Thursday's thoughts... a little early?

Remember how we talked about semicolons in class the other day? (I've suddenly remembered, after planning to write this post for a bit, that this may have happened in British Literature... so... just play along, please.) Well, I found it ironic, after talking about how semicolons are the most sophisticated grammatical device out there, that Eggers wrote, on page 288, that "you can hear his semicolons!" (speaking about Bill Clinton). Just a note about the irony of... things. Yep.

On a related, if somewhat disjointed, note, I find Eggers' writing style really appealing. We talked on Tuesday about the way he presents a little bit of a story and then skips to something else and then back and forth again... well, this is sort of like that... but it's more that he starts his stories, or anecdotes or whatever else you'd like to call them, right in the middle. Or, somewhere not at the beginning. For instance, flip the page over to 291, and at the very beginning of the paragraph after the break, Eggers writes "Toph is better at it than I am. Half the time, mine go behind me, which is funny on its own, but is not the effect we've been going for. We are doing the thing where we pretend to throw the baseball as hard as possible, with a huge windup, leg-kick and everything and then, at the last minute, instead of actually gunning it, we let it slip off our fingers, suddenly in slow motion, the ball let go with a high, looping arc, the trajectory slow and sorry, a one-winged pelican." So, he starts out explaining their game... without explaining their game. You know? And this happens on a larger scale, even in this instance. Really, Eggers is beginning a story about him and Toph visiting apartments in San Fransisco, but it starts as a story about fake baseball throwing. See what I mean? I always find syntax and word choice and word order really interesting (sometimes passively, sometimes not) so this... not quite word order choice, but uh, story order choice is sort of fascinating because it's anything but linear... which is kind of the way I like syntax to be. Convoluted is good.

So. There you have it. My Thursday thoughts... do with them as you will.