What do heaven bears do things?

Reads The Last Novel, by David Markson:

Anybody can be nobody.
Said Eugene V. Debs.

Novelist's personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

A lament of Schopenhauer's:
Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.
Said Proust.

Meanwhile, on page 93 of A History of Modern Computing, the words

The word "language" turned out to be a dangerous term, implying much more than its initial users foresaw. The English word is derived from the French langue, meaning tongue, implying that it is spoken.

can be found. Dinaw Mengestu's narrator, the shopkeeper Sepha Stephanos, has this to say:

On those good days, which come once or twice a week, I make just over four hundred dollars. I walk home at the end of the night feeling better, not only about my store, but about this country. I think to myself, America is beautiful after all. There is more here. Gas is cheap. This is not a bad place. Things could be worse. And what else could I have done?

"So then, you hate America today?" Kenneth says. He smiles a half-smile. He pours a little scotch into a Styrofoam cup he stole from his office and hands it to me. I know that if I let him, he would pull from his pocket the missing $26.16 and slide it into the cash register. Anything to make me feel better.

"With all my heart," I say to him.

STAY ALIVE / the electric bass, I would have

One of the reasons I am keeping this blog: I hope to discover, or invent, hitherto unaware themes in my reading. I will be using the word "unaware" where others might use the word "subconscious". You might say that I may be investigating, as Jung wouldn't say, the "collective ignorance" of my books.

Collective Ignorance Artifact No. 1: BEARS.

I have recently read, for example, Rafi Zabor's excellent jazz novel, Bear Comes Home, in which a highly intelligent talking bear plays the saxophone (after Bear's first gig, Ornette Coleman helpfully suggests that he stop transposing his music into human). I have also read Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee, which involves talking bears as part of the scenery of depression. As you read this blog over the coming weeks, keep an eye out for BEARS -- especially talking ones -- and we'll see if they carry any meaning.

AND SO TODAY: As I work a 14-hour day at the store, I will be reading The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengestu, in my spare moments. Whenever I read the title, I think it is missing a verb at the end. I will also continue my browsing through David Markson's The Last Novel -- I'll let you know if I find any bears within.