About Ed - Robert Glück - annotations
As of early April 2026 I am a little over halfway through, but have highlighted so much of this book already I feel the need to post it. Plus I just got to the part where Ed dies and I need to put the book down for a bit.
Times & dates are a bit off, ereader got confused about time for some reason and I have yet to reset
Annotations
Mac
2026-03-21 11:50 | Page No.: 10
When I say his face inhabited the sky, I scoop out space so my drama has its theater.
2026-03-21 11:51 | Page No.: 10
“I’ll tell you something, Bob. I went to the Castro Theatre last night and I did not even recognize myself in the mirror in the lobby till I moved.”
2026-03-21 11:53 | Page No.: 12
We looked over at my bright window, then up at his dark one. I lowered my gaze to the spectator who cried in dismay,
2026-03-21 11:55 | Page No.: 14
It was Mac, not Nonie, who wore scent, who needed acknowledgment. Mac related a number of highway disasters witnessed by Nonie and himself. This was a strangely reassuring lullaby—his belief that the exact circumstances of death have value.
2026-03-21 11:57 | Page No.: 16
I’d thought of Mac as a master of ephemera, a novelist like me who worked outside the medium;
2026-03-21 11:59 | Page No.: 17
It took me a week to visit Mac in the hospital—a week in March 1985. During that time 70,000 people applied for 150 postal jobs, Reagan likened the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua to our founding fathers, and six were drowned when a tugboat sank north of San Francisco. Pharmaceutical firms scrambled for the profits from the new AIDS blood test, the Dow surged 15.35 points to a record high, and an earthquake killed at least eighty-two on Chile’s coast. Iran bombed Baghdad, AIDS fears rose among embalmers, and an Iowa man won a restraining order to stop his ex-fiancée from having an abortion. Haitian Vodou priests doubted that Swiss pharmacists could make a zombie—“They have a long way to go.” The woman had the abortion anyway and a gay man testified that a San Francisco policeman maced, kicked, and choked him, yelling “You deserve to die!” Fifteen people were killed by lightning in Zimbabwe,
2026-03-21 12:00 | Page No.: 18
They were some impediment Nonie had invented; without remorse, she had pretty much stopped going.
2026-03-21 12:01 | Page No.: 19
The air was empty to breathe and papery, but crowded with dings of elevator arrivals, squeaks of carts and gurneys, deep coughing and clatter of dishes, doctors’ names paged, names that could never be understood, summarizing the anxiety of illness.
2026-03-21 12:02 | Page No.: 20
I could tell he was loaded by the way his irises dropped to the corners of his eyes when he rolled his head. There was a sense of dangerous speeding, time as space, like speeding over the ground as the airplane descends, when just a moment before in the air we seemed almost motionless.
Denny
2026-03-21 12:03 | Page No.: 22
The space for death was an old-fashioned parlor—framed mirrors, green drapes, a floral-tapestry sofa, two torchères with candles of electric bulbs, and a grandfather clock.
2026-03-21 12:04 | Page No.: 22
I felt tremendous latitude, that anything short of dying would be appropriate. I laughed as though we were meeting at a party. Nonie looked confused, then fell into other arms.
2026-03-21 12:05 | Page No.: 23
The agenda was written in pencil on typing paper soft with age; it proposed categories and subcategories, beginning “Item One: Warm-Up Kisses and Music a) Denny wants 20th C. b) Bob wants 18th C.,” and ending “Item Twelve: Pillow Talk.”
【Annotation】warm-up kisses
a family of four just arrived at Karen Donnelly Park, and are using the seesaw in front of me. one of the children ran to a bush, his parents asked what he was doing, and he said "mommy i'm going over here to go pee."
2026-03-21 12:11 | Page No.: 24
We saw ourselves against a panorama, climbing to the true global village. The flagstone terraces, heavy pages, and paneled bedrooms were a voluptuous garden without soil, the only home we ever pictured sharing. The gin gave the future we assembled a certain credence.
【Annotation】the family just left to go pee at a more appropriate location, because "there are other people in the park."
it is just me, i would've only found it hilarious.
on their way out, the young father stopped and asked me if i was Will Yip, grammy award winning producer. i said no, laughed brightly, and he said "he just got interviewed in the inquirer and said he has a studio in an industrial area of south philly, and you give me that art or musical production vibe. i've been vigilant."
