we eat ourselves alive

in Backbone (short story, here read & discussed by Adam Levin, author of the brilliant The Instructions), David Foster Wallace defines suiphagia1 as self-swallowing, which he then asserts has been identified as “a rare form of inanitive pica2”

“Inanition describes a state of suffering from either a literal emptiness (of sustenance) or a metaphorical emptiness (of interest or energy)… [and] comes from inanis (meaning “empty”). Another far more common descendant of inanis is inane. The family resemblance is clear: inane is used describe things lacking significance or substance.”

- Merriam-Webster

Levin pointed out how Backbone (the story of a 6yo boy who makes it his goal to personally kiss every square inch of his own body) feels resonant with Kafka’s A Hunger Artist (by far the Kafka story I’ve thought of most often over the tears), and honestly, I see it. The proud narcissism in striving for some sort of rigorous sanctity in oneself, the boy always alone and the hunger artist (in his heyday) always on display.

(also all the formal anatomical terminology in Backbone reminds me that the groove between your mouth and chin (y’know, the bit that’s constantly filling up with milky drool on a newborn, which is why I even know this) is also known as the labiomental sulcus)

it’s a beautifully harrowing story, anyways. The trapped feeling of seeing the tree outside the window change over the seasons and interact with light and birds while the boy inside just stretches and curls further and further into himself alone (such a contrast with the way a newborn infant will unfurl over the first few weeks of their life), the way a child’s suffering can be misconstrued as maturity and self-possession, the obsession with and erasure of the self (and here we wonder if the narrator is the boy, with its tone of severely academic disassociation and knowledge what goes on in that solitary bedroom), oh and the self-mothering of the boy trying to kiss every square inch of his own body in the absence of attentive parents (like the octopus, an ~orphan upon arrival) to love him so thoroughly instead

sometimes an octopus will eat its own arms, we think caused by some sort of infection - like, darn, antibiotics aren’t doing the trick and now i feel like i gotta gnaw these fingers off - but more often I think we see octopuses (and some other critters) driven to self-mutilation by the stress of captivity

octopus mothers self-destruct and sometimes eat their own arms after laying their eggs, too. possibly to prevent themselves from eating their young? (relatable. anyone who has held a screaming infant into the next and the next and the next sleepless night knows what it’s like to eat ourselves alive to protect our children.) but in Backbone, the boy’s mother is absent from the story, so he has to tangle in on himself in self-veneration (have not saints lips?) with no mother present to cannibalize him as a mother ought

(octopus fathers die a few months after mating, if mom hasn’t eaten him first - which we figuratively see in the boy’s father here, too) (yeah, even if they inject the female with venom to paralyze her before mating so as to escape the cannibalism)

if you remove the optic gland, octopus mothers avoid their otherwise inevitable death, eating and growing and living significantly longer instead

if the boy could kiss his own eyelids, what then

(you can see the back of an owl’s eyeball3 through its ears, btw)

Timeline cleanse! This is the first recorded image of a tardigrade, drawn by Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. (He called them kleiner Wasserbär, “little water bears”)

for the railfans

“if the Atlanta Plane Train were its own transit agency, [at 250,000 daily riders] it would rank as the 11th largest in the country, just behind Disney World” - the transit guy

Hayden Clarkin (the transit guy) previously told us that the Dollywood Express (the heritage railroad in Dolly Parton’s amusement park) moves about 5,000 passengers/day.

I went looking for a list of these non-transit-agency rail systems and their daily ridership, wanting to interleave it with data on official metro transit systems, but was disappointed to find that the Dollywood Express wasn’t listed in the World Metro Database or this 2018 list of heritage railroad annual ridership

…but that did lead to Voices in the Deep, a list of “departure sounds and next-station announcements in subway systems around the world”

…which is not what I want even for what it is, though. What I want is a list of all the live subway conductor announcements that people can remember. Here, I’ll start:

• When I was a kid, there was a conductor on the Q line (then known as the D, back when the Q went express in Brooklyn) who would announce arrival at Atlantic Ave with “transfer here for the 2/3/4/5/D/Q/N/R [I’m probably misremembering the exact list] trains and the LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG Island Railroad!”

• …whatcha got?

(obviously “Voices in the Deep” also reminds me of Vernor Vinge’s brilliant A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky)

short stories I recently read and enjoyed

• as mentioned at length above

  • Backbone by David Foster Wallace

  • my old fav A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka

• via The Wyrmhole

  • FAQ: The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense by Luke Burns

  • Like a River Loves the Sky by Emma Törzs - love, and letting go, and taxidermy

• The Piano Tuner’s Wives by William Trevor - devotion, love, miserliness, and the essence of giving grace

perfect sentences (and snippets)

• “Hey - do you need the movie star speech? …okay. Carolyn, you are the star of a movie. This is the part of the movie where you get your heart broken. Where the world tests you, and people treat you like shit. But it has to happen this way. Otherwise, the end of the movie, when you get everything you want, won’t feel as rewarding. There are assholes out there, but in the end, they don’t matter. Because this movie’s not about them. It’s never been about them.

  All this time, the movie’s been about you.” - Bojack Horseman

• “He looked at me with eyes which were suddenly wild as if the absence of rest had set them racing like cockroaches under the flare of a light.” - Norman Mailer, An American Dream

• “Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath, but this apparently was his inescapable destiny.” - Elif Batuman, The Possessed

• “There was within him a deep unexpressed conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this, and still less speak about it, but most only attend to one’s own work. And he did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.” - Tolstoy, W&P