His suits were ruined. he sat limp against a drawer, bullets in his chest.

Things got torn, and scattered coat hangers, shirts, also his soul.

No one saw the crime of fashion worn by the man leaving the building.

Handmade tailored suits destroyed! Everything was ironed too.

Funny that the victim was at the time dressed to kill, and not the other man.

The guest’s act of disrespect made the nervous host shriek loud.

Soon a neighbor knocked. He called up a crew of men, wearing the same thing.

Unstylish Investigation, unsuited for the night’s chaos.

His brother needed to buy a cheap black thing for his next funeral.

Men wallops the thing that is petted, and they look for the lost souls of those green watered down ice cream parlor films that were popular some miles ago. The walker crawls out doorknobs. The day dream licks up daisy’s on all of these things. Mala Spiel eats a frog who is made of clay. Her mouth has been sewn up for twenty years. She used silk from the game ping-pong, and a hammer. She uses her skin to be eaten by the moon. She is bones and walks up daisies, because they are so wide. The daisies that is. “Are we going up?” she asks the moon, who flies right beneath her shoes.

Luna sensit, sed non audivit. Some angels realize Malam’s infinite despair at this tragic fact, and she is never known again, because everything breaks down, because images are falling to the ground. Malah now has been realized into seas of pure platonic forms. She is just feeling things. She knows her machines that produce her mind. She is like a person who knows what car they buy before they even have a desire for a new one.

Shadowish Wombats screw tightly the gears of such hidden machinery, of capital and of things unfair. She has no idea what faces they have, because they lack images and pieces. She lacks pieces. She has decided to drop out of dream class. She has gotten no As.

“What a sensation? What is this thing that I have found?” She says at her time of eurek(a)ing.

She realized who things are. She knows their names and is friends with The Daisy-Kind. The Daisy-Kind are yellow as the sun, and as golden as the moon’s lemonade sap. They fly on six legs twirling through the air, and eat up green and violet grasses everywhere. All of the lawns are kept nice, because the daisy-kind become machines to eat and grow. They consume the lawns of men, sorta youngish 1950s white nostalgia-image dad types, who work so softly that they pretend to sweat tear drops, and placebo themselves some beer.

She is not static. She is revising her opinions. She is the great handyman. The clockmaker’s assistant. And if the clock is the world who is the craftsmen? She reads no books, only pages of them, because the chapters are slowing her down. Last night she read the bible. The daisy-kind were not watching so she was safe. They are totally mechanical. She is non-automical. She is Totally free and has her will. She has ideas of what she wants.

Doorknobs on the moon are creeping slowly toward her place inside the carcass of the man she executed. She is the sole-mistress of God, and therefore laws. She is utilitarian. Only hats she wears. She is speaking now.

“Well. I am walking nails yesterday. So I was listening to the beetles. They played that back several inches ago. I go to sleep at daytime, and crawl up on the moon. Most people have dreams. I just have more realities. I just have more time for my business. Don’t tell The Daisy-Kind. But I’m going to win. Do not tell the men, but I’m going to win. Mozart and Fourier are my friends. They are always right. They look at all the sounds in my head, and the Beatles play it right. I need several fields of study dedicated to my name. This building should be named right after adults who are spawned from my flesh. None of them will be me. Only they will be Fourier and Mozart, maybe Jesus’s songs from the books too. Malaa is a hero, the fourth seer of space, the last will be sister Leibniz and her sister will be Dany Targaryen. I wonder where I can meet her, or, Whether or not it’s worth the time.”

Everything is an illusion, except the realities. The narrator is confused, coiling back some image of time. The Daisy-Kind rule on dreaming world, and God makes prayers about real ones. God is the greatest prayer, she has ever said. At the moment of learning and recollection, she learned the names of gears. Only Wombats haunt her, and only they make her fear. Capitalists are no roadblock, merely comic mooks to surpass.

