related to last post, remember how two of JB’s shows are titled “Everyone I’ve Ever Known Everyone I’ve Ever Loved Everyone I’ve Ever Hated Everyone I’ve Ever Fucked” and “Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days” … lol

this is also something i can’t fully explain myself on, but i’ve been thinking a lot about this (the second screenshot in my last post is especially relevant) wrt the criticisms of a little life, specifically because a little life does so overtly make a claim to comprehensiveness: it is “a life”, both in its scope / focalizing the missing pieces of jude’s chronology as its direct plot, and that it structurally accumulates narrators towards the end goal of being able to “complete” jude’s narration - e.g. harold’s second person chapters to narrate jude’s ending since he can’t do it himself. it’s interesting to me that in criticizing that so many terrible things happen to jude, i get the sense that these people feel like any individual section of his life/the novel - orphaned in a monastery, sexually abused on the road with father luke, held captive and disabled by the doctor, being the inscrutable prodigious roommate in a group of college students, an abusive relationship in adulthood, his relationship with willem or harold - would all make fine novels on their OWN, but stringing them together in this way is too far, that’s what pushes it into gratuitousness or implausibility. well to me clearly these two things are connected. kind of depressing that you could read a story that is so fixated on the conditions that make producing the narrative that you are reading possible, where the reader is identified with the other people in jude’s life who are trying to access this narrative and believe achieving it is essential to their relation to this person, also in which she uses two very literal devices where this narrative appears diegetically within the novel (jude’s story to willem in the closet + the testimony he leaves for harold to find after his suicide) and not connect them. in a perfect world this would be the focal point of a little life’s reception to me… what does it mean to tell a complete life narrative, what does it mean or do to a subject to demand one or force one to cohere around them

all my candle beck rereading has brought me back to annie proulx, specifically because she wrote stories whose occasional sole purpose was to invent a life and tell what happened within it from to start to finish. with a level of banal detail so extreme that it actually circles around to being essential. mostly i reread candle beck to reconnect with someone who was interested in sparsely populating an imaginary world with things that could have happened or existed there… like yeah he IS drinking orange juice straight from the bottle with the fridge door hanging open, thank you for saying so. It was 1993. Yet everything that happened was real,. etc. and i think annie proulx could also be that for me. stories for people who care what movie he saw at the theaters in summer 1974. it matters that it happened in this way, and in happening this way excluded all other possibilities (it was rare). text that understood everything:

something that is so compelling to me in a way i can’t really articulate is the dynamic between a teenaged character who is having sex with an adult and the person of their own age who they are also having sex with

lines that made me say wow i miss candle beck so bad it hurts

“born to beg” is such a perfectly placed track the first four songs of the album are so complex and nauseating and describing this furtive and ruined thing and then it’s like oh this is actually very simple, at least for one of you

at TD garden with a melancholic $10 diet coke watching someone happen once and then recede forever