January 2011
13 posts
3 tags
ryu murakami, popular songs of the showa era
“… they all had an instinctive distaste for any action that smacked of ‘healing one’s wounds.’ In fact, the responsibility for this lay with their fathers, but none of the ladies were aware of this or cared about such things, and in any case their male parents have nothing to do with our story.” Clearly, then, it’s too much to ask for you to edit yourself. But really — even though...
“I think last week must have just been a weird week for bad attitudes; something...”
– Nico Muhly is The Voice of Reason, as usual. (via nsomn)
3 tags
sackville continued
“She had lived patiently alone in her husband’s brother’s house so that he would know where to find her if he found his way back; she had lived through two world wards, seen three kings die and another abandon his crown for a wife, and seen a woman once again take the throne; she had suffered, and seen suffering, and done what she could to aid those that suffered; and all the time Edward had been...
5 tags
sackville continued
“Almost every day is otherwise much the same, but for that figure creeping up daily through the 80s, recorded first and foremost without fail. The priority is never forgotten, so that more exceptional events are recorded as an afterthought.” Half of The Still Point — or, at least, half of its attention, if not its word length — concerns a failed Arctic expedition to the North Pole,...
3 tags
Today, though, it’s the bearers of culture rather... →
n+1, via The Millions.
“This, Julia thinks, is surely Edward’s Emily, as if the picture was taken from...”
– Amy Sackville, The Still Point | Counterpoint 01.01.11
4 tags
amy sackville, the still point
“If she is daunted by her task, if she has been procrastinating, can we blame her for preferring to lounge in the sun? Can a life be composed of other men’s accounts, diaries, journals, notebooks, newspapers and relics of a wrecked expedition any more than it can of — for the sake of argument — a concerto, a dead phesant, a cat in the garden, a trace of lipstick, the taste of vine...
5 tags
hollihan continued
“Training that seemed so fake and macho had worked its way into our brains somehow. The best part was the elation once we knew the attack had been choked off and that it was random rather than the big assault everyone secretly feared. We shared the intensity of the experience. We grinned easily for a change. That feeling faded hard in the grime of daily life afterward, but I never forgot the glory...
4 tags
hollihan continued
“I’d seen the faces of men who’d done what anyone would consider evil things, but their brains were usually so bewildered and pathetic, you wrote off their behavior as some sort of autism of violence. The spiritual counselors explained it with religion. The social counselors talked about case history and abuse records. All of it was so much shit to those of us actually working...
6 tags
keith hollihan, the four stages of cruelty
“People, even friends, sometimes ask me about my job with twitters of interest. They want to hear the sordid details, the glamour of it all. Except they don’t want reality. They don’t want to know what it’s like to be a woman in such an environment. They don’t want to hear about Cooper Lewis in the internal evidence room, or the other things I see or smell, or the...
“[A]bove all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be...”
– Stephen Fry on not minding your language. From the same essay: “In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them.” (via bobulate)
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abbott continued
“He wasn’t worried about Peggy Spangler. She was a detour. Another girl with something hard and metal knocking around in her chest, a can of thumbtacks, a rusty alarm clock. Another blank face with dollar signs for eyes.
“Fuck, Hop, can the purple prose.”
And as things move along, so does Abbott’s diction, keeping time with the downward spiral her characters get...
All science fiction looks towards the future of... →
Alex Carnevale dislikes Paolo Bacigalupi nearly as much as he dislikes Edward Said.
