It's always that everything always speeds up and slows down both

8/9/07, 15:12 - p. 614 - fight scene, elaborated in frame-by-frame detail.
A real ample dessert for the narrative-starved, at this point in the book.


Things to note, at random, in the last three hundred pages

- Conversations contained in the footnotes are vital. Cf. Hal and
Orin, Orin and Steeply, Arlis and Pemulis after Arlis and Schtact,
etc.

- Avril creeps me out. Always and forever.

- Sections dealing with Mario's emotional engagement with the world and
his basic decency, though few and far between, give the narrative a
bit of ballast and dilutes the feeling that you've begun to consume
something that's more enamored with its own clever depiction of suffering
and loneliness and dealing with fucked-upness of the world than it is
responsive to the characters' navigation of said suffering/loneliness/etc.

- Failure is sometimes just bound to happen.

- Bruce Green's father's psychic collapse and evolving turn to lethal
modification of ACME pranks, eventually leading to state-prescribed
lethal injection - I didn't remember that part at all.

More to come. I'm still about 70 pages from the trenchant analysis
re: cynicism and naivete in the US arts which will be excerpted in
toto, eventually, here.