February 2012
5 posts
4 tags
ruff continued
“From the White House they took a driving tour of some of the Zone’s other sights, eventually circling back to the center of the Mall, where they proceeded on foot to the base of the Washington Monument. Colonel Yunus drew Mustafa’s attention to a series of pockmarks in the obelisk’s north face. These were, he explained, the result of insurgent mortar strikes, the Monument having become a target...
“‘All of you,’ Costello said. ‘You’re the losers. It’s not fair, but it’s how it...”
– Matt Ruff, The Mirage | Harper 02.07.12
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matt ruff, the mirage
“By North African standards Tripoli was a lush city, its parks and gardens well irrigated by one of the governor’s most successful public works projects, the Great Manmade River, which had tapped into the vast fossil aquifer beneath the Sahara Desert. These eucalypti were part of an even grander Al Gaddafi scheme to fight global warming by turning the desert into a forest. Test plots like this one...
4 tags
eowyn ivey, the snow child
“What happened in that cold dark, when frost formed a halo in the child’s straw hair and snowflake turned to flesh and bone? Was it the way the children’s book showed, warmth spreading down through the cold, brow then cheeks, throat then lungs, warm flesh separating from snow and frozen earth? The exact science of one molecule transformed into another — that Mabel could not explain, but...
2 tags
But when it comes time to level the accusation of... →
Tin House has a series on the art of the sentence.
January 2012
24 posts
4 tags
johnson continued
“In a society where it is the collective that matters, we’re the only people who make the individuals count.” and “‘You know what Dr. Song said about you? He said you had a gift, that you could say a lie while speaking the truth.’” Now, that last bit? about the man and his story? That happens in the middle of a big, mostly comic set piece, with our hero...
4 tags
johnson continued
“‘Where we are from,’ he said, ‘stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.’” But, alongside...
4 tags
adam johnson, the orphan master's son
“The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew all the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he...
5 tags
szalay continued
“(An interesting idea, when she thought about it — her perception of how she felt. What was the difference between the perception of how she felt, and how she did feel? In what sense did her feelings exist when she wasn’t perceiving them — when she wasn’t feeling them?)” Working to justify sleeping with James, after telling him she needed a break from sleeping with him. Like so much...
3 tags
szalay continued
“Sometimes — usually when the sleepy sensation of skin touching skin seems of itself to hold some sort of mute insufficient promise — she still hopes that he might somehow start to understand her. The trouble is, she is unable to help feeling that it just doesn’t work like that — that if he does not understand her instinctively then trying is pointless, even if it were...
5 tags
szalay continued
“His lack of desire, as he wiped her — wiped her stomach and the seam of her pussy like an exhausted waiter wiping a table — was extraordinary. He felt like he would never want to fuck another woman in his life. In the last minute, the way he saw her had undergone a profound metamorphosis. He noted the sanded soreness around her mouth, the zones of irritation — little livid...
6 tags
david szalay, spring
“The question of the day was — Is the world changing more or less quickly than it was? Alexander said LESS quickly. The world was changing less quickly now than at any point in the twentieth century. Think, he said, of the fact that in 1900 there was no powered flight at all. The Wright brothers and their experiment on the sands at Kitty Hawk were still some years in the future. And...
“A vacuumed space would appear at first, a howling little hole, but if I strained...”
– Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet | Knopf 01.17.12
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marcus continued
“LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel...
4 tags
marcus continued
“Much of my time in those early days at the script design desk was spent creating inhibitors that would keep me from seeing what I was doing.” And then there’s the second half, which moves from one kind of nightmare (flight, isolation) to another (clinical futility) — and with that shift comes the notion, the difficulty of working with something toxic, creating a panacea out of...
7 tags
marcus continued
“When I thought of Esther alone in the house, without us, I pictured her being waited on by … us. Facsimiles of us. Robot usses. Father and mother us, hovering over Esther with bowls of berries, with the special dinner of steamed greens, the de-meated slab of protein and sauteed bread she liked. Her own baby bowl of salt, hooked onto her dinner plate like a sidecar. I couldn’t see her,...
5 tags
ben marcus, the flame alphabet
“Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went...
“It is frustrating to them beyond measure when a daughter screams, ‘You don’t...”
– Caitlin Flanagan, Girl Land | Regan Arthur 01.11.12
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flanagan continued
“Tipper Gore’s heroic campaign to get explicit music rated and labeled was born after she decided to do something few parents had even attempted: actually listen to the albums her kids had bought. She was ridiculed by many factions, including those forces on the American left who cry censorship whenever anyone attempts to protect the public, including children, from smut (and in the case of...
