Gagarin says, in ecstasy,
he could have
gone on forever
he floated
at and sang
and when he emerged from that
one hundred eight minutes off
the surface of
the earth he was smiling.
Then he returned
to take his place
among the rest of us
from all that division and
subtraction a measure
toe and heel
heel and toe he felt
as if he had
been dancing
Yuri Gagarin
...Which is to say that instead of being agglutinations of data, his works are characterized by the fact that they are writing—that their insights and their expression are inseparable and maybe indistinguishable. They are the opposite of Wikipedia: By design, they tell you as much about the author as about the ostensible subject. It's like with music—you want the voice before you want the song, don't you? Or do you just indifferently punch up any old cover of "Moon River" and that's good enough? Likewise, with a writer such as Dyer (and there aren't too many in his league), what you dig is interpretation, in its several senses: exegesis, and profound internalization of a subject, and a thorough imaginative remaking of that subject...'
I remember the edition: it was a book with very large print, like a primary school reader, slim, cloth-covered, with a horrendous drawing on the jacket, a hard book to steal and one that I didn’t know whether to hide under my arm or in my belt, because it showed under my truant student blazer, and in the end I carried it out in plain sight of all the clerks at the Glass Bookstore, which is one of the best ways to steal and which I had learned from an Edgar Allan Poe story...
out & about
out & about (Shasta is wearing a T-shirt to protect her stitches as she's healing from a recent stick-related injury--she's almost all better now)
