get to the point

"On a high shelf beneath a low ceiling, I’d discovered a single copy of Harry Mathews’s The Sinking of Odradek Stadium. It was a novel recommended to me in a professor’s rushed, indecipherable scrawl on the first story I ever submitted to a college class—a literature course, not one of those dreary, impossible fiction-writing workshops. The professor added that I had the talent to be a writer, but that I had to quit rambling and get to the point. Twenty-five years later on the other side of the world, the book was waiting. His point had found me."

from Gordon's enemies list

 

the universal appeal of fascism

"What [Professor] Licht initiates as glib anecdote moves to officious young Americans pretending to be serious critics. As a group, we want to speak about the cycles of history, when the next Hitler might appear, and how and whether fascist moments can be avoided in future history or contemporary moments. But isn’t it the rule and not the exception? We wander from cycles as Licht steers us toward the principle of backbiting within the Reich. A man could not be trusted who would not willingly lie and sleep his way to the top, or at least ahead of his best friends and neighbors. He suggests that even the Reich had its secrets. He asks if anyone would like to speak of the universal appeal of fascism, or if we should just break for McDonalds and washrooms."

giraffe

"This reminded me by some strange association of a giraffe I once saw at a zoo that lowered its great head below the brute next door that was pissing at the time, from which piss it took great gulps, only to raise itself when the piss stopped, and suck inwards as if tasting wine with spittle, a great trail of which spit was carried upon a breeze, together with some half ingested piss, across the face of a woman standing just by me who was gazing at the spectacle like many others beside her. She remarked upon it, referring only to her eye, there is giraffe piss in my eye, she said, no mention of the face, displaying great restraint given the circumstances. I express more disgust when shat upon by a small bird than she did with a face full of piss. The great comedy of her situation, the fact that made it so deliciously grotesque, to my mind, was not just that she had giraffe piss in her eye, but giraffe piss that had been savoured by another such creature and communicated to her upon a trail of saliva."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

lost his way

"A v-shaped squadron of geese breaks the silence with their squawking and barking. A late commute south before the frigid temperatures set in permanently, although from my angle, it appears they head east, maybe slightly to the north even. I'm not the only one who has lost his way, that's for sure. A last goodbye, and then I depart for work."

bewildered

"Hesitant and bewildered students were his specialty. They posed a special problem to the institution, since these students were no longer sure what they were doing there and were no longer secure in their habits. They milled about and wondered quite openly what this place was for."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen

old friends arrive by mail

 

one-leg sittings

"So I read [Thomas Bernhard's] Extinction very slowly indeed, and did most of that reading in the toilet cubicle at work. Most thinking and much else at work must be done in toilet cubicles. Toilet cubicles are about the only place where thinking can happen, I thought, where the association between thinking and [elimination] seemed entirely appropriate to my deplorable state of mind. It was unbearable to read a book like Extinction slowly. Only so much time can be spent in a toilet cubicle before one leg goes dead, followed by the other. It is easy to spot these toilet cubicle thinkers, I thought. They walk around with one dead leg from too much sitting on the pot. They think for the amount of time it takes for one leg to go dead, I thought, but not the other. Being habitual toilet cubicle thinkers, they leave the cubicle before the second leg goes dead so that they have one leg to hobble with. Becoming an experienced cubicle thinker myself, I only read Extinction in one-leg sittings."

~~ from The Sick List by Ansgar Allen