Years ago I read a strange little novel from Japan about men who lived in boxes. It was an annoying goddamned book, spare and artsy and all very post-modern, very Yalie in all, but also compelling. That too was annoying. You couldn’t miss the metaphor, couldn’t care about these abstract Japanese box-men, couldn’t stop reading. As a young Eli at Silliman College I used to read Kafka the same way and for the same reasons, and now I discover I have been a boxman for years, with nothing so tight and roomy as the appliance carton which the Japanese boxman lived in.
Musty boxes. Silly man. A genuinely sophomoric and extraordinarily in-joke that.
Unfinished man, really. An M.A. from Yale is an admission of a certain kind of defeat, however much you gussy it up in sixties reverie and a yellowing stringbook of metropolitan triumphs.