She has a podcast that she does not post to the internet, but to the Plant length coreSpider’s Web (Enteryourpodcastnamehere.PLSW). They are all recordings on some phone or another. She has remembered them all. She does not have her phone, but the rules of the game have changed. She knows you must be behind?! She knows what is behind the world, she knows what is made of dice. Everything’s creative everything’s a map. She walks up walls and sleeps at night, on great green rocks, but her real soul body is on the core of earth. She knows all of the plants down there that grow because the sun’s cousin down there makes them pop up. She’s miles ahead upon the dialectic, miles ahead in history. She has access to space beyond time and works with its plant gears.

Cite.PLSW is a place for keeping machine-plant-spheres. Spheres are made of god’s prey. The wit of fools is yummy in his tummy, which he rummy. Fire and water dance around her here. They make a heaven of it all. It is a pure space, untainted by time’s aging deathsaw. Spheres are round as circles and made of moonlight, bound tightly and spin quickly in her arms and eyes.

“Aha! The idea is that all of the image-time is merely composed into the plant machine space, as a foolish and illusory subset, made of a skin wrapped loosely over my spheres that adorn the plants on the web. See it! Just look at how things are masked so loosely. How peoples skins are just not on quite right! Oh how the skin of rocks is coming off! There is a mechanism underneath, filled with living cogs who grow the spheres to make light to make the Daisy-Kind see things. These spheres are made of the moon and so they wail like him. The moon, my god, he is a thing to behold. Why not look up at him and listen to the sounds that he plays from the PLSW. This is because there is no time and there is only space. Spasms of machines are made from the sounds of space and the moon. The moon is just space though, big and round. It’s all made of dense rocky space. The music of the spheres is true and time is not!”

She knows that the spheres are music-machines, jukeboxes that create the howling noises of the wolves’s lunar passion. Lupae are the hands of god in some ways. She is a she-wolf, and she raised Rome, but Reme was her favorite. They are her children born from flesh ripped off via her leg and left arm. Flesh is nothing but image, mere illusionary time so the birthing mattered not. It was not violent, it was peaceful and harmonious. She does no longer gives birth from her womb. Her womb is gone and replaced by plants. Nothing inside of something could be flesh.

The walloping stings someone, not her. Staircases assemble to form a machine to ride in. Staircase Machine—-The Rinzinz Plant. Rinzinz is a spiraling machine that flies. This is how she flies. Just no one can see the Rinzinz plant, unless she makes a fake image puppet version.

The 90s are a block down the street on cite.PLSW, from the time of Moses and Green biology of Hildegard. She was a great planet maker, who grew plants for breakfast each morning. Green is the fuel of Machines so they can produce Spheres to be the moon on PLSW. The Moon is the crash and the throng of teeth chattering. It is a beckon to all who listen.

She is aware that she could do something dn that would be the same as having done it. She is just going the direction she likes. Most people think that the Daisy-Kind are watching them when they run through time, straight and narrow. They did not have to go through time and could have just opted for space. There is always space between time, and there is no time at all. Time is an overcomplication and misunderstanding of certain zones of space. It is like how images are scrunched up into balls. It is a dream for it to be false. She rests in the world of the golden moon and Rinzinz, not in the world of images and clocks, those fake machines of evil.

Worldbuilding is not a new artform, but it is finally really coming into its young adulthood. Now more than ever are people talking about building settings that are primary to a story set in them if any is set in them at all. Why is the story so important anyway? Is worldbuilding maybe older than story, because maybe initially the explanations for why things are the way they are that could be given is true worldbuilding. Though I may be mistaking worldfinding with worldbuilding. It still could be the case that in some way story and worldbuilding are part of a larger art form of non-abstract art that depicts things in time and space. Neither being primary to one another. Though I have only given a representational definition of this overgenre, and there is clearly room to create and depict in both story and Worldbuilding. Though I am asking if there is Realist worldbuilding? Fantastic and Sci-Fi worldbuilding is discussed often enough now.

