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LENORE: Well see, it seems like it's not really like a life that's told, not lived; it's just that the living is the telling, that there's nothing going on with me that isn't either told or tellable, and if so, why the difference, why live at all?
[...]
LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there's nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got [...]? She's exactly what's said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she's going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.
[...]
LENORE: [...] if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?
JAY: ". . . she said, using words."
"Gee," I say, "there are no sheets on this bed."
The mouse looks at me. "Señor," he says, "if you sheet on my bed, I will keel you."
We both laugh, and the mouse punches me on the arm.
"The not blinking really bothers me, I've got to tell you. And what's this on her neck, here? On Brenda's neck?"
"Birthmark. Pimple."
"Is this an air-valve? This is an air-valve! See, here's the cap. Are you sitting with an inflatable doll?
"Don't be ridiculous."
"You're sitting with an inflatable doll! This isn't even a person."
"Brenda, this isn't funny, show Ms. Beadsman you're a person."
"My god. See, she weighs about one pound. I can lift her up." Lenore lifted Brenda way up by the thigh. Brenda suddenly fell out of Lenore's hand and her head got wedged between the bench and Mary-Ann's hand, and she was upside down. Her dress fell up.
"Good heavens," said Mr. Bloemker.
"One of those dolls. That's just sick. How can you sit in public with an anatomically correct doll?"
"I must confess, the wool seems to have been completely pulled over my eyes. I thought she was simply extremely shy. A troubled Midwesterner, in an ambivalent relation ..."
[...] the patients there couldn't remember the names for things, televisions, water, doors ... and so under Gramma Lenore's influence he had them identified with their function? [...] So the door is 'What we go from room to room through'? Water is 'What we drink, without color'? Television is 'What we watch Lawrence Welk on'--Lawrence Welk being primitive, undefined, even in syndication, no problem with Lawrence Welk. How my mother and all the rest came after a fashion to relearn the words they needed, via function, via what the things named were good for? And then Gramma Lenore noticing that the one component of the facility this method couldn't be applied to was the patients themselves, because they had no function, no use, weren't good for anything, really at all? No? She told me this drove her up the wall. They had no use at all. What? No, the derivative comes from the pineals of cattle. We use cattle pineals. Rather we would if we could. Now, just wait, please. [...]
I love the implicit shocked question that Lenore asks about where the pineals come from
[...] Care for a Corfu nut, by the way? No? They're quite good. I got them in Canada, fishing. [...]
one of Lenore's dad's many lies
[...] Modern party-dance is simply writhing to suggestive music. It is ridiculous, silly to watch and excruciatingly embarrassing to perform. It is ridiculous, and yet absolutely everyone does it, so that it is the person who does not want _to do the ridiculous thing who feels out of place and uncomfortable and self-conscious ... in a word, ridiculous. Right out of Kafka: the person who des not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an Amherst/Mt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as "F.K.," only one not dancing ...) Modern party-dance is an evil thing. [...]
an idea for a Monroe Fieldbinder story
Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance's outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V's. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child's hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.
an unexpectedly beautiful and sad paragraph
A truly, truly horrible dream, last night. Don't even want to talk about it. I am fresh out of bed. Urinating. I look down. Just a lazy stream of early-morning maple-syrup urine. Suddenly the single stream is a doubled, forking stream. Then a tripled trident stream. Four, five, ten. Soon I am at the node of a fan of urine that sprays out in all directions, blasting the walls of the bathroom, plaster shooting everywhere, contents swirling at my feet. When I awaoke--alone, Lenoreless, hence the dream--I was really afraid I had wet the bed, the windows, the ceiling. I may murder Jay over this one.
right after note 575
"I almost attacked him on the spot. I just had no idea where to begin hitting. He's much larger than he was a week ago."
Rick telling Lenore about Norman claiming to be in love with her
[...] an ocean into which this particular seal was going to pour a strong (hopefully unitary) stream of his own presence, to prove that he still is, and so was [...]
Rick referring to himself as a seal for some reason. (see note 576)