March 2010
34 posts
3 tags
palmer continued
“… the ones who pulled stunts devoid of what I still thought of as craft: submerging counterfeit holy relics in urine; ripping tossed-off paintings of pinup girls out of magazines and enshrining them in gilded frames; exhibiting lumps of flyblown human dung in sealed glass boxes. Sometime during the twentieth century the elite’s idea of beauty became tied to discomfort....
3 tags
“It is nice enough to be a child, but it is far rarer, and much more precious, to...”
– Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion
3 tags
palmer continued
“‘I can’t blame you,’ says Allan. ‘Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin or hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal can undo that? What human on...
3 tags
palmer continued
“Storytelling — that’s not the future. The future, I’m afraid, is flashes and impulses. It’s made up of moments and fragments, and stories won’t survive.”
Says the evil wizard to our hero at ten, after he asks what the boy’s heart’s desire is. Which moves the story forward, sure, but also foregrounds the irony of finding this line in an...
5 tags
dexter palmer, the dream of perpetual motion
“‘Everybody who’s a kid thinks about stuff like this, like when they’re six years old, if they’re boys,’ said Harold. ‘If you’re a boy you think about this stuff when you’re five and a half. I used to draw pictures of flying cars, and for the first time a couple of months ago I saw a flying car, a real one. And I thought, it’s like the...
3 tags
zevin continued
“‘You know what kills me about the Nativity story? Like, Mary just tells Joseph she’s a virgin, and he totally believes her. Immaculate conception, my ass. The world’s first cuckold, more like.’
‘Well, Patsy, I reckon belief is one of the points of the story.’
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘You know what always kills me about it?’ Pharm asked....
4 tags
zevin continued
“‘It’s time for a brand-new bookkeeping. It’s time for a brand-new mathematics. The world tells you that all these secular debts matter, but my whole reason for being put here on this earth is to tell you that they do not, The only debts that matter are the spiritual debts. And by spiritual debts, I mean what you owe to Him who died so you might live.’” Aside...
3 tags
gabrielle zevin, the hole we're in
“But the question had stuck with George. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had a dream for a very long time. She had dreams for her children, yes, but the only real dream she harbored for herself was to owe nothing to anyone. She imagined writing checks that erased decades-old debts. She could feel the pen in her hand and the giddy, jaunty way she spelled out the numbers — the...
4 tags
bognanni continued
“The philosophy of Buckminster Fuller and the philosophy of punk rock are not as separate as they may seem at first. I considered this anew while I waited for Jared to finish a practice quiz in his geometry book that afternoon. Once, the two modes of thought seemed as contrasting to me as humanly possible; now I wasn’t so sure. For example, both Fuller and the original practitioners of...
4 tags
bognanni continued
“‘What I’ve always loved about punk is that you can totally redefine yourself, right?’ he said. ‘You are whatever your songs say you are. Like Iggy Pop. He can wear a white leotard and roll around on broken glass and that’s who he is that night. He’s broken-glass-leotard guy. But it’s all just onstage. Do you know Iggy Pop’s real...
4 tags
"[W]e must think of graduate school as more like... →
James Mulholland, in the Chronicle, arguing that graduate school in the humanities is neither a trap nor a lie.
5 tags
peter bognanni, the house of tomorrow
“At least the sneer was identical. And the hunched posture. And this man who was skinny and strange and a tad weasel-like had managed to capture her affections. Of course, things had ended very poorly, but just the fact that they had been romantic at all was nothing short of inspiring. I didn’t let my imagination wander any further than that. I just took note of the fact that at some...
4 tags
“They named their son after the book of the Bible where God returns his people to...”
4 tags
jillian weise, the colony
“So I was worse off than him? The guy with the beer gut and the whiskery face and the stench of dead fish? The guy bumping into the couch on his way to the kitchen? I was worse off than this individual?”
So Weise, and Anne, do a wonderful job drawing out the dilemma Anne’s in, where she’s fine, really, she is, but at the same time wants to be seen differently than she is,...
3 tags
Freeing authors of fiction from the bonds of... →
Ian Walcott, responding to Jason Epstein.
5 tags
“‘Well, the suicide gene was located right next to some other inane gene....”
– Jillian Weise, The Colony | Soft Skull 03.09.10
3 tags
jillian weise, the colony
“I sat on the bed of the X-ray machine and waited. He would take my shadow and put it to the light. He would point with the end of his Montblanc to various regions of black, gray, and white. Without the light, he couldn’t see the X-ray. It’s easy to forget this. The inadequacy of the human eye. No one calls it a failure; it’s just the way we’re made.”
The...