What would it mean to be a realistic world? Can a Fantastic or Sci-Fi world be realistic? It must be the case that Star Wars’s Galaxy Far Far Away is unrealistic—but the world of Roshar within the Stormlight Archive is maybe a different case. In Star Wars there is The Force, a magical power that the Jedi can wield, but there is no economic function of this. The supposedly humble Jedi knights, who are also monks, use this power for war and not for the more humble end of making buildings happen. How do the ships fly? How, or why does Tatooine have life? These questions are rarely interesting, and asking them makes me feel bad. Non-realism is not a lack of care for realism, but a care for something else that is more important. Star Wars does not disregard Realism completely ofcourse, but a lack of square-circles does not make a world realist.

The more interesting example I used was Roshar. It should be understood that other elements of the Stormlight Archive are primary to Roshar, but not by as much as most fantasy. It is well understood that fantasy can be realistic. Often this realism is defined by how well the fantasy follows its own rules. The Stormlight Archive is an exceptional follower of rules, though it is a world richer with metaphor and non-literal ideas than I believe most people think, which needs entirely a different blog post. The Stormlight Archive has believable economy, society, language, and many more things. Though none of these things are fleshed out to the very depth of it, or at least we have access to only small pieces of the flesh. Even though all these features are present I am hesitant to call it realist. It is realistic, just it seems to me to maybe not be totally realist. When I think realism in worldbuilding I am more prone to imagine conlanging than subtle culture fragments which are buyable. For me Realism is almost scientific, like speculative evolutionary biology, worldbuilding, or planet building that uses actual astrophysics, and plate-tectonics geology.

Then immediately after calling Roshar non-realist I must reconsider. I feel that I am biasing scientific worldbuilding over whatever Roshar is, that maybe I am contradicting what my own understanding of reality is. I am an admirer of the Object-oriented-ontology of the philosopher Graham Harman. Harman understands that science is not the end of knowledge about an object. For Harman and I there is no such total and absolute knowledge of what something is. We cannot reduce a thing to a specific list of traits, pieces, qualities, or relations. For Harman we can only understand the essence non-literally. So the biasing of science over magic is strange for worldbuilding. I have no doubt that science is real, and true, but that in foreign and fictitious world we have no idea what laws of nature, or what things may break those laws on occasion may govern them. Maybe we could categorize conlanging, spec-bio, and planet building, ect under the category of naturalist worldbuilding, worldbuilding that obeys the natural laws of our real world. Though I have not read any naturalist literature or any other naturalist art, but the Wikipedia entry states that naturalism is “similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary”. So it seems an appropriate term because of the use of science.

Still my question is what realism is? I must say that I think that in some sense Roshar is closer to it than many works of hard sci-fi which preserve their culture. Roshar is likely one of the closest thing we have yet reached, or the closest thing I have seen. Realism cannot be purism of one thing, it has to be a diversity. No one would state that what is called Realist literature is a total simulation of reality, or that this is its prime aim. You do not call Realism direct simulation, because many try to be real, and also have other elements that are prioritized on often equal grounds. Realism is complex and is not equivalent to reality.

There was this force that occurred recently whenever Randy Cross sat at the end of school waiting for the end to arrive for real, something that eventually pulled him willingly, or unwillingly to the Amusement Hall. He was always waiting for school to end, from the morning when he got there till Mr Jerome’s eighth period English class. He was watching the clock which was 46, and a half minutes behind burn away until the force of desire could be released. He was not even thinking of the flashing tables of pinball that lined the halls, only of the hands of the clock. He had last played all day yesterday, skipping church too, and had not read chapter 4 of To Kill A Mockingbird yesterday either, and he had not done the twenty math problems that were assigned. He had decided that he was working himself too hard for things that had nothing to do with his real passion—which was obtaining an even higher score on a specific pinball table. The last time he had money that was his was last friday. He borrowed mostly from friends, and he figured that his loving, though sometimes strict parents would not mind him taking twenty bucks, that mourning, since it was in the name of the most fun cause, the good old silver ball. None of that was on his mind either at the moment of eighth periods, only the clock, and his new scheme for traveling faster to the hall.

