The disease is named for the presence of sweet-smelling urine, with an odor similar to that of maple syrup. The smell is also present and sometimes stronger in the ear wax of an affected individual.

Theorist Michael Moon further articulates this flowing Cornellian eros as an “oralia” characterizing his profuse artistic practices and lifestyle as an “inexhaustible urge to eat sweets and to produce language through speaking and writing.”

“Nobody is going to buy a book on the cover of which is a female body with my face for tits,” Leonard wrote in September 1964 in a long, heated letter to McClelland.

As I usually run away after readings I didn’t stop to hear anyone’s opinion of my barking except for my brother who loved it and my son who was kind of horrified. I barked at Dartmouth just last week though and no one seemed to mind.

Had trouble again with twine. Mad enough to wish I was a bad tornado. Swore at God.

(Henry Darger, Journals, April 16, 1968).

The pages also are replete, says Moon, with “puns and silly jokes – the things that most adults edit out of their writing and out of their very being.”

Aomame, fantasizing about Tengo, lingers on his “big, strong genitals,” and her bodyguard, Tamaru, bizarrely observes, “When it comes to being gay, I’m in the big leagues.”

Anthrozoologist John Bradshaw insists that cats really aren’t terribly domesticated and think that humans are the same species as them, but oddly “non-hostile.”

GPC - Cloned guinea pig receptor.

I was left wondering how a book could be mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment. Every time I tore myself away from these stunning pages to emerge for air, I had to shake my head so hard my cheeks made Looney Tunes noises.