Word: reader
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...nonfiction works, such as The Snow Leopard, physical and metaphysical worlds often conspire melodiously. His novels, however, can seem like mountain climbs -- effortful, punishing, dauntingly ambitious mountain climbs that demand as much of the reader as of the author. Often their virtuosity almost obscures their virtues. "Peter always takes the difficult way out," says one editor. Matthiessen all but acknowledges this when he says, "I am really not in the least bit conscious of the reader. Maybe that's braggadocio, or flamboyance, but I really don't think that way. I think you're doing your best work when...
...spoiled. An African fish, the tilapia, cruises irrigation canals devouring any growth that might impede the water flow, but it endangers the Colorado River's sport fish. Coast to coast, European starlings darken the skies. A century ago, the first few were released in New York City by a reader of Shakespeare bent on sharing with the New World every species mentioned by the bard. Today millions of starlings consume and defile our crops and terrorize native bluebirds. So too, we have inadvertently unleashed an invasion of plants, among them, kudzu, hydrilla and water hyacinth...
...power. As the perky illustrations demonstrate, she sleeps all day, hogs the best chair, is afraid of rain and regards the vacuum cleaner as an enemy. Yet the child narrator looks upon her pet as a blend of heroine and best friend. Boodil would agree, and so will any reader with a lazy and lovable mutt...
These lines (from the final stanza of "It Must Be Sophisticated") blend the anxiety of the poet (will my work ultimately do anything new?) with the anxiety of the reader: have I, in this text, discovered anything...
This path--from overcrowdedness to retreat, through loneliness, the fear of endings, and the search for childhood--is only one of many a reader could take through Hotel Lautreamont; in this dense book of 82 poems, there is a sort of conversation among the various kinds of quatrains--between those with refrains and those without, for example; there is a debate among several poems as to their speaker's putative uniqueness, and whether other people might notice it; there are love poems, and poems "about" architecture, and parodies of newspapers, fashion pages, idle chatter and funeral orations...