#AMREADING DAVID BUTLER, CITY OF DIS.

This story of an innocent going through a series of doomed relationships offers some brilliant definitions:

• Celebrity: Someone who is known by people he doesn’t know
• Poetry: A branch of astrology which takes itself seriously
• Animals: Reptiles – lifeless fossils, hippo –a snout in the steaming water, wolves – in perpetual motion animated by ancestral hunger
• Absence: The imagined presence of the other, so delicious, so soon short-circuited by reality
• Potential: He always gave the impression that he was rising toward an aphorism. But as usual, the aphorism failed to materialize.
• Helplessness: A pond with sides too steep or slippery to climb out. You scramble at them, but you never lift yourself much above the water.