ejaculatory messes of fantasy. time & time again. not even interesting messes. folks, coherently carrying a reader from point A to point Z in a plot is not an accomplishment. that's like praising an architect for rembering to put in floors or water pipes. if you think i'm going to call her a brilliant writer because she comes up with broomstick versions of soccer? balls to you. that is not gonna happen.

i do like soccer, though...




3. Open ; Lisa Moore

what could possibly ruin an interesting plot, an enjoyable author's tone, & what appears to be talented writing? housewives. swear to god, you could write the most interesting book ever: aliens!; unicorns!; gangsters!; incest!; but once you flip the main character into a towel-ringing housewife, my attention is gone & gone again.

especially where her major qualms revolve around really, quite boring sex. not un-sexy sex. just boring sex. if you know what i mean. & i believe i said it last night: sexy boring is almost worse than just plain ol' boring.

it makes me feel dirty & shameless in all the wrong ways.

(note: this also goes for her Degrees of Nakedness)



4. Fallen ; David Maine

survey says? this is an awesome cover, homeslices.

you, my aforementioned homeslices, know how much i dig reading books with smart design. but, however a-may-zing the cover is, the content is predictable and very plodding-along-ish. so and so does this, so and so does this, so and so feels like this because so and so did that... i kept drfting off- not to sleep. you know a book is pretty bad when i favour working on packaging design over reading.

there's not that much to say about it, really. just boring. disappointing. i got perhaps two chapters in.

they're coming in droves...

...all the books i have leant out. it is a tidal wave, and with all the recent purchases, everything was in a state of complete anarchy. well, book-wise. books make quiet anarchists. but either way, i was doing some frustrated housekeeping last night (blogspot, you are on thin ice mister-- all these reapirs. what the crap?) & it wound up with me taking inventory &, consequently, attempting to fit all the books i really love on my Favourites Shelf.

i have three shelves in my bedroom. left over from a former roommate or courtesy of the landlord i do not know. while being fairly hefty, none of them are very large. & none of them are together: there are two rather high on the opposite wall from my bed, & one right over my bed, quite a bit lower, has been dubbed my Favourites Shelf.

unfortunately, having things arranged by preference is spurring a lot of compromises. the Favourites has a usual, library-style line of books, with towers of books at each end. towers have begun to form over top, though, with flimsy piles of slipping books between them. it looks like an urban city skyline full of leaning towers of piza... & i've been mildly worried about going to sleep every night with the overburdened shelf right over my head. my tombstone would read: died by books. but generally, very good books. her favourites. isn't it ironic? don't you think?

so here it is, my inventory:

books i shipped out to lesser shelf:
. advertising books (ogilvy on advertising, pick me, and some sample books by paper companies we always get...etc)
. lisa moore's yuck-o books. [degrees of nakedness &open]
. mark haddon curious incident of the dog in the night-time
[ it was never a favourite, really]
. cookbooks/food related books aside from anthony bourdain's kitchen confidential.

refugees and/or welcome guests to favourites shelf:
. flowers for algernon
. three men in a boat
. sicilian carousel * the dark labyrinth by lawrence durrel
[ to accompany the alexandria quartet ]
. lullabye, fight club, & survivor by chuck palahniuk [ for consistency. choke is actually a favourite...]
. chekhov short stories, the cherry orchard, three plays etc.

on thin ice & in danger of being shipped out at any given moment:
. poe (collection of short stories)
. dan savage's skipping towards gomorrah: the seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in america
. gulag

recently returned to my collection:
. dead kid songs toby litt
. layer cake j. j. connolly
. another bullshit night in suck city nick flynn
. perdido st. station china mieville
. his dark materials [2 first books of the trilogy]
. coraline neil gaiman


books i know i still have, somewhere out there:
. justine lawrence durrell [ i have no idea who i leant it to...]
. pirates! on an adventure with whaling gideon defoe (i may have this around the apartment somewhere. who knows...)
. how we are hungry dave eggers
. and our faces, my heart, brief as photos john berger
. tours of the black clock steve erickson
. eats, shoots & leaves you know the one.
. anais nin's diaries (gone for good, i bet)


books that aren't mine:
. into the wild
. the contortionist's handbook
. girl with curious hair

