Boyer is my newest favorite poet.

This book is so good all the way through. I tripped up right on the first one about inescapable shock. This is from an email I sent someone the morning I started the book:

“She goes through this scenario that’s like if an animal gets shocked once, they’re happier when it’s over than they were before they were shocked because now they know how bad a shock can be. Then the more they get shocked, they start appreciating everything that isn’t the shock (including the person who shocks it, partially because they stop the shock too). Then that torture will become so ingrained in its knowledge about pleasure (because of the moments it’s not being shocked) that it will associate the shocking with pleasure/arousal and vice versa. So yea… I’ll be thinking about that all day LOL.”