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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

This was neat enough, but the thing that bothered Clare, the thing that interested her, was that each prisoner must use his own allotted time only to interpret the contest as it occurs to others. If a prisoner misunderstands another’s hesitation, if he allows himself to be preceded, time will lose its meaning.

Thirty. Fortune

Thirty

Fortune

But, truly, it’s amazing! It’s fully a miracle! Does Loudermilk not realize what a powerful enemy he has cultivated for himself in Anton Beans? Can this reality truly not have sifted down into the dim sedimentary stream of this individual’s so-called thought? Does Loudermilk not have the faintest clue as to Anton Beans’s formidable and copious resources? Either Loudermilk has a death wish, which, given his obvious taste for embodied life Anton Beans feels safe in ruling out as a factor, or, what is worse, he simply does not know. Loudermilk is, possibly, for some unfathomable reason, unable to sense, and therefore ignorant of, Anton Beans’s abilities. That this second option is so evidently the case is beyond maddening to Anton Beans. Loudermilk fucking underestimates him! There is the rub.

If Loudermilk were, for just one moment, able to get it through his thick (admittedly unusually well-formed) Cro-Magnon skull what a dedicated adversary he has now actively nurtured for himself in Anton Beans, surely Loudermilk would never dare to repeat a stunt like the one he pulled two packets ago, submitting a poem with a title that was obviously a muted commentary on Beans’s own extraordinarily natural, well-maintained pelisse. When Beans had graciously offered to provide a close reading, Loudermilk’s response had been, “No, dude, it’s chill,” by which he indicated that Beans should not trouble himself. The other workshop participants found this absurd demurral at first baffling and then, distressingly for Beans, very, very funny. Beans is still trying to get their ringing giggles and guffaws out of his brain, where he fears these echoes of ignorance and folly may have permanently lodged, due to his own infallible memory.

That any of this happened at all bespeaks a towering lack of perspicuity and gross miscalculation on the part of Loudermilk. Exhibit A, Beans does not hail from Maryland. Exhibit B, Loudermilk is an obvious philistine. Loudermilk will, Beans reasons, have to pay. And not at a seasonal discount, either.