November 2010
31 posts
themorningnews:
“Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”
Bad Sex Award: Irish author Rowan Somerville beats Alastair Campbell - The Telegraph
And Somerville, accepting the award: “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I would like to thank you.”
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lehane continued
“‘You look behind the face this town puts up, you find a lot of cracks. Unemployment’s double digits and those who are hiring ain’t paying shit. Benefits?’ He laughed. ‘Not a chance. Insurance?’ He shook his head. ‘All the stuff our fathers took for granted as long as you worked hard, the great safety net and the fair wage and the gold watch at the...
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dennis lehane, moonlight mile
“I like the sound of jackhammers, the bleat of sirens in the night, twenty-four-hour diners, graffiti, coffee served in cardboard cups, steam exhaled through manhole covers, cobblestone, tabloid newspapers, the Citgo sign, someone yelling, “Tax-i” on a cold night, corner boys, sidewalk art, Irish pubs, and guys named Sal.”
This is a project that’s pretty well doomed...
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levin concluded
“This is how I’ll start: It’s the middle of the schoolday. We’re smoking in the bleachers. To smoke in the bleachers in the middle of the schoolday — it’s fucken good. Anyone who says different isn’t really a human. Even Brodsky, the cops, even fucken Botha — they know in their fuckfaced hearts this is good. They wish they were us, smoking up here....
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levin continued
“Your name’s Barnum? I said.”
I’m happy to go on record suspecting that Barnum’s called Barnum, actually, only because “Oz” was already taken, or maybe sounded a little too Semitic.
Not surprisingly, in a book so invested in scriptural allegory, Barnum figures as Goliath of Gath (and plays the five on the varsity basketball team), but also as the...
“The suckerpunch is not so-named for its puncher.”
– Adam Levin, The Instructions :: McSweeney’s 11.01.10
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levin continued
A case in point, if you will. The scene is a schoolyard conversation among junior-high students; the topic is great comics. The subtext is whether to admit the new kid to the group — he’s Orthodox, they’re a melting-pot. And the conclusion that they come to, and riff off on, is a preference for Jewish comedians, which derails into a debate about action and goodness, and then...
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levin continued
“… and because you seemed, as well, to be soliciting my advice, I thought I would offer you some: You don’t need this conceit that you’re a nine-year-old. Nor the pseudonym. Your jokes and insights the both would come across better if instead of writing from the unconvincing POV of a boy-genius whose name suggests a messianic fate, you wrote from your current POV: that of...
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levin continued
And then also:
“His tactic made me think of that Lauryn Hill line that Flowers loved, ‘Even after all my logic and my theory, I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ig’nant niggas hear me.’ Lauryn’s not only telling you about what she does, but in telling you what she does, she’s doing what she tells you she does. She makes truth by saying it.”
I...
“Flowers said, ‘Forget the pathetic fallacy. There’s what you write...”
– Adam Levin, The Instructions | McSweeney’s 11.01.10
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levin continued
“‘And what does love feel like?’ Scott went on. ‘Does it feel like the sound of cantaloupes smashing beneath fleshy hammers? It does indeed feel like melons exploding! Have you warmed her by the balustrade near ornamented parapets? Embraced her in the sandstorms of the Negev and the Sinai? Wherefore art thou, Gurion Maccabee? Will you leave us all behind for this lovely...
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levin continued
“I revolved to face the wall and got as flat as I could. Then I started telling myself a children’s version of the story of the kind of holiday I wanted to one day be the hero of, the version you’d tell kids who didn’t know how to read yet and couldn’t understand the complexities of scripture — like the version of Chanukah where it’s all about the oil, or...
“At 933 pages, the fourteenth was comparable in size to the heralded...”