His hair was red, but too short to really coil into springs like the ones one pinball plungers, and his face freckled somehow only on one side. He had scrapes on his legs, the type that children gain from their play, and he had six minutes left on the classroom’s clock. It was such a waste of time, they basically recapped things they had talked about, or had supposedly read. Some kids were just reading other books in class by the end. The school system was basically wasting his time, because he was not maximizing pinball time. They basically did not have their priorities straight, he thought. He broke his pencil in his hand, and shoved the remains into his pocket, locating an extra quarter. His bag was already packed up other than that. He needed to play, so badly. He needed the initial satisfaction that came with pulling back the plunger on his table, his one and only love, who he missed so much from day to day. He imagined himself being like his father coming home from work.

The bell rang, and Randy sprung out kicking his chair over. He didn't need to walk with his friends that day, only to go. He needed to get to the dazzling light of the table, because the high school was closer than the middle to the Amusement hall and there was risk of some big bully taking over his table. Mr Jerome’s voice could be heard from down the hall calling to Randy to “come back, and stand up his chair”, or something like that. Randy, dear Randy he tried to dash down and duck across the center of the hallway at all times so maximum turning ability could be achieved. Randy actually pushed a guy’s books out of his hands, because the thin, lanky guy, with a hiking backpack at least three times the size of his torso was jaunting slowly, and oafishly down the corridor’s core. The thin almost man-boy, who had scrapish facial hair already hollered at Randy, though had never seen him before, and the boy didn’t see the Randy’s face as it sank into the oceans of shuffling students that swarmed at the end of any school day before retreating to the home’s isolation after an hour. Randy did cognize the call for apology present in the vanishing cry of “hey man! You fucking hit my books down!”, but he needed to focus on what was important to him, and not waste time, so the apology already brewing was shoved out of his head.

A side door on the school got shoulder slammed open by Randy solely concentrated on his route’s snaking steps. Next there was a slight hill, and a chain fence. This was something that Randy could lose minutes on if he did it poorly. He slowed his sprint to a heavy skipping almost frog-hopping sort of jog while going down the green mound, which the school sat on. As he quickly approached the chain fence at an extreme uncontrollable pace, he took a leap. He clung to the fence, then fell crushing his intentionally light packed books. He chucked his bag over the fence, and jumped the fence, really climbing as he had not yet grown too full height, in what looked like pursuit of his beaten red bag that was his older brother’s before him.

Randy hit the ground, and descended instantly into a squat to grab the bag, the rest of the run would be easy after this. He knew he would perfect the fence jump segment, at some point in the future. He simply needed to run down the sidewalk for three blocks, turn, run down three blocks, and then cut through an alley and then down one block past the mall into the amusement hall. He had it all planned out within the world of his skull’s goal-space-time-existential-meaning map.

He sprinted through the city noises, past people talking, a pale yellow car honking which almost hit him once and the little bells on store fronts ringing. The car thing did not slow him down, but it distracted him and filled his head with thoughts other than the compelling force, like what if it all had killed him.. It was totally day, but the sun was lower than the high point. The street’s dirt went unnoticed by millions of people, until Randy tripped on a slick spot of filth. The legs went backward and face forward and the hands downward. His hands turned up a little bloody. It was not gushing out. It was more like thin skin scraped widely. Blood was weirdly dark in real life. Despite the many movies he had seen with mountains of bright fake blood; he really did not see real blood often since he rarely had bloody noses, because he did NOT pick it. It was kind of a weird moment for the sixth grader. Everything had gone from fast fracas, to still silent pond all at an as of yet unheard of speed. The speeding toward end points had affected itself. Now he had no idea what he was really doing. No map.

