day's stream

I kept reading S. Ship of Theseus late today around 4:00. I annotated about 130 pages of the inner novel bibcard-style on a couple sheets of copy paper, though I have the nagging feeling I'm writing / I'll be writing too much. So I set it down and pivoted into catching up on Eric and Jen's marginalia. They're physically smaller than I remember (though that could be my eyesight), and the complexity of these characters and their intelligence is much more clear to me. They're both skilled researchers and writers for sure. I relate to Jen a lot, yes, even down to the sheltered kid syndrome she mentions in her gray letter. Reading the marginalia took equal time if not more as annotating the book, and I "only" got halfway. I think it's because I'm actually focusing on all the characters, fictional and superfictional, within this work; there are many moving parts; and the inner text of Ship of Theseus stands much much MUCH stronger with even a few annotations (well, the black/blue ink phase has tons of them) because the sheer volume of imagery are actually callbacks to previous, albeit unpublished, works in the superfictional VM Straka canon; and the characters of the work and the plot events seem less eclectic than they are pointers back to fictional events at the level of Eric and Jen's world. Additionally, the way Jen relates fragments of text to her life is far less frustrating as well -- I used to ask WTF she was talking about when I read this in 2017, 2018 -- but now as a college student I'm like, okay, this is really really relatable now. (Same went for Johnny Truant's appends in House of Leaves when I read it this January 2024.) Finally, I'm reading the marginalia in the context of the text. When I first read the marginalia I was speed-reading through it, glossing over names and not even looking back at the inner text. Now I see most of the annotations derive from the inner text, and they're easier to follow when you look at the center first and then look at the margins.