book review

so, in trying to fold tasks into one another, i am reading richard powers' galatea 2.2, which i am thinking about teaching this school year, as inspiration to finish writing a book review i am writing for a friend's journal. i am probably about, say, 70% qualified to comment on this particular book, and it manifests issues that represent my frustrations with certain parts of academia as a whole. maybe more on that later. it's also a really interesting book, btw.

in any case, i usually turn to other writers not so much for "inspiration," although there is some of that, but more for vocabulary, cadence, syntax, tense, perspective, and various ways of folding the plane of language that i would have never been able to come up with on my own.

but as much as i am enjoying the book, richard powers' language isn't really doing it for me. so:

"Lentz had speculated about that strange doubling in one of his more controversial articles. Memory was a parasite, he proposed. It opportunistically used perception's circuitry for its playback theater.
"And I have that whole parasite intact. Nothing requireed ot bring it forth but numbness. True, the specifics of that moment have grown stylized Artist's conceptions. I can check nothing. C. kept the book, the one where we pasted the paper trail of our shared existence. The documents are all elsewhere, trashed, or transferred to a stranger's long-term storage."

see what i mean??!!! this kind of thing inclines me to write my book review thusly: "the collection is a something that glimmers with the something of something, all something. bleak somethings cascade. the celluloid future is a palimpsest of something. in order to something, we must confront the something of naiveté."

this will not do!!