April 2010
34 posts
4 tags
“We are the walking dead, my friend: America’s winners. Too tired making...”
– David Goodwillie, American Subversive | Scribner 04.20.10
“All the seminars, in fact, had a fatal family likeness. They were repetitive in...”
– Character of Phineas Gilbert Nanson in A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (via literarypiano)
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david goodwillie, american subversive
“I checked the stats: 53,723 unique visitors since 9 a.m. Numbers like that once buoyed my confidence; now they just sapped it. All those people, running out the clock in their barren little cubicles, looking for cheap laughs, idle gossip, anything they could repeat later over martinis and melting candles.” Very tempting to dislike Goodwillie right from the jump, because of the very...
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harvey continued
“The first face he saw was that of Jessica Morgan, twenty-three years old and driving a Ford Focus. Jessica was a single mom, working as a paralegal at a Loop law firm and taking classes at night to earn her college degree. Jessica would never know about the law degree she’d have earned from the University of Chicago, her subsequent clerkship with a federal judge, and, eventually, her...
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harvey continued
“I slouched against a rusted girder Nelson Algren would have been proud of, about a block from the corner of Lake and Wabash.”
And then one page later — making it page 19 — Nelson Algren’s name drops (along with his evident pride in decaying metal, which was never anything I associated with Algren, but I’ve only read one or two of his greatest hits). Now, these...
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michael harvey, the third rail
“Then Rodriguez was gone. I wandered back to the medic and her aspirin.”
Very early going, in a minimalist style-driven thriller, rather than an overstuffed info-packed one, and already having to flip back through the chapter to find out where the medic came from. And then finding that this is the first mention. Frustrating.
Knopf 04.20.10
“Philadelphia had been conceived in the style of an English rural town, one where...”
– Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America | Knopf 04.20.10
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carey continued
”’Le systeme democratique, naturellement. It is as without plans as it is without energy, as incapable of harm as it is incapable of good. It is powerless and passive. It lets society marcher toute seule without trying to direct it. Well, in the present state of affairs, it is perfect, no? In order to prosper? America does not need either leadership or deep-laid plans or great efforts,...
“No matter how strong their religious sentiments, or their passion about the...”
– Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America | Knopf 04.20.10
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peter carey, parrot and olivier in america
“The trouble with the general class of Garmonts is that they cannot imagine the life of anyone outside the circle of their own arse. They will hand out the Maundy money, thank you sir, but for the rest of time you must abandon your own story for their own, and you are nothing better than an ink-dipped ant who must scurry about the page at their command.”
So says Parrot, the servant,...
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cusk continued
“What is art? It is, perhaps, a distillation of the difficulty, like the hospital brochure — a kind of knowledge after the fact, a description of what cannot be known until it is lived, by which time it is too late to know it. When he plays the piano he is not living. He is describing what lies beyond his own capacity to redeem.”
Again, a beautiful insight; this time, it’s...
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As citizens, we consider our family, our friends... →
David Hare, in the Guardian, on art and facts and journalism
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cusk continued
“She remembers that Alexa was wearing a red dress when she stood at the door to say goodbye. Tonie had never seen the dress before: Thomas bought it for her. It made Alexa seem unreal, like a girl in a dream. In it, she seemed to have no further need of Tonie, except to be numbered among her accomplishments. Yet the mark of possession was Thomas’s: in the red dress Alexa was...
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rachel cusk, the bradshaw variations
“The world always offers a small opportunity for difference, among a large majority of things that are all the same; and equally unfailingly Tonie takes it, only remembering afterwards that being different is not the same as being right.” This is specifically in reference to her house, which is “narrow and tall and white, Georgian, impractical.” It accomplishes that trick...
marginalgloss:
randyhaddock:
snuh:
Bob Dylan:...
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“My preferred song was called ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All...”
– Teddy Wayne, Kapitoil | Harper Perennial 04.13.10
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wayne continued
“When I terminated, I lay down and was ready to fall asleep, but Rebecca took my hand and guided it on her body and instructed me on what to do until she also terminated. After that, she turned her back to me but placed my left arm around her body and my hand over her right breast, but soon she reversed and made a motion for me to reverse as well, with her arm around my body, and we fell...
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teddy wayne, kapitoil
“Everyone else who writes programs to predict the stock market concentrates on the most central variables and incorporates a few minor ones. But what if I utilize variables that no one observes because they seem tangential, and I utilize exclusively these tangential variables? I would have an advantage like Dan had in his fantasy baseball trade, where he used tangential data instead of...
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“Seeing Grandma this way, it makes me know for certain that everything about a...”
– Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 04.06.10
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durrow continued
“Grandma thinks she’s dreaming big when she says I can have a three-bedroom house on Albina or Killingsworth or maybe near Irving Park (she calls it Irvington), and a husband, and a Toyota that has the new car smell. She wants me to be able to buy whatever I want at the Fred Meyer without paying attention to what vegetable is on sale and without worrying about bringing double coupons....
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“My darling girl, this is the real world. The only way to get a man like Mr Darcy...”
– Jane Austen would never have said that. Mr Darcy is far from perfect. The book’s really about attacking the notion that love is some kind of perfect love at first sight fairytale; it’s about loving someone despite their flaws. I hate shallow interpretations of the book where Darcy is ‘sooo haawt’...
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heidi w. durrow, the girl who fell from the sky
“On that last day Mor took us up on the roof, she had calculated the difference between what we couldn’t have an her ability to watch us want. The difference between her pain and ours, she decided, measured nine stories high.”
This is Rachel speaking, the biracial daughter of a Danish mother and a GI father, who has gone to live — in the early ’80s — with her...
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kerr continued
“In spite of what you once thought, angel, I was never cut out to be a hero. If I was anything like the person you think I am, I wouldn’t have lasted half as long as I have.” And then, at the end, after the necessary shocking reveal, there’s this — from a long speech that lays out explicitly everything that’s been implied, as if Kerr was not sure he had played...
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kerr continued
“Bare flesh was the order of the day for the performers, and lots of it. They tried to make it seem more glamorous by wearing some thoughtfully placed sequins and triangles, but the result was much the same: it was bacon with cheese on top, however you cooked it. Most of the chorus boys looked as if they’d have been a lot happier wearing a cocktail dress. Most of the cocktail girls...
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kerr continued
“The smooth, modern facade was very slightly curved and pockmarked with different-sized, recessed windows, none of which was on the same level. It looked like a face recovering from a dose of smallpox. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of these Weimar-built homes in Berlin and they were about as distinguished as packets of Persil. And yet, although they despised modernism, the Nazis had...
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Words I am Fairly Certain Cormac McCarthy Made Up →
In the first three pages of Suttree alone:
cupracers
photoplates
countercat*
spoorless
bonedust
afreight
unbelled
frograils
dogwhelk
fishplates
pinchbeck
clockless
deathwear
*from the funniest sentence** I have ever read while tipsy and trying to fall asleep at 2:00 in the morning:
Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles...
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philip kerr, if the dead rise not
“German history is nothing more than a series of ridiculous mustaches.”
Philip Kerr is a strange case — he’s got scads of books to his name, and they’re all over the genre map (please see, for instance, The Grid, a kind of sub-Crichton late-nineties techno-thriller about a smart building that kills people, which is pretty terrible even given the sub-genre) —...
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Chuck Barnes submits the workaday surreality of “I... →
A reprint of William Bowers’s entirely brilliant ”All We Read is Freaks,” on teaching Emily Dickinson in community college, originally from the Oxford American.
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shriver continued
“‘Anyway, I don’t care about Iraq anymore,’ Glynis muttered. ‘Or Terri Schiavo. I’m happy for them all to die. I’m happy about global warming, and nuclear proliferation, and the shortage of fresh water. I’m big on earthquakes and floods and bird flu. I’d be thrilled for worldwide oil reserves to run out by 2007. I’d love to see the whole...
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“Jackson hated the word inappropriate, which rod-up-the-ass prisses threw around...”
– Lionel Shriver, So Much For That | HarperCollins 03.09.10
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lionel shriver, so much for that
“For while Gabe Knacker faulted the character of his son ‘the philistine’ for his worship of the false god Mammon, Shep believed fervently that money — the web of your fiscal relationships to individuals and the world at large — was character; that the surest test of any man’s mettle was how he wielded his wallet… . Ever since earning his first five...
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coover continued
“She’s right. You still don’t know who did what, but as Blanche has reminded you, that’s not really the point. Integrity is. Style. As Fingers liked to say, you can’t escape the melody, man, but you can make it your own.”
And here, at the end of the novel, Coover stares down his biggest problem. More than his chosen style of narration. It’s the conception...
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coover continued
“You hope Cueball is okay. But why shouldn’t he be? Why does it matter? To anyone? Nothing seems to make sense, but why do you expect it to? Shouldn’t you just take Mr. Big’s dream warning to heart and stop trying to figure something out when there is nothing to figure?” Never a good sign when a narrator asks why something should matter. But the other effect of...
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robert coover, noir
“It’s a good story and you want to know more (gotta know, gotta know), but you can’t help it, you fall asleep, and from there the story takes other turnings of its own. You become her lover, or else the cop, and the other guy is the fat man in the white suit and panama hat you once trailed through the alley. Are you his double? No, this is a different caper.”
The problem...
