( alt: we do not know all we know)

It’s not an unusual event to walk into a bookstore with no exact purpose other than to browse and pick up a book off the New Release table. People gravitate towards the new, intriguingly packaged novels and sift through them for the synopsis or some line that strikes. It’s easy. There’s no motivation or goal other than to view. Then it happens all of a sudden and it feels like magic. You find yourself holding a book that must be bought. There’s no telling what it will be – an attractive book cover, a perfect sentence, a compelling storyline – but you’re hooked and the book is quickly bought and packaged in a plastic bag.

Sometimes you even have no clue what the book is about or who the author is.

was: annales nomadique, a novel of internet.

I didn’t know if the book was a novel or a volume of poetry. It wasn’t until I began it that I realized it was a literal novel of internet. The reader is thrust into an informational sea and left to pick out points of interest and knowing. Its a great, episodic mismash of language and culture, story and slogan. There are bits of dialogue, of information, and blink-and-you –miss-it narrative. The book is almost visual as its read. One can see all the color and shape succinctly described within the text. Rather than write something of my own, I’m going to share the best thing I’ve read all week:

I’m going to tell you what happened, eh? Bobbie gets it into his head to go out in a girl’s dress over Doc Martens 8-eye Union Jack top cap black high boots on the second day of the Stampede, promenading through the pancake breakfast with a white Smithbuilt on his head, and everyone is laughing and giving him the high sign or the finger, eh, but all in good spirits, when out of nowhere this weekend cowboy sticks him once in the gut with a shiv and runs away through the crowd, people running after him, leaving Bobbie clutching himself and looking embarrassed about how the blood’s spreading through his fingers and across the belly of his chemise like a dark crimson azalea. RCMP guy comes back winded from running but with the cowboy in cuffs and asks, is this him? Bobbie cannot say by then so they roll him away on a gurney but just when they’re closing the doors this girl jumps in saying she’s his wife and plops down in the jumpseat next to him, and when he gets out two days later after observation they move in together, just like that; she’s the sticker’s by now ex-girlfriend, see, and she tells Bobbie the way she sees it is she owes him her love because of what her boyfriend has done, and they live with each other for three years like that until she has a baby, then they get married and have two more kids, and she still tells him how sexy he looked that morning in that dress and with the garnet feather on his hat and how the scar is like a ruby under the skin of his guts. (was, Michael Joyce)