Category: questions

Are collectivities interesting because, as they are networks, energy can move along their grids?

Does the book feel a little like a soap opera?

Aren’t all autobiographies soap operas?

Is it lubricious enough?

Aren’t they awfully “invested” in “writing well?” Ought we to be more so?

(“they”? “we”?)

Doesn’t everyone enact a fantasy of themselves?

Do the names roll out like a scroll of (a part of) my own youth, sort of?

Doesn’t Ted Pearson write a little like, I don’t know, John Ruskin?

Doesn’t Lyn’s section sound a little like a testimonial?

Did Tom really have an experience with a transsexual?

Isn’t everyone in love with Carla?

Why is Barry the only one to mention clothing? Isn’t his section the wittiest?

Is the situation at Berkeley Ron describes replicable? I mean in the near future?

Why did Juliana make a fuss? Wasn’t Ron’s mention of the black woman his father was having an affair with a narratively necessary descriptive marker? And wasn’t Kit’s mention of “an African-American Marxist intellectual and auto mechanic with a daughter named Erica” not particularly eroticized – except insofar as he’s someone’s lover (and aren’t most ((happy)) people?)? Is the fact that the daughter named Erica significant? Is she Erica Hunt? Isn’t that generationally impossible? Or maybe the mechanic was older? Does every detail in a narrative have to be relevant? Why are we made uncomfortable by possibly irrelevant details?

Why was it hard for Bob to posit love as a term in a discussion of writing? Why does he seem so anxious?

Don’t they seem to mention their children a lot? Is having children really so fulfilling or is it something the species/the state brainwashes us into believing so it can sustain itself? Is that too nihilistic of a thing to even say? Was it a mistake for me not to have children?

Have “we” (not “they”) overcome modernism? Does modernism require overcoming?

Why is this book so expensive? Isn’t it wrapped in brown paper? Is it sustainable? Doesn’t it fit nicely into a coat pocket?

Didn’t I go to the Grand Piano in 1977 after walking ten miles for the whales through Golden Gate Park (not for a poetry reading) when I was thirteen wearing kung fu shoes which were all the rage then and getting blisters with my friend Caitlin who later became estranged from me and died of complications related to a brain aneurysm she had had many years before?

Aren’t there still a lot of questions to ask?

Am I looking forward to the next installment? Hell yeah!