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Though Flanagan does attempt an idiosyncratic and... →
So, I was perhaps not aware of Ms. Flanagan’s particular place in the cultural conversation, or that she lined up so well opposite Katie Roiphe, but that does explain a number of things, only slightly further illuminated by this here piece in (ack) Slate.
(Oh, and two other little things: This is one of three reviews of this book that have used the “girl land: population one”...
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caitlin flanagan, girl land
“That a sexually budding adolescent girl becomes the sudden object of predatory male attention has been the cause of parental anxiety down through the ages. When I was a young teenager in 1973, the horror movie The Exorcist took America by storm. It was a supernatural tale of the occult, but it also had within it a central idea that was at once culturally relevant and deeply terrifying: that...
3 tags
o'malley continued
“It occurred to me, however, that if this was not an abomination in the eyes of God that would lead to our eternal damnation, it represented a marvelous business opportunity. So it was with an open mind and a couple of extremely large fellows from my estates as backup that I accompanied my cousin to his residence, where a handful of grubby men were engaged in some extremely complicated...
3 tags
daniel o'malley, the rook
“She opened up the big purple binder and flipped through the pages to the entry on Gallows Keep Prison.” The setup here is that our heroine wakes up, amnesiac in the rain, and must figure out who betrayed her within England’s bureaucracy of the supernatural; she’s aided by copious notes prepared for her by her pre-memory-loss self. Which are inserted in the narrative, verbatim, in italics....
6 tags
dunthorne continued
“The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia’s dark and seething underbelly, she had found the potbelly of contentment.” And I think that pulled punch — the undelivered promise of quirk — is a mixed blessing for Wild Abandon. Because, really, the book winds up being much more a matter of a coming-of-age, rather like The Fallback...
“Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so...”
– Pico Iyer | The point of the long and winding sentence
[And with that, I have an alibi.]
(via lowendtheory)
Oh God yes.
(via jonathanbogart)
3 tags
joe dunthorne, wild abandon
“Freya remembered noticing that after Don had said his bit he kept nodding, as though his sentence continued on, unheard, in his head. He strongly agreed with himself.” Dunthorne is good with details, like this one, which advances and crystallizes Don’s character (in this case, a young, nascent student Don) in a detail. Which serves the comedy very well, even if it means that the book is...
“She had never thought of herself as a slow eater until that point. He poured the...”
– Joe Dunthorne, Wild Abandon | Random 01.03.12
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stein continued
“He spoke softly of submicroscopic physics and liked strategic multiplayer board games. My Mitch. He didn’t bring me flowers, but he always brought me Raisonets once I mentioned that I liked them.” The situation is that Esther, at the end of her college career, identifies so strongly with Blanche DuBois that she slips into an alcoholic depression — a nice semicomic turn. This makes...
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leigh stein, the fallback plan
“After the credits, I joined the throng and exited the theater. Everyone was rubbing their eyes at first, but by the time we had reached the fluorescent lobby we remembered what country we lived in and where we’d parked our cars.” The movie is A Mighty Heart, the Angelina Jolie movie about Daniel Pearl; the tone is easy gentle Millennial snark, readable if a little inconsequential. Despite...
December 2011
1 post
5 tags
richard zimler, the warsaw anagrams
“Imagine black dye running off into every memory. Nothing survives that isn’t grey.” This is the especially nice thing that Zimler does, in a perfectly adequate historical mystery (that is, a little bit of a mixed bag, with an underdeveloped frame story and the weird dissonance of a small cast of characters in the overcrowded Warsaw Ghetto setting, but a strongly and specifically-developed...
November 2011
16 posts
3 tags
warner continued
“‘It’s okay,’ I reply. ‘It’s thinly veiled fiction and I’m not using any names, like when I write about you, rather than calling you Gord, I just refer to you as “the agent.” Frazier is just “the manager,” and Beth is “the wife” until she’s “the ex-wife.” I call myself “the funny man.” I’m the villain.’” This is a hint at a more interesting, more difficult book. Of course, when you unpack it, it...
4 tags
warner continued
“The funny man is aware that he is at a crossroads, perhaps for the first time in his life. No, this is not his first crossroads, just the first time he is aware of it at the time of crossing. Knowing the condom had slipped off and continuing to have sex with his future wife in the library, that was a crossroads. Doing the thing for his agent the first time, crossroads. Signing up for the movie,...
3 tags
john warner, the funny man
“Following that gig, when he pours from the limousine in front of his house, he looks at it for a fleeing moment of rare self-awareness and wonders if it is a palace or a prison. As he approaches the front door a motion-sensitive light snaps on, causing him to blink and shade his eyes, and once inside he must deactivate and then reactivate the alarm. He doesn’t think about these things at the time...
