“In the perfectly stirring
stories of Where We Go When All We
Were Is Gone, Sequoia Nagamatsu constructs a cartography of eye-stinging
wonder with his fleet of wobbly wabi-sabi GPS syntax-spinning satellites. These
fictions plot asymmetrically the raw terrain of the wasabi slathered human
heart, leaving us lost in all our findings, the stunned state of boketto, empty
yet teeming with that taste of awful awe.”
— Michael Martone
Things that make you go,
“*duh* - what?” ... but on the other hand, after months of reading nothing but
the depravity of the American condition and complete failure of the national
educational system at its most fundamental level (i.e., politics on Facebook,
when you realize that there are lots of people out there who cannot spell basic
words, or employ rudimentary logic and yet are given access to a voting booth),
I’d forgotten that there are a few people out there whose brains function
occasionally. Which is heartening.
Not THIS guy, no – (I
suspect he had possibly just chopped a lot of onions – or perhaps couldn’t
handle the wasabi – his eyes were definitely stinging, no disputing that one,
before he wrote that) – but I ordered the book anyway because, despite the
unintelligible and incomprehensible review, it sounded creative and
interesting. Along with a blender, and
there may be some subliminal message in that too ... except I needed the
blender. Like every other blender in the
USA, it was made in China, so I expect it to fall apart and stop working after
a month. Get out your stopwatches.
Speaking of which ... ah,
the fun of watching the entire world fall apart at the seams ... Nice, Turkey,
Dallas, Orlando, Brexit, Kansas City, BLM triggering police murdering squads, Germans
being knifed and axed on trains, the world’s worst U.S. election of all time,
Trump blurting out more and more insane nonsense ... all except for the
election pretty much within one month’s time... feels like World War III is on
the verge of exploding. Well, at least
I’ll have some reading material to enjoy before I go. And maybe one frozen margarita, courtesy of
China, before the blender falls apart.
It’s impossible, trying to
make sense of this 2016 election. It’s
like a circus ... no other way to describe it.
As I write this, Trump’s “spokeswoman” (someone named Katrina Pierson, who
appears to be a convicted shoplifter from Texas) has just blamed President Obama
for something that happened 4 years before he was even elected in 2008 ...
resulting in a Facebook and Twitter explosion of ridicule at her idiocy ... and
you think, “Why would Trump pick a shoplifter as a spokesperson?” Makes no sense. Meanwhile a senator in CA just demanded that
Trump be forced to submit to a psyche exam.
But that is the way this election is going – something like a massive
April Fool’s Day prank or something. You
just give up and stare at the three-ring circus in amazement, unable to make
much sense of it.