He stood up using his elbows. He was surprised that no one came to help him up. He was as unnoticed as the slippy spot before anyone saw it. He assumed there had been a slippy spot, he did not check. He also did realize that he was going too fast. No one above the age of ten could think that they had not ran too fast in that moment. He did not immediately start running, but instead slowly walked to the Amusement hall. He observed the table's lights flashing for maybe ten, or even twenty minutes without playing. He walked to the back of his table eventually. It was a fading yellow weird thing that actually had no theme, because it was that old, but was deeply challenging thing to play. It’s left lever was so slow. No one, but Randy, ever played it more than once in a row and there was no line ever. He had been scared of the idea that there could be one, if people ever realized how awesome it was. Was it awesome? Was she truly lovely?

He had a twenty dollar bill, and figured that he did not want to go through the effort of getting quarters from the guy at the desk. He also realized that his mother probably did not care whether or not he played pinball, but likely cared that he had stolen twenty dollars from them without asking. Also his hands still had the uncinematic blood on them. He stuck his hand in his pocket, and found one spare quarter. He tore out a page from his notebook, and wiped off his hands with it. Then he played one game, which went poorly because he was distracted. He had other things on his mind, and the ball actually snuck into the out zone, down the center of the table, and he did not even hit the lever.

He left right after. Randy walked home all slow, and careful. He had realized that the game’s bright bursting yellow lights hurt his eyes, like the Television did if you watched into the long hours of the night without going to the bathroom. He decided that he would apologize to the eighth-grader almost man with the massive backpack the next day. He figured he would do his homework or something else that at least did not involve senseless flashing mono colored lights.

The Swan King wore white, and blue robes, and jewels on his hands and neck, and he walked around his own gardens with a swarm of musicians, friends and other entertainers bribed to like him. He saw a private play every day. He built countless castles that he never slept in. He had many servants whose names he did not know, and Jacob Bergmann was one of them. Jacob was a coin man, an accountant essentially, who cleaned up his highnesses’ poem, and opera fuelled purse-fire, which made each day a swing closer to having to tell Der Marchenkonig of his majestic, or drunken dive toward bankruptcy. A man who could not feel heat burning him alive as he sought to become an amateur firewalker. Jacob was no higher up in the Bavarian court, because his highnesses’ siblings and puppets held ghost titles and limitless salaries. Jacob was a leading Bureaucrat, and advisor to advisors. The friends of the king had enough sense to make the royal tasks actually done via the second, or often third (at least 25% of the time fourth) order of delegation, but not enough to realize that they would be safe doing it themselves. Jacob knew, or thought that he was the most powerful man in the country. He provided the largest sum of marks for the crown, more than any other dogishly loyal courtsman, though he would not place himself under the category of dogish in his own words. The King was the dog who pissed the floor.

Each coin for the debts had to be pressed, or smuggled into existence, or purse, only so many only so fast. Business was really the way to do it. Jacob Itched his noise and stared into a check he had signed in the king’s name. He would not dare sign off on a check for a wagon of coins for himself, because he would be out of a job in an instant as Bavaria would bankrupt itself. Embellezzlement was limited by bankruptcy and the inability for you to ever actually get your money from the the Bavarian crown, only a waterfall of IOUs. Worker ants sustaining The King’s illusion could not possibly take out the time for an unnecessary personal illusion or self-entertainment. It was paper after paper, and meeting after meeting on plans of how to dig The King, who fancied himself as some fairy tale hero out of a hole that was itsself already inside of a deeper more hopelessly abyssal hole.

