October 2010
37 posts
4 tags
franzen continued
“On the chance that, regarding Patty’s parents, a note of complaint or even outright blame has crept into these pages, the autobiographer here acknowledges her profound gratitude to Joyce and Ray for at least one thing, namely, their never encouraging her to be Creative in the Arts, the way they did with her sisters. Joyce and Ray’s neglect of Patty, however much it stung when...
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jonathan franzen, freedom
“Walter resembled the officious ‘student manager’ that high-school teams sometimes have, the unathletic kid who assists the coaches and wears a jacket and necktie to games and gets to stand on the sideline with a clipboard. Jocks tend to tolerate this kind of manager because he’s inevitably a deep student of the game, and this seemed to be one element of the Walter-Richard...
The question is whether the enormous force of... →
Why, that’s depressing and awful, and I hope you’re wrong, Mr. DeLillo.
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yu continued
“…(something I will soon learn about at the university, where some of my upper-middle-class classmates, with their strangely nice bedsheets and faster computers and discreetly expensive clothes tossed casually over the chair or in piles on the floor, so different from my prepressed, store-label khakis, folded in my half-empty drawer, how these classmates took me seriously, were nice to...
Science fiction allows a writer to selectively... →
Charles Yu, managing to sound just a little bit like Emily Dickinson. No, really, now.
As the comic novelist Julian Gough told me: “One... →
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yu continued
“Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding...
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yu continued
“My father had originally come from a faraway country, a part of reality, a tiny island in the ocean, a different part of the planet, really, a different time, where people still farmed with water buffalo and believed that stories, like life, were all straight lines of chronology, where there was enough magic left in the real, in the humidity of August and the mosquito and the sun and birth,...
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charles yu, how to live safely in a science...
“Time isn’t an orderly stream. Time isn’t a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We’re too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small...
“My wife and I are still clearly in the rapture stage of parenthood. Friends...”
– Scott Simon, Baby We Were Meant For Each Other | Random 08.24.10
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fortier continued
“I winced, but Janice didn’t seem to notice. ‘The irony is, of course,’ she continued, too absorbed in her own lewd logic to notice my extreme discomfort with the subject and her choice of words, ‘that they could have saved themselves the whole friggin’ trouble. ‘Cause you two went ahead and stuffed the cannelloni anyway. Just like Romeo and Juliet....
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fortier continued
“He glanced at the dagger, too, and I knew that we were thinking the same thing. If Shakespeare was right, this was the weapon with which Giulietta Tolomei had killed herself. ‘Then why don’t you rewrite it?’ he proposed. ‘And change your destiny.’”
And, as with her wholehearted embrace of fairytale plotting, Fortier jumps into the stew of Juliet stories...
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Sometimes a song gets stuck in your head.
“Art” and “content” are both interpretive... →
Matt LeMay on the work of art in the age of electronic reproduction, more or less.
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anne fortier, juliet
“‘There are some things,’ he said softly, ‘that a princess has to do alone. Do you remember what I told you … one day you will find your kingdom?’
‘That was just a story. Life isn’t like that.’
‘Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.’”
On the off chance that you hadn’t figured out that...
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percy continued
“His hidden nature has been suddenly revealed, as it is with those 3-D books he owned as a child, pages full of seemingly random patterns that disguised a picture — a skull, a train, a flock of birds frozen in flight — exposed once you let your eyes go out of focus. He is a beast. That is what he is. Just look at him. He holds out his arms as evidence. He is like some beastly toy...
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percy continued
“Justin understands and doesn’t. He rolls his eyes at the way big box stores sprout up like fungus, at the way Californians outnumber Oregonians, at the way MapQuest can’t keep up with all the development, but at the same time, he likes Gap and Starbucks, likes not having to drive to Portland for the things he wants. He knows he shouldn’t say anything more — he should...
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benjamin percy, the wilding
“It is common knowledge, the resentment felt toward Portland and Eugene and Bend, especially among the dairy farmers and cattle ranchers, the mountain towns. The money comes out of the cities. The votes come out of cities. They make a red state blue.”
This occurs at an interesting point in the book. The central conflict is among three generations of men, in exurban Oregon —...
“The tragedy does not remain the story. As with any public property, it is...”
– Jessica Francis Kane, The Report | Graywolf 08.31.10
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krauss continued
“To call it a desk is to say too little. The word conjures some homely, unassuming article of work or domesticity, a selfless and practical object that is always poised to offer up its back for its owner to make use of, and which, when not in use, occupies its alloted space with humility. Well, I told Gottlieb, you can cancel that image immediately. This desk was something else entirely: an...
