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A distinction of Frege, a Wittgenstein-era titan: to mention a word or phrase is to speak about it, w/ at least implicit quotation marks: e.g., "Kate" is a four-letter name; to use a word or phrase is to mention its referent: e.g., Kate is by default the main character of Wittgenstein's Mistress.
footnote 7. kinda interesting to think about
[...] "I EXIST" is the signal that throbs under most voluntary writing--& all good writing. [...]
Mr. T. Pynchon, who has done in literature for paranoia what Sacher-Masoch did for whips, [...]
just a funny quote (apparently someone else who checked out the book thought so too--the passage is marked with a pencil)
(referring to Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch, Austrian writer and journalist, who gained renown for his romantic stories of Galician life and for whom the term "masochism" was named
The basic argument here is that Mr. Markson, by drawing on a definitive atomistic metaphysics and transfiguring it into art, has achieved something like the definitive anti-melodrama. He has made facts sad. For Kate's existence itself is that of an atomic fact, her loneliness metaphysically ultimate. Her world is "empty" of all but data that are like the holes in a reticular pattern, both defined & imprisoned by the epistemic strands she knows only she can weave. [...]
just a nice passage
[...] what's less clear and way richer is the peculiar slant "omniresponsibility" takes when the responsible monad in question is historically passive, per- and & conceived as an object and not a subject--i.e., when one is a woman, who can effect change & cataclysm not as an agent but merely as a perceived entity ... perceived by historically active testosteroids whose glands positively gush with agency. To be an object of desire (by hirsute characters), speculation (by hirsute author), oneself the "product" of male heads & shafts is to be almost Classically feminized, less Eve than Helen, responsible without freedom to choose, act, forbear. The (my) terribly blanket assumption here is that received perceptions of women as moral agents divide into those of Hellenic and those of Evian (Eve-ish) responsibility [...]
on Kate
[...] there is indeed about the Stadium crowd down here something indefinable that strongly suggests Connecticut license plates and very green lawns. In sum, the socioeconomic aura here for the day's headline match is one of management rather than labor.
[...] there are just as many furtive-looking parties standing at the edges asking whether anyone passing by has an extra ticket for sale, or would like perhaps to sell their own, as there aer scalpers. The scalpers and weird people asking to be scalped seem not even to notice one another, all of them calling softly at once, and this makes the last pre-Gate stretch of the promenade kind of surreally sad, a study in missed connection.
footnote 21
[...] Deep down, we all know that the real allure of sexuality has about as much to do with copulation as the appeal of food does with metabolic combustion. Trite though it (used to) sound, real sexuality is about our struggles to connect with one another, to erect bridges about the chasms that separate selves. Sexuality is, finally, about imagination. [...]
[...] one John Connor; and but that apparently the Resistance itself somehow gets one-time-only access to Skynet's time-travel technology [...]
[...] you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it [...]
on writing a book being like having a hideous infant following you around