That was when I first noticed him. It was six weeks later that we first spoke. And maybe a year after that that I found out that the line wasn’t his. I saw it in a book he loaned me. I was flicking through it, not really reading. Looking for the marks of his pen in the margins, the notes he had made. There it was, underlined. The same phrase, word for word. But by then it didn’t matter. You can’t unnotice something.
Jack Gain, “Communism Doesn’t Work,” Boston Review
A paragraph from an author whose writing I’m convinced is definitive of what contemporary fiction should be—whose writing leaves me hungry for more of his writing. This paragraph takes me back to Autobiography of Red’s “there it was one of those moments / that is the opposite of blindness. / The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice,” but it’s better—what the narrator notices is what Eric (the “he”) has said in a class on modern political thought: “‘Workers of the world unite’ is an erotic injunction.” It’s good politics framed as a stolen gesture, an instance of “that thing you like is bad.” The phrase is a paraphrase of a phrase attributed to Susie Bright, via this advice column.