#112
Rain on a paved road. Nocturne. Yeux. Labial consonant, supine vowel. And tiens! Your name spells itself like evening. Wherefore darkness bends toward dark. Questions report and recant. "Value happens to you, Greg." And to you too, mon dear. The proof of head-phones, eloquence. A Roman scholar, business tied and jacket. Tout le monde for you, alone.
Or in the light: St. Thomas Aquinas. Let us read him. Prima pars. Le parc. The soniferous screes of birds. In feet, in famine. The motive case defined. Corinthians 3:1-2. And a field of turbans variopinti. Sein. The early rise, the inkling. The chattering box goes lax. Holy holy hands on free. Diaboli virtus in lumbis est. Light allumes obscurity. And we will come before we parse.
posted by Greg @ 6:43 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Thanks for the comment, Charles. Though I'm sorry if you didn't enjoy starting at #112. What you're reading is not exactly a book, but the peculiar gestation process of what will one day be a similarly peculiar novel.
It's interesting that you find the style fragmented, because it doesn't feel that way at all to me. Each sentence or section of sentence is framed by the punctuation and spacing, so as to be supererogatory. If anything's missing, it's what I might call the keywords - so far almost entirely constituted by the proper names of the novel's characters. Sometimes they are not explicitly given because they've been given sufficiently in other posts; other times their presence is obscured because they are appearing for the first time. In the case of #112, the problem you're having is double. The top half of the post concerns a (mostly - see #81) new character whose name resembles Steven's (the main character). The bottom half offers an inversion or reflection through the name of another new character: Thomas. Obviously, the signifincance of these names can only be rendered retrospectively (unless, that is, you are in a position to connect their real world identities with their forms in the Library).
As to the language question: I don't speak French well, not yet anyway (I began learning it last week). But the Library means to be in multiple languages, often simultaneously. #112, for example, gestures in at least five languages: English, German, French, Latin, and Italian. Of course, as you rightly noticed, French is (next to English) being privileged in this post. That is intentional: both of the characters introduced here speak French. Though a reader may not be able to ascertain that detail from this post alone, that French is important here is clearly evident, and so can (at the time of reading this or a later post) prompt an interpretation or interpretations as to why.
I hope this is somewhat "allume-inating" (you can also check out Paring His Fingernails, which often reflects upon the Library's writing process), and I hope to hear more from you in the future.
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