Perhaps it is only because I am rereading James Joyce's Dubliners alongside a rereading of Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence: a memoir -- not obvious companions in the pile of books beside my bed but such is the happenstance of reading -- that I notice just how much the material for each author has stuck in his craw -- the sourness, the bodies, the small flutterings of inept kindliness -- which, stewing there, fuels the great strange machines of their work.