context is king.
you know how sometimes you can experience something in an ambivalent or slightly appreciative way, tinker a bit, return, and get blown?
about a month ago i picked up the collected stories of issac babel. wikipedia describes him as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry"
holler.
last night i had a few beers and decided to get back into babel. the rush of the commuter train and the molecules of belgian beer diffusing in my bloodstream rerouted the reading experience into something literally joyful - babel's frantic, gurgling, slick, and always sort of snowy prose had never felt so fucking packed with energy. i had battery fingers and a full-blown face boner. there were Odessa girls and naked men hugging russian trees, soilders getting pissed on and then gunned down in trenches, nurses tearfully exposing their breasts to crippled men. do you understand? this collection is amazing.