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krauss continued
“The messages on the backs of the cards, written in handwriting that will die with his generation (shaky, mangled by its forced leaps from language to language, dignified in its illegibility) always ended in the same way: Take care of each other, my loves. Papa.”
The insight and detail of some of her tossed-off asides, like this one about the handwriting of the Second World...
Talking with an itinerant used-clothing peddler in... →
George Packer on the late-nineteenth-century (and — ahem — realist English) novel and the developing world.
(Which, actually, replicates the earlier-version-of-modernity argument that’s inherent in the term ‘developing world,’ but culturally, too.)
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nicole krauss, great house
“Two nights before your mother died I sat down to write her a letter. Me, who hates writing letters, who would rather pick up a phone to say my piece. A letter lacks volume, and I am a man who relies on volume to make myself understood. But, OK, there was no line that would reach your mother, or maybe there was still a line but no telephone on the other end. Or just an endless ringing and no...
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will lavender, obedience
“It wasn’t until later, when she was back in her dorm room trying to read the middle section of City of Glass, that the thought came to her: But what is real and what isn’t? Was Polly’s father’s tattoo real? Williams had referenced it in class so it must be part of the game. Why were some details meaningful and others coincidence?”
This is frustrating, the...
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mccarthy continued
“Wireless waves don’t die away after the ether disturbance is produced: they linger, clogging up the air and causing interference. Half the static we’ve just waded through is formed by residues of old transmissions. They build up, and up, and up, the more we pump them out.”
I was very eager to like C, to the point of putting off reading it as long as I could, waiting for a...
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mccarthy continued
“Of all the pilots and observers, Serge alone remains unhaunted by the prospect of a firey airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards: brain and connecting rod merging to...
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mccarthy continued
“But Serge can’t do it: his perceptual apparatuses refuse point-blank to be twisted into the requisite configuration. He sees things flat; he paints things flat. Objects, figures, landscapes: flat. Even when Clair sits him down in front of reproductions of Giottos, Constables and Vermeers and orders him to copy them, the scenes accordion down into two dimensions, sideways-facing...
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"But on Wednesday morning five of the candidates... →
Guardian: Booker prize betting suspended after ‘inexplicable’ run on Tom McCarthy
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tom mccarthy, c
“Walled in by wooden planks, scores of white moths are coupling. Some are crawling around, their antennae twitching as they seek out partners; some are bumping blindly into one another, wrestling a little before moving on; but most are slotted into other moths. The males crouch over the females, thorax stacked above thorax, wings resting over wings. Once joined, they frot around, vibrating,...
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bass continued
“From behind the opiates and the booze he would order another take, and then another, would call out to the producer as well as to the Jordanaires, ‘Give me some of that Brown sound!’ — but by that time no one ever understood what he was talking about, assumed instead he was talking about James Brown, and punched their vocals up in the other direction, making it more...
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bass continued
“They talked on and on, sinking a little deeper into things as the night progressed, but in no way descending all the way to the murky bottom; that in his pursuit of being loved, he had almost been like a hunter — seeking, finding, then feasting on, their magic — and that night, Bonnie did not acknowledge or understand this either, or the guilt of knowing that at some level she...
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bass continued
“The visual aura — certain things at the periphery dimming while others become more illuminated, even gilded — and the tightening also of aural intensities, with some sounds becoming so much sharper as to be almost painful. The quickened heartbeat, to the point of palpitations, and the rush of anticipatory endorphins: always, the best part about drinking was the very last second,...
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rick bass, nashville chrome
“The little sawmill was perched at the edge of the dark woods, resting atop the rich soil, with the workers gnawing their way slowly into the old forest. Some years the workers would bring the logs in to the mill, and other years — depending on transportation logistics and contracts — the mill would pack up and move a little farther into the woods. There were still panthers in...
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farndale continued
“There was a bubble of laughter from Sang-mi. ‘Not at all! The mind of a scientist is open to all possibilities. Take the uncertainty of the subatomic world. It is supposedly full of fluctuations that apply to space-time as well. So up and down, left and right, even past, present, and future are no longer predictable at the subatomic level. The past could walk in on the present. Your...
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nigel farndale, the blasphemer
“Wetherby’s fingers were tapping his chin. ‘A better quote to have above the door might be “Monkeys make men. Men make angels.”’
‘That’s good. Who said it?’
‘Darwin. Notebook B.’
Daniel looked embarrassed.”
Well, he should look embarrassed. He’s a TV presenter, a committed atheist, a man who uses the word...
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kehlmann continued
“How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space...
