Description: always wrong to the light
always wrong to the light
He’d given me a book—more accurately, three volumes shrinkwrapped in a tan, cardboard slipcase—and said something about it being amazing. I probably said thanks and stuck it with all the rest of his gifts: zines of obscure communist theory, Italian modernist poetry, assorted Dalkey Archive paperbacks. Our lives were in many ways at cross-purposes—he a vegan straightedge animal rights activist with a penchant for literature, me an uneducated anarcho-primitivist crustpunk turned vegetable farmer—but we bonded
I don’t know what eventually drew me to pull it from the tottering stack of milk crates we used for shelves. Maybe the daunting size of the thing, or the elaborate patterns on each of the spines, or the mysterious title the collection bore: “2666,” a number evoking both Satan and the future. I must have started it in winter—when the harvest was over, the canning was complete, and the only real task was to tend the hearth against the wet Kentucky cold and read—and continued between planting in the spring. I