Recently 34 year old, King Ludwig started each day with wine, that he did not know was not the fine vintages the bottles said they were and instead had been replaced with something cheap. He proceeded to hear the same poem read to him everyday, and if his friend the musician Wagner happened to be in town they would chat anywhere from twenty minutes to three hours. He would then start his more general and chaotic charade of “rulership”. He played at mock court and laughed himself silly as actors he was well aware of being his friends dressed in rags and begged for advice. Jacob generally worked exclusively in Munich, near the Winter Residence. There he could access libraries and on the occasional day off debate philosophy in coffee houses, and at night attended lectures on purer mathematics, or sciences. All of those were his hobby.

The oncoming fear of more work was what distracted Jacob the most. This made more work later on. Jacob was antsy about this issue aswell, which was maybe the second biggest distraction. He had not gotten to where he was by making more work for himself. It was that now work was a measure of how much work you can conceivably do later. He had impressed the deputy assistant vice-minister of finances the Graf von Wiesbacher, who had never met the King, with a good not idea, not good work ethic. The King lived in one castle one, or two months at a time. So they could be toured by commons, or rented by Merchants, when his highnesses was not looking. Of course sale was an absurd idea, because the King did not necessarily chose to sleep in the best few castles on repeat.

Jacob figured that he was more of a rational enlightenment type man than a Romantic dreamer type. Romanticists got lost in poets and meaningless emotions or dreams. The king in a speech to an audience called himself a “dreamer of the highest hopes of god, and man”, and “a connoisseur of the architecture of the fae”. Jacob was a real dreamer, some type of dreamer of people, not a dreamer of elves, or valkyries. He figured that if he just though up the best idea possible he could escape both of the big debt holes in almost one scope. If only he didn’t need to work, he though to himself. Then he believed that he could really dedicate full time to dreaming the biggest economic idea that the world had ever seen. If only he enough time to read a few of the treatise’s of the science of economy. He would just need all day everyday for maybe a year or two and certainly the ideas would pop out directly. He was confident in his genius’s integrity. Everyone knew that the king was just insane. Maybe if Jacob solved the problem he would get some type of title….. He wondered about this little dream of his. The idea was so nice, if the highest hopes of god had been rested on him, from the Swan King’s rather long arms. Each morning that was how he got himself to wake and going to bed he hoped he would find.

Jacob liked summers, and winter less than each other. He swore he wished it was summer in the winter, and winter in the summer. The King did the same, longing for beautiful snows, and sleigh rides, or fantasizing about playing in gardens. Jacob in winter wanted to not have to walk through miles of slush to save his job, and in summer wanted to be able to stop sweating on the papers. Jacob liked the sounds of drier springs, and the smells of fat autumns. He wanted to sit, and listen to the lectures on Newton’s mechanics for hours outside of those prized months. He wanted to avoid work in the good times, so that he good walk by festivals smelling the scents, and eating the foods. The king in autumn wanted to spend less time drinking, and more time working on the arts, but never quite was amble to remember that he wanted to do so. Jacob hated that The King’s expenses seemed to go up around those prized months. He only drank during celebrations in those months, slowing the things down. In his rare excessive drunkenness he wished aloud for a King, who drank instead of building tall towers of marble.

They were sitting in desks with their faces around- Short Fiction

The class was full, and none of the students were talking, creating a pseudo-silence only present in libraries with one fly inside. The teacher, who was new to working at the public high school asked the question again which instead of entering the student’s minds and being interpreted it entered their ears and garbled itself into something lost and forgotten like a dull pencil in the back of a locker at the end of someone’s 7th grade school year. Not one student was listening, and the one teacher did not know what to do. The students did not even talk amongst themselves or dress up in any particular aesthetic. They dressed in hoodies often, or the occasional sweater, or mono-colored short sleeve tee usually red or blue or green. Some classes at the beginning of the year one or two students would try to answer questions in dry (not in a funny way), but not precise terms. Most homework got done, yet no one did all the assignments and everyone had roughly the same B minusish give, or take grades. She had initially tried reporting it to the principal, but it was “a very silly idea for a very busy man”. She often sighed loudly after she noticed that her students did it as well in class sometimes.

