I really liked this, especially when Dodge was talking theory and ideas. The non-linear narrative worked so well for what the book is about.

The memoir portions interested me less, but that likely says more about my interests and less about the writing.

I loved the argonauts so much and I had a feeling that Harry was super academic with his art and I was right. His fascination with Automatons is so interesting. But the way he bought a piece of a meteorite to use as inspiration and how the book has such a powerful way of starting in 2009 when Dodge’s mother died and ended with his father’s death. His writing is very poetic and abstract, sometimes going to random diatribes regarding Transhumanism, the sexual seduction of the scent of a flower, and talking about Schrödinger’s cat. Harry Dodge is so incredible but sometimes hard to follow. Maybe it’ll be better to get the physical book and read it with the author lol

i really liked this book, though theoretical physics and quantum theory and the nature of time and consciousness and matter are largely beyond my ken. i loved the portrait of harry that emerged through his thoughts and memories and relayed emotions and interests. i read this right after a re-read of "the argonauts" and enjoyed the dialogue between the two; how each is a brain in a jar as authorial god/voice in their own books but is a flesh and blood person doing daily things when written about by the other.

my favorite parts:
-harry's letter to loved ones recounting the death of his mom (also published in "argonauts"):
"And i knew she had found her way; dared. Summoned up her smarts and courage and whacked a way through. I was really astonished. Proud of her."

-the visits from the bird/Max through the dog door: "I run after it, speaking telepathically — trying to communicate effectively how desperate is my love."

-any of the scenes with lenny: watching blade runner 2049, avoiding rattlesnakes, walking through varied landscapes, the description of his sudden transition to not getting tucked in because the baby's crib got moved into his room and he had to go to bed alone

-his description of Arrival, maybe my favorite movie ever; the heptapods' skin as "like flexible concrete."

-Harry's reckoning about whether or not to intubate his dying dad, either through a stomach tube or an intranasal tube, and a discussion of "quality of life" - namely that the life his dad is living might seem boring and awful to a healthy person, but is causing no discernible pain and in fact seems placid and gentle. "For him, time and therefor narrative have evaporated, wholly or in part (what do I really know); his consciousness is one observer moment; he whirls in the coil of time but matching its speed now. He's with time, enwombed; nothing passes, or moves by, no age, or change, no grasping or lament."
 
-the description of his last visit, now with his dad's body just minutes or maybe a couple of hours after his dad's death. it made me dearly hope/wish for an approach to death, especially the death of loved ones, writ by curiosity and observation and appreciation. "His extremities are already tepid but the back of his neck is normal feeling (almost hot even), his eyes are open (gray) and mouth is stuck ajar; I say Okay like fifty times (we say things). I work to close his eyes, they keep creeping back open and so only little by little am I able to correct them, coax them, convince them that this is what they have been waiting for. Eyes are closed for this part, I urge, ghost note, decay, time between attacks. Goodbye, bardo, hello, long hot ride into night." 

"'there is no the body,' brian massumi has written. 'There is a continuous bodying.'"

"Say, for example, I'm looking at some art, bringing my attention to bear on the piece, and that experience (sensual-intellectual) is in some real sense chaotic, maybe even infinite. There's something about the pressure of the rational...that needs to be rethough; we have this devaluation, this amputation of all kinds of bodily experiences or what i call non-language knowings. It's forcing a sort of stultifying binary which is "This is rational or irrational," rather than "I know this thing by this other set of parameters — one of myriad ways of knowing." (It'd be cool if we didn't have to go straight to the word irrational, which has a specific connotation.)

"forging solidarity in diversity is odd, difficult, ecstatic work. I try not to allocate care, my sympathies, via a logics of sameness, eg. "We're all human," etc, which (though a sort of stock, well-intentioned exhortation to kindness) is, briefly stated, arguably a kind of violence by erasure (of specificity). I wonder if a drift toward the word sympathy (from empathy) would generate a foregrounding of the idea of difference as we figure out how to keep growing practices of love?"

"Is it possible that a physical body could really be unaffected by what takes place mentally? ...When I'm reading am I in two places at once? What are the conditions which would qualify me as "present"? Is "presence" adjudicated by the ability I have to make a splash in some environment....?"