January 2012
24 posts
4 tags
johnson continued
“In a society where it is the collective that matters, we’re the only people who make the individuals count.” and “‘You know what Dr. Song said about you? He said you had a gift, that you could say a lie while speaking the truth.’” Now, that last bit? about the man and his story? That happens in the middle of a big, mostly comic set piece, with our hero...
4 tags
johnson continued
“‘Where we are from,’ he said, ‘stories are factual. If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change.’” But, alongside...
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adam johnson, the orphan master's son
“The tunnels always ended with a ladder leading up to a rabbit hole. Jun Do’s men would vie to be the ones to slip out and wander South Korea for a while. They’d come back with stories of machines that handed out money and people who picked up dog shit and put it in bags. Jun Do never looked. He knew all the televisions were huge and there was all the rice you could eat. Yet he...
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szalay continued
“(An interesting idea, when she thought about it — her perception of how she felt. What was the difference between the perception of how she felt, and how she did feel? In what sense did her feelings exist when she wasn’t perceiving them — when she wasn’t feeling them?)” Working to justify sleeping with James, after telling him she needed a break from sleeping with him. Like so much...
3 tags
szalay continued
“Sometimes — usually when the sleepy sensation of skin touching skin seems of itself to hold some sort of mute insufficient promise — she still hopes that he might somehow start to understand her. The trouble is, she is unable to help feeling that it just doesn’t work like that — that if he does not understand her instinctively then trying is pointless, even if it were...
5 tags
szalay continued
“His lack of desire, as he wiped her — wiped her stomach and the seam of her pussy like an exhausted waiter wiping a table — was extraordinary. He felt like he would never want to fuck another woman in his life. In the last minute, the way he saw her had undergone a profound metamorphosis. He noted the sanded soreness around her mouth, the zones of irritation — little livid...
6 tags
david szalay, spring
“The question of the day was — Is the world changing more or less quickly than it was? Alexander said LESS quickly. The world was changing less quickly now than at any point in the twentieth century. Think, he said, of the fact that in 1900 there was no powered flight at all. The Wright brothers and their experiment on the sands at Kitty Hawk were still some years in the future. And...
“A vacuumed space would appear at first, a howling little hole, but if I strained...”
– Ben Marcus, The Flame Alphabet | Knopf 01.17.12
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marcus continued
“LeBov enjoyed the rhetorical vague. He relished not naming something, in not even talking about something. I felt his pleasure as he refused to say whatever he was obviously thinking. He didn’t even really say what he was saying. Instead he found some way to make it seem that someone else was saying it, someone he looked down on. He was only the vessel, raped in the mouth and made to channel...
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marcus continued
“Much of my time in those early days at the script design desk was spent creating inhibitors that would keep me from seeing what I was doing.” And then there’s the second half, which moves from one kind of nightmare (flight, isolation) to another (clinical futility) — and with that shift comes the notion, the difficulty of working with something toxic, creating a panacea out of...
7 tags
marcus continued
“When I thought of Esther alone in the house, without us, I pictured her being waited on by … us. Facsimiles of us. Robot usses. Father and mother us, hovering over Esther with bowls of berries, with the special dinner of steamed greens, the de-meated slab of protein and sauteed bread she liked. Her own baby bowl of salt, hooked onto her dinner plate like a sidecar. I couldn’t see her,...
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ben marcus, the flame alphabet
“Esther was probably riding a horse right now, wearing the black Mary Janes she refused to shed for anyone, even if it was a shit-clotted field she needed to cross. Or she was lugging a saddle to the stable, or standing not-so-patiently as someone overexplained something Esther already knew. At home she fumed when you doled out information she took to be a given. Anything factual went...
“It is frustrating to them beyond measure when a daughter screams, ‘You don’t...”
– Caitlin Flanagan, Girl Land | Regan Arthur 01.11.12
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flanagan continued
“Tipper Gore’s heroic campaign to get explicit music rated and labeled was born after she decided to do something few parents had even attempted: actually listen to the albums her kids had bought. She was ridiculed by many factions, including those forces on the American left who cry censorship whenever anyone attempts to protect the public, including children, from smut (and in the case of...
4 tags
Though Flanagan does attempt an idiosyncratic and... →
So, I was perhaps not aware of Ms. Flanagan’s particular place in the cultural conversation, or that she lined up so well opposite Katie Roiphe, but that does explain a number of things, only slightly further illuminated by this here piece in (ack) Slate.
(Oh, and two other little things: This is one of three reviews of this book that have used the “girl land: population one”...
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caitlin flanagan, girl land
“That a sexually budding adolescent girl becomes the sudden object of predatory male attention has been the cause of parental anxiety down through the ages. When I was a young teenager in 1973, the horror movie The Exorcist took America by storm. It was a supernatural tale of the occult, but it also had within it a central idea that was at once culturally relevant and deeply terrifying: that...
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o'malley continued
“It occurred to me, however, that if this was not an abomination in the eyes of God that would lead to our eternal damnation, it represented a marvelous business opportunity. So it was with an open mind and a couple of extremely large fellows from my estates as backup that I accompanied my cousin to his residence, where a handful of grubby men were engaged in some extremely complicated...
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daniel o'malley, the rook
“She opened up the big purple binder and flipped through the pages to the entry on Gallows Keep Prison.” The setup here is that our heroine wakes up, amnesiac in the rain, and must figure out who betrayed her within England’s bureaucracy of the supernatural; she’s aided by copious notes prepared for her by her pre-memory-loss self. Which are inserted in the narrative, verbatim, in italics....
6 tags
dunthorne continued
“The disappointing news from her time in Three Crosses was that, where she had hoped to find suburbia’s dark and seething underbelly, she had found the potbelly of contentment.” And I think that pulled punch — the undelivered promise of quirk — is a mixed blessing for Wild Abandon. Because, really, the book winds up being much more a matter of a coming-of-age, rather like The Fallback...
“Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so...”
– Pico Iyer | The point of the long and winding sentence
[And with that, I have an alibi.]
(via lowendtheory)
Oh God yes.
(via jonathanbogart)
3 tags
joe dunthorne, wild abandon
“Freya remembered noticing that after Don had said his bit he kept nodding, as though his sentence continued on, unheard, in his head. He strongly agreed with himself.” Dunthorne is good with details, like this one, which advances and crystallizes Don’s character (in this case, a young, nascent student Don) in a detail. Which serves the comedy very well, even if it means that the book is...
“She had never thought of herself as a slow eater until that point. He poured the...”
– Joe Dunthorne, Wild Abandon | Random 01.03.12
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stein continued
“He spoke softly of submicroscopic physics and liked strategic multiplayer board games. My Mitch. He didn’t bring me flowers, but he always brought me Raisonets once I mentioned that I liked them.” The situation is that Esther, at the end of her college career, identifies so strongly with Blanche DuBois that she slips into an alcoholic depression — a nice semicomic turn. This makes...
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leigh stein, the fallback plan
“After the credits, I joined the throng and exited the theater. Everyone was rubbing their eyes at first, but by the time we had reached the fluorescent lobby we remembered what country we lived in and where we’d parked our cars.” The movie is A Mighty Heart, the Angelina Jolie movie about Daniel Pearl; the tone is easy gentle Millennial snark, readable if a little inconsequential. Despite...