Will Yip is just an Asian man with long hair that is a completely different texture as mine. there is a photo of him in that article. ???
2026-03-21 12:18 | Page No.: 25
“Oh Bob, Ed always thinks he’s sick.”
“Ed says, ‘The pain is under my fifth rib and feels orange,’ and the doctor starts shouting.”
“Is he worried about AIDS?”
2026-03-21 12:38 | Page No.: 25
Isn’t it strange that you and I gave up all the unsafe sex on our agenda, even though the viral horse would have already left our barn?”
“It’s your cow and your barn door and your horse and your stable door. That’s ideology for you, mon ami. When is Mac’s funeral?”
“Last Thursday. The service wasn’t announced and Nonie kept it to herself. It started at twelve on the dot and lasted till twelve fifteen. A third of the mourners missed it trying to park. I came in at the tail end and you know—there was Mac. He still looked interested.”
2026-03-21 12:50 | Page No.: 27
I threw her out to sea, but wind caught her ashes and threw them back in my face, and Mary-Madeleine went right up my nose and into my eyes. I was so blinded I had to kneel. I probably have some of her lodged inside my lungs.”
“A walking urn,” Denny said.
2026-03-21 12:54 | Page No.: 29
On this stage I have constructed for my soliloquy, I can’t speak about my death or bid you look in my grave. As for ordering my tomb, over the two dates put an image of men fucking—to show what made me happy. Do the following stories belong here? They don’t “come to mind” but intrude. The first is more resonant but simple to tell. It’s just the pleasure my mother took in four eggs she brought 350 miles to my house. “See, it has a blue shell.” She held out the egg for me to look at, though not to hold. “Bob, look at this.” She was submitting a new piece of evidence, asking me to reconsider, but the problem was beyond articulation. Her elegant face tipped back, a conclusive gesture, and for a moment she occupied the sixty-eight years of her life.
2026-03-21 12:55 | Page No.: 30
“Art’s a lucky man.” I asked what made him lucky—what is luck in general? She said, “His parents are both alive.” Art was fifty-seven. Kathleen is not simple; she didn’t mean his parents were pure joy, but that Art is still a child, his body still given to him. My mom’s advice was chilling because she eliminated her own presence from my life. She gave her son exactly what he asked for, a survival kit. I should have asked for comfort
2026-03-21 12:56 | Page No.: 31
I was suddenly aware of the southern sky behind him, not cloudy but flat gray, and that I had acknowledged the day by wearing an old green cardigan.
2026-03-21 12:57 | Page No.: 32
I am intrigued by the specificity of my dad’s memory, though he lacks the sheer disinterestedness and solidarity of Mac. My dad thinks it’s easy for me to visit O’Connell’s court with him; he doesn’t realize how easy it is for me to visit O’Connell’s hotel room.
Nonie
2026-03-21 13:01 | Page No.: 37
Instead of the despicable houses and front lawns, the landscape of my little soul has been replaced by a sweeping pastoral vista. I am conscious of the disjunction between the absolute visual stillness—intense blue through the firs, the meadow’s gold sheen, the tremor of cattails by a fence—and the terrible rattle and cough of an old lawn mower somewhere down below.
2026-03-21 13:02 | Page No.: 38
NONIE TRIES TO KEEP her weight up to eighty.
【Annotation】there are some south philly teenage girls on the seesaw now, and one tried to guess the other's weight. she guessed 70, the guessee said "more like 80" seconds after i read this line.
2026-03-21 13:04 | Page No.: 39
Any story underwrites its experience with the value of experience itself. Any language wants to be total, pathless yearning. “Bob, do you eat tomatoes?” Mac packs them in a brown paper bag. When he steps out his door, he is aware of the day for the first time.
2026-03-21 13:08 | Page No.: 41
I located no memorial service for Mac inside myself. Meanwhile I was depressed and teary imagining that I was remembering Ed’s death, though he had not been diagnosed; that is, I could register my fear only as an episode from the past. Was I practicing remembering Ed?—rehearsing mourning? Was it disloyal?
Ed
2026-03-21 13:12 | Page No.: 45
Ed’s solitude retreats through thresholds to the unspeakable, yet I bring him into this story because he’s capable of a talkative grief that can still be trusted.
2026-03-21 13:16 | Page No.: 50
Bob says, “Now you can figure out what you’re going to do.” He speaks firmly. These words bring us back. Daniel and I are caught up, but these words locate us in time and space. We are three standing together.