3 tags
mieville continued
“‘I don’t want to be a simile anymore,’ I said. ‘I want to be a metaphor.’” I’m confident that this is obtuse enough not to qualify as a spoiler, even if it’s the articulation of an important turning point. And yes, the turning point involves figurative expressions.
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mieville continued
“I was surprised at what gave us comfort. Artists plumbed our archives, digital archaeology, back millions of hours, to the antediasporan age. They pulled up corroded ancient fictions to screen. “‘These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,’ one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly...
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mieville continued
“‘What are you thinking?’ he said. ‘Are you thinking that I keep them so they’re close at hand? Are you thinking that I hide them away, to try to forget them? Avice. If I’d thrown his away and kept mine, you’d think I was clinging to my dead identity, or resenting his death. If I threw them both away, you’d see me in denial. If I kept his but not mine you’d say I was refusing to let him go....
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china mieville, embassytown
“We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after.” This is not as koan-y as it seems, really: keep in mind that this is hard science fiction (interstellar travel, alien races) about linguistics. Delicacy and precisely-calibrated vagueness should be expected. At this point in the book, too, this is completely apposite, the best way to explain what is...
3 tags
knipfel continued
“‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Hank snapped at him. ‘Whole goddamn country’s a freak show. Look out the window here.’ “‘That’s just it, Shirley,’ Rocky said. ‘It’s all around ’em for free, so why pay to go in a tent? ’Specially when you got no real freaks to show ’em.’” (Which is not to say that it doesn’t wear its heart, and its conclusions, on its sleeve. Satire’s got no...
7 tags
jim knipfel, the blow off
“To Hank, the crime blotter was not simply a sadly neglected literary genre but a profoundly and uniquely American one as well. In every one-hundred-fifty-word entry, no matter how extravagant or seemingly irrelevant the crime in question, you had the makings of a miniature novel, with a clear narrative arc, heroes, villains, drama, conflict, and a resolution. Each entry was an encapsulated...
4 tags
ingo schulze, adam and evelyn
“After a pause, with everyone looking at her, Katja said, ‘Well, to be happy, to go someplace where things function, where you can live reasonably. I would keep trying over and over, or I’d throw myself out the window.’ “‘It’s not always a matter of either-or,’ Adam said without lifting his eyes from his potato. ‘You can’t say that this is nothing here. And besides, it’s enough that people like...
I felt that the indispensable relationship I... →
Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker.
5 tags
murakami continued
“Maybe I’m fated to drift through life with nothing but second-rate erections, he asked himself, or not even second-rate ones? That would be a sad sort of life, like a prolonged twilight. But depending on how you look at it, it might be unavoidable. At least once in his life he had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone with the Wind. Once you...
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murakami continued
“Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he choped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to...
“The Professor stared at his hands for a time, then looked up and said,...”
– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 | Knopf 10.28.11
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murakami continued
“Because you are neither an angel nor a god. I am quite aware that your actions have been prompted by your pure feelings, and I understand perfectly well that, for that very reason, you do not wish to receive money for what you have done. But pure, unadulterated feelings are dangerous in their own way. It is no easy feat for a flesh-and-blood human to go on living with such feelings. That is...
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murakami continued
“‘My specialty is cultural anthropology,’ the Professor said. ‘I gave up being a scholar some time ago, but I’m still permeated with the spirit of the discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in those images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals....
October 2011
26 posts
4 tags
haruki murakami, 1Q84
“The more she thought about it, the more natural her second hypothesis began to feel to her because, no matter how much she searched for it, she could not find in herself a gap or distortion in her mind. And so she carried this hypothesis forward: It’s not me but the world that’s deranged. Yes, that settles it.”
One of the criticisms that gets levelled against Murakami...
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everett continued
“The mural depicted refrigerators dressed like Indians dancing around a huge, glowing-red convection oven. The scene was modeled after the local corn dance and most people were offended by it, but Blinky, being native, claimed that every detail was accurate, except for the fact that the dancers were appliances.”
Assumption is a strange little book, too, in its shifts: there are three...
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percival everett, assumption
“Ogden had little interest in the old woman when she’d been alive, so he was amused at how much her death was affecting him. Perhaps it was as simple as a mystery to pass the time in a boring, sleepy village. Maybe it was some kind of sublimation for a stalled life, a life he was not pursuing. Or perhaps he just wanted to catch and stop a killer.”
It’s interesting to see...
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dewitt continued
“But any salesman knows you can’t get pedantic with the client. The old saying ‘The customer is always right’, harks back to this common knowledge. If you’re the kind of person who has to correct someone every time they make a factual mistake, you might just want to stop for a moment and compare the average take-home pay of a teacher and that of a halfway competent...