November 2011
16 posts
3 tags
warner continued
“‘It’s okay,’ I reply. ‘It’s thinly veiled fiction and I’m not using any names, like when I write about you, rather than calling you Gord, I just refer to you as “the agent.” Frazier is just “the manager,” and Beth is “the wife” until she’s “the ex-wife.” I call myself “the funny man.” I’m the villain.’” This is a hint at a more interesting, more difficult book. Of course, when you unpack it, it...
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warner continued
“The funny man is aware that he is at a crossroads, perhaps for the first time in his life. No, this is not his first crossroads, just the first time he is aware of it at the time of crossing. Knowing the condom had slipped off and continuing to have sex with his future wife in the library, that was a crossroads. Doing the thing for his agent the first time, crossroads. Signing up for the movie,...
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john warner, the funny man
“Following that gig, when he pours from the limousine in front of his house, he looks at it for a fleeing moment of rare self-awareness and wonders if it is a palace or a prison. As he approaches the front door a motion-sensitive light snaps on, causing him to blink and shade his eyes, and once inside he must deactivate and then reactivate the alarm. He doesn’t think about these things at the time...
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mieville continued
“‘I don’t want to be a simile anymore,’ I said. ‘I want to be a metaphor.’” I’m confident that this is obtuse enough not to qualify as a spoiler, even if it’s the articulation of an important turning point. And yes, the turning point involves figurative expressions.
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mieville continued
“I was surprised at what gave us comfort. Artists plumbed our archives, digital archaeology, back millions of hours, to the antediasporan age. They pulled up corroded ancient fictions to screen. “‘These ones are Georgian or Roman, I gather,’ one organiser told me. “They talk early Anglo, though.” Men and women bled of colour, in clumsy symbolism, fortified in a house and fighting grossly...
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mieville continued
“‘What are you thinking?’ he said. ‘Are you thinking that I keep them so they’re close at hand? Are you thinking that I hide them away, to try to forget them? Avice. If I’d thrown his away and kept mine, you’d think I was clinging to my dead identity, or resenting his death. If I threw them both away, you’d see me in denial. If I kept his but not mine you’d say I was refusing to let him go....
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china mieville, embassytown
“We were trying to find language to make sense of a time before whatever came after.” This is not as koan-y as it seems, really: keep in mind that this is hard science fiction (interstellar travel, alien races) about linguistics. Delicacy and precisely-calibrated vagueness should be expected. At this point in the book, too, this is completely apposite, the best way to explain what is...
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knipfel continued
“‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Hank snapped at him. ‘Whole goddamn country’s a freak show. Look out the window here.’ “‘That’s just it, Shirley,’ Rocky said. ‘It’s all around ’em for free, so why pay to go in a tent? ’Specially when you got no real freaks to show ’em.’” (Which is not to say that it doesn’t wear its heart, and its conclusions, on its sleeve. Satire’s got no...
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jim knipfel, the blow off
“To Hank, the crime blotter was not simply a sadly neglected literary genre but a profoundly and uniquely American one as well. In every one-hundred-fifty-word entry, no matter how extravagant or seemingly irrelevant the crime in question, you had the makings of a miniature novel, with a clear narrative arc, heroes, villains, drama, conflict, and a resolution. Each entry was an encapsulated...
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ingo schulze, adam and evelyn
“After a pause, with everyone looking at her, Katja said, ‘Well, to be happy, to go someplace where things function, where you can live reasonably. I would keep trying over and over, or I’d throw myself out the window.’ “‘It’s not always a matter of either-or,’ Adam said without lifting his eyes from his potato. ‘You can’t say that this is nothing here. And besides, it’s enough that people like...
I felt that the indispensable relationship I... →
Haruki Murakami, in the New Yorker.
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murakami continued
“Maybe I’m fated to drift through life with nothing but second-rate erections, he asked himself, or not even second-rate ones? That would be a sad sort of life, like a prolonged twilight. But depending on how you look at it, it might be unavoidable. At least once in his life he had had the perfect erection, and the perfect orgasm. It was like the author of Gone with the Wind. Once you...
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murakami continued
“Tengo chopped a lot of ginger to a fine consistency. Then he sliced some celery and mushrooms into nice-sized pieces. The Chinese parsley, too, he choped up finely. He peeled the shrimp and washed them at the sink. Spreading a paper towel, he laid the shrimp out in neat rows, like troops in formation. When the edamame were finished boiling, he drained them in a colander and left them to...
“The Professor stared at his hands for a time, then looked up and said,...”
– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84 | Knopf 10.28.11
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murakami continued
“Because you are neither an angel nor a god. I am quite aware that your actions have been prompted by your pure feelings, and I understand perfectly well that, for that very reason, you do not wish to receive money for what you have done. But pure, unadulterated feelings are dangerous in their own way. It is no easy feat for a flesh-and-blood human to go on living with such feelings. That is...
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murakami continued
“‘My specialty is cultural anthropology,’ the Professor said. ‘I gave up being a scholar some time ago, but I’m still permeated with the spirit of the discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in those images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals....