2026-03-21 13:17 | Page No.: 51
As he and Bob talk, I’m already backing away, the scene before me is animated but two-dimensional.
2026-03-21 13:19 | Page No.: 53
Things in Bob’s house feel either old or new. The old is good because it’s familiar, but the new dares me to live, as if I will age before it. I look at the huge cedar bed Bob and I constructed and see years stacked up in it. I stand in the hall judging things by degrees of safety.
2026-03-21 13:19 | Page No.: 54
become someone else if a situation demanded it, maybe because his Japanese features already belong to “someone else.”
Nonie’s Map
2026-03-21 13:21 | Page No.: 58
I regrouped. “Okay, make me a map. Make a map so I can find it without any trouble. A map a child could use.”
2026-03-21 13:22 | Page No.: 59
. I looked at the map. It was just a jagged line with another line branching off. I couldn’t read it at all. At the top of the second line she had printed “Sunshine Pharmacy.” We stood gazing at it, then flatly at each other. She waited for it to sink in that I would really be going to Colma. When it did, I asked, “Nonie, on this map, where are we?” She pointed to the bottom of the first line. “So what is this turn?”
“It’s where you turn.” The map was drawn in quavering pencil on a torn square of lined paper.
2026-03-21 13:23 | Page No.: 59
“You just go along the line, then you turn here,” she said to a child for the last time.
2026-04-08 07:52 | Page No.: 61
WHAT CAN I WRITE for Ed? The question puts faith on the café table with the mealy apple and chopped orange, meager allegory garden of decay and orderly renewal. Scale falls off the map: To die and return from the grave.
•
2026-04-08 07:54 | Page No.: 62
Then, as though remembering the “moral,” he lives forever, dies and revives, keeps returning. What is the circumstance of his death, the agency of renewal?
【Annotation】mad farmers liberation front
2026-04-08 07:50 | Page No.: 62
I rewrite so the pratfall lays Ed in green pastures. Bees are bees or crosses of the dead. I dream for Ed, a commons producing images. Skin sore, tongue thick, sour. The earth’s surface. I touch my face, pale worms swallow each other in the soil of my apartment.
2026-04-08 07:53 | Page No.: 63
To answer your question answers every question; you move your arms and legs in the world’s unfinished blue.
【Annotation】unfinished blue!!!
2026-04-08 07:54 | Page No.: 63
Ed never sees or hears enough, he can’t include himself, the next breath revises ardently.
About Ed
2026-04-08 07:55 | Page No.: 64
Let Ed live forever, Cup on the Sill, Wind in the Flue. Let him live as the world unfolds into pages. Now I part my hands. Now I’ve said my prayer.
Ed and the Movies
2026-04-08 07:58 | Page No.: 67
I smell the Japanese half of Ed’s childhood—soy and ginger.
【Annotation】lol what the fuck
2026-04-08 07:59 | Page No.: 68
He’s down to 120 and wears a disorganized expression.
2026-04-08 08:00 | Page No.: 69
What am I leaving out? I remind myself to tape some conversations with Ed. Is that too gruesome?
2026-04-08 08:01 | Page No.: 70
Ed replies with a look, What do you see? The face that detained me for so many years. Galaxies.
2026-04-08 08:08 | Page No.: 72
Ed’s head falls forward, his eyes pop, and his jaw drops in amazement. Once I thought that was gay body language, but then I learned it’s Japanese.
【Annotation】lol wtf pt 2
A False Step
2026-04-08 08:20 | Page No.: 81
It made me feel helpless in a way that leads to sex.
2026-04-08 07:54 | Page No.: 92
I remembered being cornered in the closet—the other children trying to pull the door open. I’m a desperate virgin. I’ll die if they see me in my underwear. It would not have been a problem for another boy, and that was my shame, but I hung on to the doorknob for dear life. I was bewildered to find myself still in existence. How did you survive? I didn’t, someone else was kept alive. Is it enough that I have memories? Enough for a personal truth? Let’s forget about the shy little fag. It was an intermediate time. I started a novel, needed a job. My friends no longer seemed to like me. I treated them badly or ignored them, caught in the toils of job-dating-novel. I was not worth the effort.