books i wish weren't mine [but i'm too lazy to take to a secondhand shop]:
. snow falling on cedars
. white oleander
. open & degrees of nakedness
. fallen
. the fire thief
. the catastrophist

books i intend to lend out in the nearby future:
. amber spyglass (recently recovered from page-by-page spilled/dried gesso removal surgery) to rhianna
. it happened in boston? to rhianna and/or kathleen
. here is where we meet by john berger- to kathleen because she loves him too.
. three men in a boat (to say nothing of the dog) jerome k. jerome

books i know i want copies of, but am too sad to handle for sentimental reasons:
. gene wolfe's strange travelers
. rilke (collection)
. gabriel garcia marquez's love in the time of cholera
. voltaire's candide
. henry miller (almost anything)

reminded to order/get:
. the black book lawrence durrell

The Robber by Robert Walser

I was reminded today of one of my all-time favourite books, The Robber. This is one of the most stunning books I've ever read, even though I've only been able to read it in translation. It is also a criminally neglected book by a criminially neglected author. Robert Walser is one of the most clever, funny, and intelligent of the Europeans. The Robber is an absolutely hilarious story about an unnamed Robber caught in a bizarre love triangle. The book is a wild collection of small sketches and non-sequiters that somehow coalesce into a witty and innovative novel that is as much about its narrator/author as it is about The Robber or any of the other characters.

It begins with one of the greatest first lines of any book:

Edith loves him. More on this later.

The introduction to my edition calls the novel a "quirky masterpiece of high modernism" and it's a good five-word description. The first lines (above) set the standard for the tone of the book, which endlessly promises and evades its own narrative. In many respects, you might consider the true story of the novel to be a tale of an author attempting to simultaneously tell and withhold his story. But in addition to being a very innovative, experimental narrative, it's very readable and humorous. A later quote where the narrator has once again begun speaking of himself, in an evasive move to avoid telling the story:

People might suppose I've a low opinion of myself. On my table lie magazines. How could someone they name as honorary subscriber be a person of little worth? Often I receive entire bundles of letters, which clearly demonstrates that here and there I'm very much in people's thoughts. If I ever make a visit where visits have significance, I'd do it quite cozily, with respect, and, as for the rest, as if I had one of my hands in my coat pocket, that is, a touch woodenly. For it's amusing to appear somewhat awkward, I mean to say, there's something beautiful about it. Poor Robber, I'm neglecting you completely. It's said he likes to eat semolina pudding, and worships anyone who fries him up some nice Rösti potatoes. Admittedly this is slander on my part, but with a person like this, why split hairs? Now something about that deceased widow. Across from me stands a house whose façade is quite simply a poem. French troops who marched into our city in 1798 beheld the countenance of this house, provided they took the trouble or had the time to notice it.

I love how everything in this story is so contingent on knowledge its author does not have, as in those final lines (which, you will notice, are offered as if they related somehow to a dead widow, more of this endless deferral of the story proper).

Every once in a while Walser attempts to summarize the events of the book. But his narrator-character fails miserably as an author, which in many respects is the source of much of the book's humour. Walser is working very hard to appear the clown, and a clever clown he makes:

The general state of affairs now appears to us as follows: Edith has behaved rather bunglingly toward "her" Robber. She committed noteworthy errors. I, for my part, have stated in these pages my wish to take him by the hand and lead him to her so he can stand before her like a sort of sinner and beg her forgiveness. But ought he to beg her forgiveness on account of her bungling? Really there wouldn't be any point to it. So now I find myself in a slight pickle, seeing these reconciliatory negotiations dangling once again in uncertainty. Though it's true I regard the indefinite, at times, as auspicious. For how am I to know what sort of welcome Edith will offer us in the event of our attempting a timid knock at her door? After all, it might well occur to her to slam the door on our, that is, my and my Robber's nose, perhaps saying to us: "Get lost, both of you." Assuredly she's still fuming at me. And at him as well? I couldn't say. In point of fact, she's a habitual fumer. For a time she appear to us, that is, to all those she encountered, with a brownish tinge to her.

Walser is a writer you need to read, whoever you may be. His work is very funny and has an air of innocence about it that is truly delightful yet tempered with a very sad and a very quiet underbelly of knowledge.

Besides, how can you not love a guy who describes himself as a "honorary subscriber" to various magazines?