Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Coming after that

I read Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches in Banff, a gift from my son, and wondered if the number of chapters--each beginning with the narrator wishing us "good morning" and reporting, in the first place, on the fire he's just built in his fireplace, and whatever comes after that--depended on the number of matches in the box, since he uses the last match at the beginning of the last chapter. That's just the sort of arbitrary structure this writer would take on, I surmised. I'm that way myself (tempted to call on/write every Rest Stop on #1 highway in Saskatchewan, for instance).
As for book of matches, that's a quicker read. And I've often seen them soggy or dried out, past their spark. How many books per sparking lot?

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