Notes for a Novel
2026-04-08 07:52 | Page No.: 93
Although I wanted to believe, doubt crashed through. I wavered like an exorcised ghost. I might have disbelieved in character, but what if Pete didn’t share that lack of faith? Then I would have to create a moment of revelation or madness in him, and that would have been our story. In Black Sunday the witch pulls her cloak aside to reveal the rotting cavern, the polluted Garden of Eden where death stands as norm.
2026-04-08 07:56 | Page No.: 97
The day is muffled, sounds blurt and expire. Electrons forget to spin, relation perishes, symbols and solar systems throw themselves onto the landfill.
Ed’s Tomb
2026-04-08 07:57 | Page No.: 99
My life’s sole aim is to hide my own weakness from myself, but my weakness is the way into the world.
2026-04-08 07:59 | Page No.: 102
What to do with the day and the wide blue sky? How to move in space both cramped and infinite?
Nonie in Excelsis
2026-04-08 08:01 | Page No.: 104
Ed’s tomb conveys an inside-out-ness, a grasp of time that makes me want to write my stories posthumously, image replacing image.
【Annotation】obaba/ojiji tomb dad refuses to see before necessary.
Haircut
2026-04-08 08:09 | Page No.: 116
Ed’s voice on the phone is strange because it’s as familiar to me as the voice that speaks inside my head, as the feeling of my tongue inside my mouth. His voice is so embedded in me that it confuses inside and outside, like seeing the back of my head in a mirror.
2026-04-08 08:11 | Page No.: 120
When he was a child he plucked the hair from his scalp and face, follicle by follicle, a naked fledgling, and I suppose the finality of that childhood misery informs his present sorrow.
Middle Child
2026-04-08 08:14 | Page No.: 124
His body seemed to need a narrator.
2026-04-08 08:15 | Page No.: 125
Finally she said I used to corner her in verbal games. When I complained that I was the stupidest kid in my class, she would assert that I was not. I’d say, “How can you know that? You are not in my class.”
2026-04-08 08:16 | Page No.: 126
What do I remember of that remote and too-close fiction?—a beautiful giantess who stretches from my infancy to my old age.
2026-04-08 08:17 | Page No.: 127
For you this sentence may be drawn from a multitude that lead into the wide world. For me it is the dead end of what I am able to say, written at the crumbling edge of the cliff.
2026-04-08 08:19 | Page No.: 128
A revolution occurred in the way I valued my childhood. The good child is actually the unknown child. Attention exists only in conflict. I imagined I was a princess because I was never scolded. After a while, I held myself apart. I am afraid of falling into the past, and my parents offer an emptiness to justify my vertigo.
2026-04-08 08:20 | Page No.: 129
Even when I was a boy I resented the way childhood shaped expectations. A hellish inner force drove other boys around playgrounds and parks, and this was supposed to prepare them. I never subscribed to that faith: to pursue the ball and believe the game.
2026-04-08 08:20 | Page No.: 129
I could not imagine an adulthood I wanted, except that they could sit around and talk. Thinking about it, it’s a false relief (like so much that comes from psychology) that my behavior has an antecedent, a structure that shapes the all-there-is of present being.
2026-04-08 08:20 | Page No.: 129
I still care what happened seventy years ago to a child I barely recognize in the few blurry photos, docile and serious. I want my life and death to be inconsequential. When I die nothing will be lost, because nothing will have existed. I’m a morbidly good girl in the void, cleaning it of my presence.
2026-04-08 08:20 | Page No.: 129
The memory of childhood is full or empty, but memory itself is empty like any code that organizes matter or information. I associate the awareness of this particular emptiness both with the desire to hide it like a bad conscience and with the desire to be an artist so I can take revenge by showing how it tunnels through all experience, a madness that is the truth.
2026-04-08 08:21 | Page No.: 130
I want to disappear and to be fiercely present.
2026-04-08 08:21 | Page No.: 130
If my experience had not been so empty, I’d need to empty it myself.
2026-04-08 08:21 | Page No.: 131
Sickness amplified the mystery of his body.
2026-04-08 08:24 | Page No.: 134
1974: “Remains of a muggy day. Heat lightning—the whole sky flashes. I MISS YOUR COCK! I look out at the bay, the islands. The water is still and large. Trains shake the house, here comes one now. I cry hard in my dreams and when I wake each eye has a puddle of tears.” Ed’s letters: loving, observant, suffering—different from the feeling of Ed inside me? I watched the grass rise after his bare foot pressed it.