– Ed Park on The Chicago Manual of Style (via typo analysis - bookforum.com / in print)
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adam levin, the instructions
“Forgetting that the hairstyle doesn’t fool anyone, ignoring that it highlights what it’s meant to hide, the hairstyle’s name — combover — is in the same class of words as unibrow and needlenose and muffintop and trampstamp, i.e., not only does the name mock the thing it refers to, but it’s the only name there is for the thing it refers to. So any speaker...
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This is how you include balance, which we all know is necessary, in a review:
I know that a few tender souls will feel that there must be something good in everything, and that I really shouldn’t be so negative. So I will say one favorable thing about the book. Holding it in my hands did not make my skin erupt in a horrible disfiguring disease. There. I’m done. Don’t tell me I...
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murray continued
“Ruprecht believed in explanations; he has always seen the universe as a series of questions posed to its inhabitants, with the answers waiting like prizes for the boy lucky and diligent enough to find them. To believe in explanations is good, because it means you may believe also that beneath the chaotic, mindless jumble of everything, beneath the horrible disjunction you feel at every...
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murray continued
“But then thinking about it he realizes he remembers the last time quite clearly; and with a disarming vividness finds himself not so much in the grip of a memory as slipped back to that very time, to the shape and feel of being fourteen — the taste of apple-flavoured bubblegum in his mouth, the humiliation of a spot on his chin, the unending turmoil of that endless struggle to stay...
“That’s one of the great puzzles of every American generation to come along since...”
– Shaenon Garrity, on Scott Pilgrim, via jonathanbogart
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murray continued
“In fact, maybe it’s love after all. Why can’t we fall in love with a theory? Is it a person we fall in love with, or the idea of a person? So yes, Ruprecht has fallen in love. It was love at first sight, occurring the moment he saw Professor Tamashi present that initial diagram, and it has unfolded exponentially ever since. The question of reason, then, the question of evidence,...
“The thing is, though both explanations are, as far as we can work out, right,...”
– Paul Murray, Skippy Dies | Faber & Faber 08.31.10
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paul murray, skippy dies
“It’s not that Howard doesn’t love her. He does, he would do anything for her, lay down his life if it came to it — if for example she were a princess menaced by a fire-breathing dragon, and he a knight on horseback, he would charge in with his lance without a second thought, stare the serpent right in its smouldering igneous eye, even if it meant getting barbecued there on...
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franzen continued (and concluded)
“The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement — to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an...
“You cannot see that her family loves American movies like she does and that...”
– Eric Gansworth, Extra Indians | Milkweed 11.01.10
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eric gansworth, extra indians
“The interview was going fairly routine, about as I expected, but how do you describe someone going insane on you? It’s a gradual process and one day, the person you used to spend every waking hour with is saying the craziest of things, and you are left trying to carry on a conversation with him in this world when he has clearly moved on to another.”
Tommy Jack’s voice...
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sobol continued
“She ignores his comment, sell people a carrot as a carrot and they won’t buy it. But if you hint to them that the carrot contains a substance that in combination with the oil of pitango seeds brings about a mystical connection to the embryonic experience together with triple orgasms, they’ll buy the carrot, and also search the internet for pitango seed oil. Do you get it?...
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joshua sobol, cut throat dog
“This is a true story, he hears the voice in the trailer say, the story of the secret life of the undercover agent H.R., otherwise known as Billy the Bard, or Shakespeare for short. A story of desperate manhunts, daring assassinations, friendship between men, love sanctified in blood that won’t let our hearts forget.”
And, well, that’s your early-on statement of the...
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franzen continued
“Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built huge processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal. The polluted...
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franzen continued
“He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no...
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franzen continued
“I used to work at the Conservancy, and when we’d have our annual gala, the rich people were happy to buy a table for twenty thousand dollars, but only if they got their gift bag at the end of the night. The gift bags were full of worthless garbage donated by somebody else. But if they didn’t get their gift bags, they wouldn’t donate twenty thousand again the next...
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He says: "My parents have a (expletive) Kindle.... →
Adam Levin (of The Instructions).
