February 2011
24 posts
I wonder: I can fatigue very particular muscles.... →
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taylor continued
“A thought passes through her mind — Desire is a strange attractor. You longing warps the arc of the world’s emergent truth — as she darkens the bubble for Nader, slips the ballot into the slot, exits the booth, and walks off to have her day.” Which involves meeting a guy for pizza and picking up the new Radiohead album. It’s interesting that the clearest parts...
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taylor continued
“What Katy worships is not so much Parker as Parker’s absence, and she herself fills the space she has carved out for him, the role he perpetually declines to appear and assume. Liz doubts that Katy knows that she ‘knows’ this. The knowledge is so fundamental that it does not register as information; it is completely integrated into Katy’s reality, not a fact of life...
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justin taylor, the gospel of anarchy
“They already lived outside capitalism’s kingdom, in the gutter that ran along the base of its foritfied wall, not beyond but below its field of vision — except of course when they got caught stealing, but they were pretty ace thieves by this point. We might be trapped in this fucked, fallen world, Parker said, but that is not the same as being of it. When Katy and Thomas...
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brockmeier continued
“And it seemed to Ryan that He viewed their bodies as a doctor would — so many sorry aging structures of blood and tissue, each displaying its own particular debility. Their wounds were majestic to Him, their tumors and lacerations. And perhaps it had always been that way. Perhaps the light He had brought to their injuries, or allowed the world to bring, was simply a new kind of...
“He could have put together a book sorting their traumas into two separate lists...”
– Kevin Brockmeier, The Illumination | Pantheon 02.01.11
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brockmeier continued
“Chuck skimmed a news magazine he found on the table. Someone, a Chinese soldier, had been shot in the head. Light was gushing from his temple in a sideways fountain. Some children were starving, their stomachs glistening like crystal balls. Their pain had made them simple, honest, candid, like objects.” One of the excellent things that Brockmeier does with his conceit comes from its development...
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brockmeier continued
“In the days that followed, Melissa guided him into greater and more pleasurable forms of injury, assisting him through each procedure step-by-step. She plucked the hairs from his stomach with a pair of tweezers, patiently and deliberately, so that each one generated a ring-shaped lambent spot that spread open and disappeared like a raindrop striking a puddle.” Arguably one of the few permissible...
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kevin brockmeier, the illumination
“Before the chorus took hold, he was overcome with a sense of dread and had to press the STOP button. He shook his head involuntarily, like a dog throwing off crests of water. He sat down on the stationary bicycle. He had known the song for twenty years, longer than he had known Patricia, longer than he had known how to drive or write a check. Its meaning in his life ought to have been...
“The real issue is that there are at least a dozen things I worry about in my...”
– Too Many Books In The Kitchen: A word about those VIDA pie charts
This sounds right to me.
And I don’t know enough about book publishing to say for sure, but I suspect bias begins at the publishing stage (if not earlier), particularly in the marketing department. I can’t even count the number of...
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child continued
“‘What’s a Persuader?’ ‘A shotgun,’ I said. ‘The Mossberg M500 Persuader. It’s a paramilitary weapon.’” And here we were, all this time, thinking it was the hero that was the persuader. Ooh — but! Maybe they both are. (I do see what he did there, I do.)
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No. 1: James Hynes' "Next" →
From Salon: “Our countdown of the year’s best sex writing concludes with a steamy, erotic encounter on a farmhouse porch.” Really, an excellent choice.
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lee child, persuader
“I slapped its side like van people do and it boomed faintly in response.” Now, one of the hallmarks and glories of the Lee Child style is its self-evident simplicity. SVO sentences. When things get exciting, he drops the subject. But when the guy slaps the side of the van “like van people do” you see the self-evident hardening into something dangerously close to self-parody.
Dell (Delacorte)...
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richards continued
“I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me. I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl. Is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image, as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain… . I think some of it is that there is so much pressure to be that person that you become it, maybe, to a certain point that you can...
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“Our thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we...”
– Keith Richards, Life | Little Brown 10.26.10
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richards continued
“He set me up a couple of times. Without my knowing it — I found out later — he used me as a getaway driver on a hit-and-run jewel theft in the Burlington Arcade. ‘Here, Keith, I’ve got this Jag. Want to try it out?’ What they wanted was a clean car and a clean driver. And Tony had obviously told these blokes that I was a good night driver. So I waited outside this place, not knowing...
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keith richards, life
“There’s no way to stop a primate. If I’m in, I’m in. When they got me in the scouts, I was a patrol leader in three months. I clearly like to run guys about. Give me a platoon, I’ll do a good job. Give me a company, I’ll do even better. Give me a division, and I’ll do wonders. I like to motivate guys, and that’s what came in handy with the Stones. I’m really good at pulling a bunch of guys...
“There was a story that traveled around the islands about a woman named Mama...”
– Karen Russell, Swamplandia! | Knopf 02.01.11
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russell continued
“The Pelkises had a poinciana tree dragging magenta combs over the grass and a bunch of rusting croquet wickets in the yard. Inside, they had a Wurlitzer piano and a mantel covered in what appeared to be hundreds of tiny porcelain cats. The Pelkises’ decor was such a clean and pleasant variation on the Bigtrees’ cabinets of gin and lizards that Kiwi found himself holding tightly...
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russell continued
“I had pictured the birds’ strident calls trembling through the air and dying, and then all of a sudden those same cries taking on a coloring — red, black, blue — until what had previously been an empty hissing splintered into a hundred separate dramas: males squabbling over carrion, a lover’s quarrel, a chick and its four siblings protesting their hunger. ...
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karen russell, swamplandia!
“The doctor lit a Turkish cigarette and let out a little cry, a sadness that registered in decibels somewhere between a gambler’s sigh and the poor woman’s grief-mad wailing at the end of her labor — and then another cry joined the doctor’s. The stillborn’s blue face opened like a flower and he started crying even harder, unequivocally alive now, unabashedly...
The cause was complications of prostate cancer,... →
NYT obit for Brian Rust, “father of modern discography.”
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murakami continued
“The real wall that the investigation had run up against, however, was the lack of any discernible chain of events. Crimes that don’t have any clear motive are the most difficult to solve, and tying a rocket attack at the beach to three random murders in Chofu was a leap far beyond the imaginative powers of the police.” But not the novelist. The thing is, Murakami’s implicit argument here —...
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murakami continued
“They always say that when human beings are extinct, the only living thing left will be the cockroach, but that’s bullshit. It’s the Oba-san.” Another minor character, later on, explains a different wrinkle on his distaste for the Oba-san — which is, I think, literally ‘auntie,’ but in this case refers rather narrowly to a particular sort of middle-aged single woman — by explaining...
