Ball by Ander Monson... excerpt

Ball

For starters, the dagger and the Ball are connected in interesting ways. The Ball itself, as you'll soon see (see also "Exteriority," "Vanishing Point: Middle West, Citizenship," "Interiority"), is more than just a ball. It is a way of life. A symbol of something. An obsession, but not just an obsession. It virtually requires annotation, exploration, theorization. It's hard not to make the ball into myth. It makes itself into myth by force of its own conviction.

And if you like the Ball, and I like the Ball, or if you like balls at all ("we've got the biggest balls of them all" --AC/DC, juvenile-ly), enjoy also The Available World, which uses a slice of the Ball--perhaps sliced off with something like a dagger--as the cover image (see below for more). Like many of my books, there are a lot of correspondences between this one and that one.

It is either a defect or a feature. I prefer a feature.

I don't know why I find the Ball so fascinating, why it means more and more the more I think about it. Balls are like this, the more you use them, the more you think about them, the more they roll and accrue gravitational forces. Super balls, for instance. They accrue dust and gum and fur and whatever else as they travel quickly through the air, ready to break your parents' collectibles if muscle-loosed. Too, I'm a fan of the video game Katamari Damacy and its sequels, which features some serious ball action. You probably need to check this game out if you haven't played it yet.

Some epigraphs from TAW:

Let us roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball; --Andrew Marvell

The prince rolled them all up, rolled and rolled, until the katamari was big enough to be lifted up to space to replace the shiny stars that were so grievously lost. And that, dear friends, was the plot and purpose of the fabulous game called Katamari Damacy. --We Love Katamari Damacy

Every ball is a model of the world. Even down to the layer after layer inside of it:

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Ander Monson is really interesting his blurb is as follows
...'Inside every thing there is another thing. Inside each self there is another. Crack the I open and another one emerges. The I — even a fictional I like those we find in memoir — is a mine. The book, a mine. It's mine: I should know. This is the website for the book. Superimpose it on the book. Print it out and stuff it in. The book is a static artifact. The website, not so much. There's more here, new tunnels, new considerations, more thinking. It might not be the same when you return. So: think of the website when you think of the book. Start with the book. When you see a word adorned with a dagger (†) in the book, enter it in the box above.'