3 tags
hynes continued
“‘And I try to link it all with what I bring with me from Michigan, and what little I know about Texas. Which is, of course, mostly cliches and stereotypes.’ He’s gesturing with both hands now, which makes him even more self-conscious. ‘So of course I get everything wrong, and not only that, I get it wrong in front of a native Texan. Who’s been very kind to me....
4 tags
hynes continued
“You’re not just shopping for groceries at Gaia, you’re making a political statement, a moral choice—no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners, say the signs, no exploited farmworkers—and you’re also proving that you’re not one of the lumpen, morbidly obese proles in synthetic fibers waddling under unflattering lights up the aisle of Farmer Jack’s, filling your vast cart with family-sized...
3 tags
“During Kevin’s undergraduate years, people like this seemed like the...”
4 tags
hynes continued
“These days, where he buys his coffee depends on which way he walks to work. Say he comes up behind the Union and along Maynard under University Towers and through the Arcade, in which case he stops at Expresso Royale and carries his cardboard cup steaming along State Street. That’s his route on cloudy days. When it’s sunny, he walks all the way up Fifth to Liberty, then straight...
4 tags
james hynes, next
“An Asian girl reading Amy Tan — at first this seemed kind of predictable to Kevin, and then kind of redundant, a coals-to-Newcastle kind of thing. What could Amy Tan tell this girl that she didn’t already know? Then his Ann Arbor brainpan brimmed over with guilt again and he thought, maybe I should be reading Amy Tan, what do I know?”
This is the guy Hynes sticks us with...
4 tags
nesbø continued
“However, the most characteristic trait of the serial killer is that he’s American. Only God — and perhaps a couple of psychology professors at Blindern — knows why. That’s why it’s interesting that the people who know most about serial killings — the FBI and the American legal profession — distinguish between two types of serial murderer: the...
4 tags
jo nesbø, the devil's star
“‘We haven’t had a serial killer in Norway — as far as we know at least — since Arnfinn Nesset went berserk in the ’80s,’ Waaler said. ‘Serial killers are rare, so rare that this is going to attract attention beyond the borders of Norway. We’re already the subject of a lot of attention, folks.’”
Rare in Norway? Perhaps, but it...
6 tags
Although there is an obvious analogy to recent... →
An interesting essay by Ian MacDougall on Stieg Larsson’s books, but I’m not sure I can entirely agree with his arguments. My problem, and it’s a problem I have with Larsson, is verisimillitude: I’m not sure that it’s right, exactly, to confuse the world Larsson depicts in his books with society as it exists. If we are to take Larsson at his word, then virtually every...
4 tags
greenland continued
“‘But business is business and what I’m about is people. I’m a people person.’ Marcus found the words people person singularly idiotic, yet knew it was a phrase to which, for some reason, many individuals seemed to respond. If millions of American idiots can choose a president based on whom they would want to have a beer with, it was probably not a bad yardstick by...
5 tags
greenland continued
“Were they employees? Associates? Subcontractors? What exactly was the worker / management relationship? He was curious to know. Alas, there was no trade journal, no American Pimp in whose pages he could immerse himself to glean the whys and wherefores.” Greenland’s an early entry, apparently, in a recession sub-genre: the comic novel of the middle-class family guy forced into...
3 tags
seth greenland, shining city
“‘I gotta get going,’ the pierced girl said. Then: ‘Do you have any more blow?’ Julian liked how she spoke, do you have, not got any or you got. He enjoyed it when someone made an attempt to sound civilized, life being so debased these days.”
It’s not so much that Julian likes the “do you have” in a question about coke; it’s the fact...
4 tags
lipsyte continued
“Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich find funding us superfluous. Well, they always think we’re superfluous, but when they’re feeling flush it doesn’t matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philanthropy to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it’s a pleasure many don’t feel like splurging on these days. Worse...
5 tags
You frustrated artists, you terrified fathers: Do... →
Dan Kois, in New York, on The Ask, confirming that this is one of those books that I’ll enjoy reading the reviews of far more than I enjoyed actually reading.
3 tags
sam lipsyte, the ask
“… petted his moustache with a kind of cunningdigital ardor.”
Which term, I think, kind of sums up Lipsyte’s humor, at least in this book: technically impressive, but conceptually grade-school, like, oh I don’t know, an exquisite and beautifully-crafted tool, a chef’s knife, maybe, used like a crowbar or taken out on the porch to whittle with.
FSG 03.02.10
4 tags
Writers always envy artists, would trade places... →
from Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage
4 tags
atkinson continued
“Wherever you looked, there was unfinished business and unanswered questions. He had always imagined that when you died, there was a last moment when everything was cleared up for you — the business finished, the questions answered, the lost things found — and you thought, ‘Oh right, I understand,’ and then you were free to go into the darkness, or the light. But it...
6 tags
“Louise sighed inwardly. The girl was one of those. An overexcited imagination,...”
– Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? 