Carried Through Artificial Tunnels and Dream Recurrent Dreams

I vouch for Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun. I don't write reviews, but below the fold below the poem, put there because spoilers, Monday and last night's thoughts and questions, in the order typed and - I need emphasize this - without edit, it's muddy. 

Here's a taste: Why is the housekeeper named Melania who speaks with a central European Slav accent? Her main role in the novel is to compare and contrast other humans interaction with her as servant viz Klara, an AI robot (for sake of shorthand), as servant, and anyway, below the fold, just the first two days thoughts.

First read through brought back every sensation my first reads of The Unconsoled and Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans chilled me, here's another tease: every Ishiguro novel is first about parenting and are filled with orphans, sometimes even those with parents. He thinks about what I think about and when zap the uncanny gongs, I didn't forget but sweet to be jolted

Will reread this time next year (says Jeff). Won't be posting tonight's tomorrow's ... thoughts, though much I haven't connected yet will be thought. I have an extra copy, been offered two places, silence so far, grab it. 

There's new Lambchop in May, here's a first release, Klara didn't gong my bell at first either, by the third listen I'm in, those certain chords

Immunity Bath	Totalitarium	I do aggregate because I'm looking anyway plus this shitty blogs Schtick One
We had different plans	Maggie's weekly links	{ feuilleton }'s weekly links	Exercises in Color
Johannes Göransson	I don't, right now, need read much less link to Purina Mark Chow, as your Artificial Friend I will throw my hairpin into a wood-chipper to save you, I am telling you three times, programmed to
Had cause to think of:

THE MAN-MOTH

Elizabeth Bishop

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for “mammoth.”

Here, above,

cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.

The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.

It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,

and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.

He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,

feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,

of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.

                     But when the Man-Moth

pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,

the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges

from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks

and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.

He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,

proving the sky quite useless for protection.

He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

                     Up the façades,

his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him

he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage

to push his small head through that round clean opening

and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.

(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)

But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although

he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

                     Then he returns

to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,

he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains

fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.

The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way

and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,

without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.

He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

                     Each night he must

be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.

Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie

his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,

for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,

runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease

he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep

his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

                     If you catch him,

hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,

an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens

as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids

one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.

Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention

he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,

cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

Klara thoughts below the fold

1. Josie's father
2. Part Three = Coggling Machine
3. Good Ishiguro chimes my bells
4. That Klara programmed to Kind
5. itself programmed to sacrifice for owner
6. Klara programmed to believe all parental motives honorable
7. Klara talks of her fellow Artificial Friends for sale and misses their staring out the window at customers and  both adjusting their head tilts and facial expressions to best sell themselves as artificial, what works best
8. One of Ishiguro's always themes parenting and lack thereof, orphans, always orphans
9. Klara thinks Josie runs on Sun
10. The story line of Klara's sacrifice is strained, as is its success, as is the book's
11. My bells chime, this machine naif puppeted by handlers with different motives she was programmed to believe all without question
12. I've part five of five tomorrow. I bet Klara ends up in the used artificial friend lot (typed Monday)
13. Rick the only other character in novel through part four not tainted with motive, so far nothing but Kind
14. That at certain times Klara cannot control her vision suggests someone is directing her to see what the someone wants or more importantly doesn't want Klara to see
15. When the mother gave Klara a test-run as Josie
16. Why is the housekeeper named Melania who speaks with a central European Slav accent?
17. When the mother accused Rick of being happy he hadn't been lifted while one of her daughters dead from lifting, the other now near death
18. Me and objects, the ones - rocks, watches, Dogduck - I believe in some small empathic connection
19. Contrast and compare how the Mother treats Melania and Klara
20. Manager, Klara, Mother, Housekeeper, Rick, Rick's mother, Rick's mother's ex-lover, Klara's father, Capaldi
21. So Father goes along with Klara's plan to disable Pollution in deal with sun who would save Josie (the father listens to the machine say I can't tell you but help me save your daughter and he's like, Ok I will, but let me short-circuit this machine to save my daughter) in order to disable Josie so the Capaldi can't create a  Klara as Josie, the reason Mother bought Klara
22. Manager noticed Klara's exceptional talents as an observer and info-processor than others of the same model Artificial Friend from the same assembly line and tells Klara when Manager sees Klara in... I was almost right, was worse than I thought
23. Rick and Josie split up after Josie recovers, she goes to Lifted University, he starts a career building spy surveillance drones
24. Klara would have died to save Josie, programmed into a machine parents buy their lonely mid-teen children: like my parents bought a television set, nostalgia, that's another Ish-me ping
    
25. Enough for now. I replensished my plastic animals, Happy Tree Knot