The room had a paneled ceiling, paneled with the sort of white spotted cardboard rectangular tile that made the rooms in the school look like an office space. The teacher switched to lecture style, which made her students turn in their homework with less quality, and lower frequency. This did not change when she went back to the traditional question, and answer sort of thing that teachers did in movies. She tried putting up many colorful posters to cheer up the high school students. Stuff with cats on them from the early 2010s. Someone said something about “Cats” to a response lacking laughter. She was afraid to speak in the lunchroom about her class’s issues since everyone else seemed so frustrated with their students talking in class or even skipping class (which her students did not seem to have a reason to do). She no longer gave students not in her class detention if she encountered one without a hall pass, she really wanted them to enjoy themselves. Everyday she taught what she had studied for years to the bored unrioting masses, and received no affection or even collective youthful rebellion.

She drank lots of coffee throughout the day, and increasingly less water. Her students had never seemed like water drinkers, and had some Dunkin donut’s cups from the morning long into the afternoon. She had the same food everyday for lunch, and her eyes felt like metal weights were sitting inside by the the time the day’s last bell called out her heavenly salvation. She spent more, and more time to go to sleep each night waiting at least an hour with her eyes closed till it happened, and she could try to dream. She brushed her teeth in the morning though she did not know if it was enough because her had been getting yellower and her face, and bones felt tight an out of practice gymnast who had been turned to stone mid stretch.

One day a student wore a pink long sleeve, and had no backpack. She had seen other students (not her perpetual pests) who wore hats and eyeshadow, and, skirts, and band logos and tie dye, and hair dye, not carry their backpacks, not hers, not even purses, or shoulder bags. Her students had backpacks ranging from blue to dark green to red. The student who had a pink shirt raised their hand for the first time, but then put it down. At this point the teacher normally choose random volunteers, but decided to make this student pay for her sin. The student answered the question wrong though, and she had to just tell everyone the answer even though some people had gotten it right anyways on the homework.

She saw something weird with them for the first time, but it was always there and she did not comment because it was so nice. The students had no faces except the shapes of their faces attached to their heads which where as empty as googling “rolling planes” and a full as an red ant’s in a New York city rat exterminator's office that was too busy to call the bug guys. Their faces where not on their skin but in the air in front of them fidgeting. Some wore glasses which was funny looking since the eyes stood in front of their desks. When class was over she walked through the hall seeing how special her student’s where compared to the diseased hoards of images that the other teachers had. Even the other teachers in the break room had faces bound so tightly to their skulls that their noses needed to be pulled out to the smell the coffee that they sucked into their infinite rows of daggerish slowly yellowing fangs. She finally had a noisy class. She sighs in relief.

This book is a delightful magical surprise. Go read it first. It’s Less than a hundred pages. Now that you have read it you know what I mean. You go into the book expecting a normal book about tea. Lists of types and discussion on “the best'' ways to drink tea. This book does list types and introduces you to tea on a relatively introductory level but it has less of a definitive quality to it. It will show you this introductory information on tea but without the hustle or bustle of the modern day workplace cup of tea. The book is printed by McCormick himself on handcrafted paper. It is natural in a certain aesthetically pleasing way and the paper reminds me of tea paper. The book is written in confrontaional direct yet non offensive or abrasive style. Although there is a warm feeling like the heat of tea.The end of the book is deceptive, it gives a list of recipes for food to have with tea. This appears more like an appendix then afterwards is a section on tea reading. This gives an almost hidden and therefore ancient effect to the mysticism of the tea reading.