October 1993
2026-04-08 08:24 | Page No.: 135
My mother’s two versions of life: First, we are alone and have only ourselves to depend on, emotionally and financially. Second, we can go back to comfort and love our infant selves. Or are they different?
Bob and Ed
2026-04-08 08:27 | Page No.: 140
It cost less to forget heterosexuality than to maintain the leaky hydraulics of repression. That is, I had to forget myself to pursue my goals. Homos of my generation will understand. Ed and I were paranoid, driven, lonely, but our dominant feeling was relief that there was a world to enter, a human club to join, an adulthood that was recognizable, a cup, a friend, a dog.
【Annotation】blhaah
2026-04-08 08:29 | Page No.: 142
To gain a point of view, I asked Ed to describe me and he said without pausing, “High-spirited and pessimistic.” So I was a secret from myself but visible to Ed. It was the question I would ask my parents twenty years later.
2026-04-08 08:30 | Page No.: 143
Our dreams were not puzzles to solve but a commons producing images that we harvested for paintings and poems. A room appears as I enter it.
2026-04-08 08:30 | Page No.: 144
Two lonely people make a lonely couple. We didn’t know how not to be lonely, what was required. We ate in silence at the restaurant, stunned by the expense. Ed found this note: “What is better, being lonely with Ed or lonely by myself?”
【Annotation】:'''|
2026-04-08 07:49 | Page No.: 158
He shaped it—an ancient fragment might say—in a sacred manner. What did we have in common? Everything! We needed erotic touch to tell us what we were.
Question with a Question
2026-04-08 07:50 | Page No.: 160
His memory is the archive of many pages of my experience. I’m afraid of losing the shape of my life, a shape I can’t recognize without help. If I step back (grow old enough), will I see it? Is stepping back equal to form? Is form the stepping back? I waited too long to obtain this record. I’m the “he” who hesitates in the proverb.
【Annotation】Xxxx's writing... I am happy to have the audio recording context now. It makes sense. Melting. Message her about this.
2026-04-08 07:51 | Page No.: 161
To me it is very rewarding to have the ability to do that. Make lists of the past and incorporate them into the present. It happened in a part of my life when I was not very conscious.”
2026-04-08 07:51 | Page No.: 161
My memory . . . I remember the wild turkeys—they were blue-gray. Those things on turkeys? Wattles, they had turquoise wattles. I depended on the wattles quite a bit. They were sort of dirty colors. Regular turkeys have orange and red and yellow in their feathers and somehow it all looks great—oh there I go . . .” He wears a jangled expression, as though he’s hearing bells.
2026-04-08 07:52 | Page No.: 163
Dorothy is the worst, a bright red sweater down to her knees—that red allowed no other nuances of color, never allowing different feelings. Can I have a little taste? Eating is difficult—it’s so hard to eat. And then she eats the whole bowl.”
2026-04-08 07:53 | Page No.: 165
“Oh, I was just asking how we were relating during that trip.”
“I was relying on what we had between us to get me through each day. What two people say is Time.”
2026-04-08 07:49 | Page No.: 166
No, I haven’t had any uncomfortable thoughts. I like when you sit in a room with me.
2026-04-08 07:50 | Page No.: 167
“There are so many things I want to say, so many things I want to do. Talking is a creative process and I really miss that. And of course I miss all the facts that I can’t remember.”
2026-04-08 07:51 | Page No.: 167
“He died on the freeway, and they found his windows nailed shut and newspapers and old mail stacked to the ceiling, narrow canyons twisting through.”
2026-04-08 07:53 | Page No.: 170
Old relationships maintain their failings, even as new relationships are conducted with more generosity on firmer ground. Are relationships time capsules?
The Earth Is Full
2026-04-08 07:54 | Page No.: 171
At the restaurant, Ed stage whispers to Denny, “Who invited Bob?” Out of the corner of his eye he catches sight of the guest who won’t take shape.
2026-04-08 07:54 | Page No.: 172
Now life is a collection of details: fingering a fold in the blanket, turning the head, a bit of cuticle chewed solemnly, the awareness of prickly skin. Ed floats on his back, his breath apparent;
2026-04-08 07:55 | Page No.: 172
He feels a new sensation, as though water were pouring into his chest from a great height.
2026-04-08 07:56 | Page No.: 174
I cast about for something that will please him. “I want you to know that you did a great job.” At living and dying, but he could take it to mean his art.
He startles me by whispering, “Thank you.”