January 2010
32 posts
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Beneath the riches of the creative life, and... →
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macdonald continued
“‘No, Mr. Archer,’ she said with her tight smile, ‘I have nothing against you except that you’re a zealot in your trade, or do you call it a profession? Does it really matter so much how people died? They’re dead, as we all shall be, sooner or later. Some of us sooner. And I feel I’ve given you enough of my remaining time on earth.’”
...
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ross macdonald, the chill
“I’d been having a little too much talk with people whose business was talking. It was good to sit at the counter of a working-class restaurant where men spoke when they wanted something, or simply to kid the waitress. I kidded her a little myself. Her name was Stella, and she was so efficient that she threatened to take the place of automation. She said with a flashing smile that this...
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“Within a few minutes a fingerprint man and a deputy coroner and a photographer...”
– Ross MacDonald, The Chill | Knopf 1964
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When I asked him what he was reading now,... →
At which point, I imagine, James Patterson chuckled. And it sounded just like Dick Cheney’s grimace-y, back-of-the-throat thing.
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tartt continued
“I have thought a great deal about … a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. ‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.’ This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian’s...
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tartt continued
“A few months ago, in an airport bookstore, I picked up the autobiography of a notorious thrill killer and was disheartened to find it entirely bereft of lurid detail. At the points of greatest suspense (rainy night; deserted street; fingers closing around the lovely neck of Victim Number Four) it would suddenly, and not without some coyness, switch to some utterly unrelated matter… ....
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“Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of...”
– Donna Tartt, The Secret History | Knopf 09.05.92
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tartt continued
“Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia… . When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state...
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donna tartt, the secret history
“In high school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and all at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of...
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macdonald continued
“‘I wouldn’t have done it,’ he said, ‘if I’d known what I know now. There are factors that you don’t foresee — the factor of human change, for example. You think you can handle anything, that you can go on forever. But your strength wears away under pressure. A few days, or a few weeks, and everything looks different. Nothing seems worth struggling...
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“‘You’re very honest, Mr. Archer. I gave you an opening, but you...”
– Ross MacDonald, The Galton Case | Knopf 1959
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ross macdonald, the galton case
“‘It sounds like one of Grimm’s fairy tales. The goatherd turns out to be the prince in disguise. Or like Oedipus. John had an Oedipus theory of his own, that Oedipus killed his father because he had banished him from the kingdom.’ Her voice was brittle. She was marking time.”
This seems to be one of those ideas that surfaces once, and then you see it again and...
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“I remain unimpressed with the mathematical arts in general. What are the...”
– From Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. (please note that, for the character speaking the lines, this is entirely in earnest.)
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goldstein continued
“Every morning, you play Russian roulette, and the gun has no memory. Sooner or later, your bullet will come. No one is literally immortal. So carpe diem! In fact, carpe diem all the more, because if you die today — and you know, if you compute which is the most likely day that you’ll die, then mathematically the answer is always today — then you’ll be losing out on...
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rebecca newberger goldstein, 36 arguments for the...
“The un-Adorno-ed truth: if I had any chance to go to medical school, I’d be out of here so fast the back draft would blow the foam off this beer.”
I’m pretty sure that, even in grad school, I never said anything like “un-Adorno-ed.” I certainly, fervently hope so.
Pantheon 01.12.10
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Dave Eggers on being a critic
agrammar:
peterwknox:
veiledyellow:portraitoftheartistasayoungman:
Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person...
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"Yes, I like to read book reviews, and in the past... →
Joshua Mohr’s bit on reviewing, or his difficulty with reviewing, has been niggling at me for the past couple of days. And, despite him being gracious enough to anticipate disagreement, not to mention soliciting another point of view (Ron Currie’s perspective that a reviewer or critic should judge a work by how well it fulfills its goals), there’s a disconnect at the root of...
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dee continued
“‘Thank you for not telling me,’ she said. ‘All this time, I mean. What a burden that must have been for you. I know why you did it. I know you did it for us. I’m fucking proud of you, if you want to know the truth. You are a man, Adam. You are a man among men. Let them come after us. They can’t touch us.’”
This is a wife’s speech, to her...
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jonathan dee, the privileges
“… And Adam thought how right she was: you couldn’t just do nothing. It wasn’t enough to trust in your future, you had to seize your future, pull it up out of the stream of time, and in doing so you separated yourself from the legions of pathetic, sullen yes-men who had faith in the world as a patrimony. That kind of meek belief in the ultimate justice of things was not in...
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“But there was something in Adam that stiffened against that idea — more so...”
– Jonathan Dee, The Privileges | Random House 01.05.10
(Look over that last line again: “determine his own rewards, and the pace at which they would come.” The interior monologue of the private-equity banker.)
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flanagan continued
“Over time I developed a professional admiration for craftsmanship. Motown songs were built like a Cadillac. Beatles records were Aston Martins. The Beach Boys made Mustangs — not much under the hood but fun for a summer with the top down.
“In California in the 1970s we made a lot of Monzas, Crickets, and Dusters. They looked all right in their moment and sold a lot at the...
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“Across the radio and retail landscape, rock was in retreat. The latest...”
– Bill Flanagan, in Evening’s Empire, on rock and roll in the early ’90s.
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flanagan continued
“In America it was believed that the Beatles’ sudden explosion in popularity in February 1964 was a reaction to the winter of mourning that followed JFK’s murder. Of course some lunatic would have to complete the assassination cycle by shooting Lennon. Yoko would then assume the oversized dark glasses of the widow Jackie. The circle of anguish was closed and the era of...
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"The mechanically reproduced object will have its... →
Sez Richard Nash, writing about the future of publishing. To split hairs: I’m not sure he means what he says, and am still less certain that Benjamin’s argument can be read as cheerful or approving: simply because digital dissemination is more soulless (or carries even less aura) than mechanical reproduction doesn’t make the earlier model better. However awful mp3 compression is...
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bill flanagan, evening's empire
“He said, ‘This tribe was pretty poor, but they were happy. They hunted, they fished, they played cards and told stories and sang songs and made love and had birthday parties. They had a decent life. Until they got television. Suddenly they saw how other people lived. They saw families with big cars and fancy houses and nice clothes, doing things they’d never done and never would...
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"They [e-books] are simply the latest link in an... →
(says publisher Jonathan Galassi, who we actually hope is right, but who we still suspect is trying to convince himself)
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hay continued
“The books housed in one’s first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become.”
Narrator Rosemary says to herself, assembling her first adult bookshelf at the age of eighteen: Balzac, Borges, James, and Melville. Which contrasts sharply with a lecture from a colleague, managing the rare book room:
“‘All collections are, Rosemary, trying to elude...
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sheridan hay, the secret of lost things
“Understand, the Arcade is itself a city; itself an island. That bookstores are such places is always hoped for, but the Arcade is like the original wish behind such hopes. In that first visit New York was made actual. The Arcade was population, mass, was the accomplishment of a city.” Apparently, Amazon sold more Kindles than anything else this year. And while I don’t want to...
pgwp:
The Zombies: This Will Be Our Year
This...