The book is critical of bagged (as opposed to loose leaf) tea, an “an American invention”. It is critical of a sort of corporate coffee culture around tea. Where you drink your cardboard cup of triple caramel latte and then a mug of Lipton. There is Confucian nature to the book. It argues for tea the way tea should be. No insincere commercial bags for his tea, no “the best, excellent ingenious” tea. Malachi wants a decent cup of tea. The book argues for a tradition of tea where the secrets of tea are passed down. Similar to Confucian sincerity, a term used by philosophy Professor Hans-Georg Möller in his video Why care? The philosophy of care describes it as a role based ethics where completing and commiting to your societal role (mother, father, king, son, farmer or even cup of tea) is seen as the ideal of ethics. In the book Malachi argues that tea should meet certain decent standards, as in not ingenious, or ahead of its times, or out-of the box, just decent. Decency is about doing what tea does in his idea of it’s traditional form.

Decency is desired, not the indecent commercialism of bagged American tea, but for Malachi the decent cup of tea has a history. Malachi’s own family has a tea drinking history. His mother drank and read tea. For Malachi the final practice of decent tea is the arcane tea reading, which is tradition oriented. He says “the mechanics of tea-leaf reading are not difficult to learn, given the tutelage of a good practioner”, but there aren’t too many of them about.” This seems to imply that he bealives it is some sort of lineage of tea teaching in which each teacher teachs a student to be a teacher. This lineage which he implies may have something to due with the history of tea he outlines that abruptly ends upon tea’s contact with the British isles and America. This is also unfortunately influenced by a touch of anglocentrism.

Man this is one crazy book. I really like long books they make me really happy. Books that take months on end to read. When you read one chapter[1] a day everyday you get something special. Something that lets you get to know the characters. Infinite Jest is one of those nice long books. With characters that do actually feel like people you could meet. People who have weird and quirky things about them[2] then they have personalities that are totally unrelated[3]. Not saying that people in real life do not make their hobbies their personality, it’s just that often in stories it is also the case that people become the first thing they do.

When I read a book, hopefully I also deep dive into the author’s brand and the interviews around them. I let all media from this influence my book reading. Reading for me is not just a book with words and footnotes. Admittedly I allow myself to hold a parasocial bond[4]. I watch countless interviews. I try to see why they wrote the book. Reading a book for me starts with me skimming the author’s Wikipedia page. Then I pick up the book. The profile of the author is a lot of fun to dig into. Feels like there's conversation going when I read books like this. There was someone on the other end of the art, rather than just me absorbing content. Someone is serving the content over the tennis net[5] for me to be broken down by[6].

This book is obsessed with certain things within itself[7]. It looks at things relating to these things, especially in places where these intersect. This book does not have conclusions merely by getting to the themes straightforwardly but it draws connections and finds the meeting places, then gets its results. It is a net of stories and pathways that all lead into each other. Every plot falling out onto a theme and every theme leading to a plot or character. The author said the book is structured like a Sierpinski Gasket[8], when it is also a web of ideas coming together. When reading it starts like a deep sea in which nothing makes sense and you keep gasping for air but becomes coherent through learning to find the connections and the repetitions of sandbars.

Footnotes

1. not exactly one chapter a Day, just enough reading everyday to make me feel like something has happened.
2. like when you meet someone and they tell you their hobbies.
3. like if a person meets you tells you they kill at drawing but being good at drawing has nothing to do with their mannerisms and habits. Like when people are not just what super power they have.
4. Although I always remember that all book authors are not real and are made by the elder gods that control the internet.
5. This is a reference on my part to the fact that a huge chunk of the book takes place at a tennis academy highschool.
6. I am very bad at Tennis and this book made me cry a few times.
7. Obsessed with Québeckers, a fictional film titled Infinite Jest, drug addicts, alcoholics, academia, formal grammar, addiction in general, sad families, television, disabilities, drugs in general (legal and illegal), philosophy (both literal academic philosophy and pop philosophies) American media consumption and many other things.
8. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierpi%C5%84ski_triangle In what way is a matter for debate and a longer, more spoiler heavy review. Buf in general the novel has a fractal quality where certain things keep repeating.

Crossword puzzle clark—- Impossible without groups