in grendel’s alone working on my second absinthe and my re-reading of the first half of ben lerner’s *leaving the atocha station*, the best book (by far) that i have yet read by any author i consider “a member of my generation.” i will have to write more fully about it later on—but for now here are my thoughts, for i no longer wish to contain them.

i am re-reading the first half of the book because i originally read the first half, the first three chapters, in three different sittings in a chair nested in the biography section of the harvard coop. the initial reason i didn’t buy it was a deep-seated reluctance—originally financial, now perverse (in the sense that it persisted as an unjustified desire even after the material conditions originally justifying it, i.e. my unemployment, no longer applied, and at any rate was unjustified considering the amount of money i spent on used books)—to buy any new (as opposed to used) books. but, as i read, my in-store reading took on (as unjustified yet persistent behaviors often do) an almost ritualistic significance: it became something like a refuge, a place apart from the cold unboundedness of life outside; something like the sabbath peace; something like church.

it wasn’t just the material conditions, though, that made this little metaphysical dynamic set itself up in my life—mostly it was the book itself. my feeling while reading it—and this may seem a strange thing to say about a book whose narrator spends most of his waking life teetering on the edge of a panic attack—but my feeling while reading it was that i found it comforting: that there is someone else in the world who also has those feelings—or those thoughts, or whatever those things are that virginia woolf writes about, those things that are midway between feelings and thoughts—that i do; that the world is still such that it is even possible to write a book like *leaving the atocha station*—a fact that, to me at least, was far from obvious; that my overflowing store of unwritten potentialities, many of which i’d more or less given up on, might be writable after all; and, most of all, an almost uterine sense that i am not alone in the world, that there is someone else out there who is identical to me on an atomic level.

i meant it when i said atomic rather than molecular. i am made of the same stuff as, if not ben lerner, then at least adam gordon—but that stuff is constellated into quite distinct, if sometimes isotopic, things: he grooves on the opacity and inaccessibility of art, while the i am addicted to the experience of seeing a work of art shine forth for me as a unified, utterly translucent whole in which ever detail appears as necessary and the whole thing becomes some sort of potted undergraduate figuration of universal utopian reconcilement; he is a compulsive liar, while i am a horrible liar and compulsive truth teller, so much so that i avoid as much as possible all social situations in which i will be required to be inauthentic or feign spontaneity, which is most of them; he is having some sort of an adventure in a foreign land, while i am having some sort of adventure in the city where i grew up.

my resolve is wearing out and so is my patience with the horrible tumblr iphone app and i haven’t even gotten around to actually talking about the book yet. i ate two things, the first (a veggie burger) disappointing and the second (something between buffalo wings and chicken satay, ordered to mitigate the disappointment of the first) absolutely delicious, but still not good enough to remedy the pall that the first had cast over the whole meal, which i had been looking forward to with the anticipation of a man who has eaten nothing all day save a bowl of oatmeal, two dark and stormies, and part of one grapefruit and two oranges. even two absinthes couldn’t fully restore my sense of humanity. i am writing, though, so i must have done something right. i don’t even know if i have much of anything to say about the book—by which i mean, i don’t think i have anything to say about it that it doesn’t already say preemptively about itself. so for now all i’ll say, to anyone who reads this is: read *leaving the atocha station*, and read it now. sorry for the makeshift asterisk italics—they are due to a limitation of the tumblr app, which is also what is preventing me from reading over the beginning of this post to ensure that it (the beginning) still makes sense given how it (the post as a whole) is now turning out. it’s probably better that way.

i didn’t even say the story of how i came to buy the book new, and i don’t think it will. it would involve mentioning the other books i also bought in that purchase, all three of which would be liable to establish some sort of “cred” for me in the eyes of my readers. but i’d rather not be that guy. so instead i will merely reiterate: read this book, read it now, read it over and over. i cannot say this strongly enough, so i will say it one more time and then be done: read it! okay i’m out.