v.

Eddie Van Halen - Beat It

Eric Clapton - While My Guitar Gently Weeps

from Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Discussing To Have and Have Not:

In part one, at a crucial moment during the fishing expedition, which has disappointed both the captain and his customer, the boat moves into promising waters. Harry is coaching Johnson; the black man is at the wheel. Earlier Harry assured us that the black man does nothing aside from cutting bait but read and sleep. But Hemingway realizes that Harry cannot be in two critical places at the same time, instructing the incompetent Johnson and guiding the vessel. It is important to remember that there is another person aboard, an alcoholic named Eddy, who is too unreliable to be given the responsibility of steering but who is given manhood and speech and a physical description. Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so. Now, with Harry taking care of his customer and Eddy in a pleasant stupor, there is only the black man to tend the wheel.

When the sign heralding the promising waters arrives—the sighting of flying fish beyond the prow of the boat—the crewman facing forward ought to be the first to see them. In fact he is. The problem is how to acknowledge that first sighting and continue the muzzling of this "nigger" who, so far, has not said one word. The solution is a strangely awkward, oddly constructed sentence: "The nigger was still taking her out and I looked and saw he had seen a patch of flying fish burst out ahead." "Saw he had seen" is improbable in syntax, sense, and tense but, like other choices available to Hemingway, it is risked to avoid a speaking black. The problem this writer gives himself, then, is to say how one sees that someone has already seen.

Randall.

In my early youth, I cared nothing for Pink Floyd. Throughout high school and even as an undergraduate, I failed to understand the draw, what their appeal was to so great an audience.

Only now, as I get closer to thirty, have I begun to appreciate the band. I find the more I listen to Pink Floyd, the more I enjoy their music.

Baker's Dozen

A large egg weighs, on average, 1.67 oz, with the white making up 2/3 of the egg and the yolk constructing the remainder.

Although a pinch was originally a measurement that suggested the amount of sugar, salt or other fine spice that could be pinched between the thumb and forefinger, it is now considered to be equal to 1/4 of a gram.

Judaism

The country clubs with a blue light burning at their entrance do not welcome Jewish members.

The Cinefamily - Update

Of the things I enjoyed about my time in West Hollywood was my membership at the Cinefamily.

On January 4th of 2009, I went on a double-date to view a screening of The Peanut Butter Solution, put on by the Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre.

It was the first time I'd ever heard of the establishment or of the group. We ended up parking in the neighborhood, west of Fairfax. I didn't know that within a few months I'd be working around the corner or that we were parked on the street where I'd eventually end up living.

Of the events I've been to since:

The Robocop Trilogy

We didn't stay for part 3 because it's awful, but the opportunity to see 1 & 2 back-to-back was not to be missed.

The [original]Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan [on Friday the 13th]

By the time our group arrived at the theatre, the sold-out sign was already posted. We were crestfallen and most were ready to surrender to cigarettes & disappointment, but I wasn't having it.
I started hustling and found two people selling tickets. Because they were trying to pawn them off, they were cheaper than box office price, and I ended up buying one more than I needed for our group and selling it at price to someone else.
Recap: found enough tickets for all of us and came up $12;

Cinefamily Senior Prom with Carrie

Attended with my then squeeze & current girlfriend, and a few other friends to watch Carrie and dance our asses off. A memorable evening for many reasons.

The 100 Most Extreme Kills



The trailer nearly says it all. A portion of the compilation was set to Stairway to Heaven.

Halloween II, Nightmare on Elm St. III: The Dream Warriors and Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter

October Franchise Triple Feature.

Battle Royale




First US theatrical screening

Week-end



My first Godard, which I know own via Criterion Collection.

Kill List



+ Screenwriter/director Q&A.

Bullhead



+ Director & Lead Actor Q&A.

Possession

Among the more brilliant films I've ever seen. It made me dislike Hellraiser, which I'd previously enjoyed, for being an inferior rendition of the same, basic, idea.

On the Silver Globe



Possession

Pretty Poison



+ Director Q&A.

Werckmeister Harmonies



Now one of my all-time favorites.

Jason X



+ Director Q&A and appearances by Derek Mears and Tyler Mane.

Werckmeister Harmonies



TJ Miller's Hangover Matinee



+ Brunch and live standup before the film.

HFS: That's Mexploitation! featuring LA VENGANZA DE LOS PUNKS



The screening began with two compilation clips. The first was a montage of luchador Santo, set to "The Sound of Silence." It worked perfectly and everyone in the audience was losing their shit. The Cinefamily picked clips that had nothing to do with fighting; instead they compiled moments of everyday, almost existential monotony, with Santo wearing his mask throughout.

The second was a series of clips culled from a number of Mexploitation films, interrupted routinely by, "That's Mexploitation!"
+ Mexican food & piñatas.

Funny, Ha Ha! 10th Anniversary



At this point, I cannot recall when or where I first saw this film, but I know that it was sometime between 2002 and it's 10 year anniversary. Whenever it was, at the time it wasn't poignant to me. Strange that now, at twenty-seven, watching the adrift missteps of a twenty-four'ish crowd, hit me in a much more visceral way.
+ Writer/director/editor/actor Andrew Bujalski Q&A.

Predator 25th Anniversary



Preceded by a montage of old photos of Arnold, set to the complete scores for Commando, Terminator and Total Recall.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day Archival 35mm Print

This has been my favorite film since I was 5. I was already watching my parents' VHS tape of the original Terminator by the time I was 4, and I distinctly remember the moment I saw the first trailer for T2 on television. My dad took me to see it in theaters and I haven't been able to get enough of it since. For me, it's the quintessential action film and, (despite a well-written—obviously—article by DFW that articulates all the reasons it sucks), a very good film generally. I've watched it hundreds of times now, and this was my third time seeing it in a theater.

Fiction

an article.

Short Fiction

an article.

Auerbach

This poem is all of one movement. Actually, despite the period after the fourth stanza, it seems to consist of a single sentence; made up of three temporal dependent clauses, each taking up a whole stanza, each beginning with quand, and of a main clause with several subdivisions, which unfolds in the last two stanzas. The alexandrine meter makes it clear that this is a serious poem, to be spoken slowly and gravely; it contains allegorical figures written in capital letters, Espérance, Espoir, Angoisse; and we also find epithets and other rhetorical figures in the classical style (de son aile timide). The syntactical unity, the grave rhythm, and the rhetorical figures; combine to lend the poem an atmosphere of somber sublimity, which is perfectly consonant with the deep despair it expresses.

The temporal clauses, describing a rainy day with low, heavy hanging clouds, are replete with metaphors: the sky like a heavy lid closing off the horizon, leaving us without prospect in the darkness; the earth like a damp dungeon; Hope like a fluttering bat caught in the moldering masonry; the threads of rain like the bars of a prison; and inside us a mute swarm of loathsome spiders, spinning their nets. All these figures symbolize dull, deepening despair. And there is an insistence about them which, if you submit to their spell, seems to exclude any possibility of a happier life. The quand loses its temporal meaning and rings out like a threat; we begin with the poet to doubt whether a sunny day will ever dawn again; for Hope, the poor bat, is also imprisoned and has lost touch with the world beyond the clouds—is there any such world? Even a reader unfamiliar with Baudelaire’s other poems, who does not know how often he evokes the barred horizon, the damp and moldering dungeon of hell, who does not know how little use the sun is to him when it does happen to be shining, will grasp the irrevocable hopelessness of the situation from these three stanzas alone. Hopeless horror has its traditional place in literature; it is a special form of the sublime; we find it, for example, in some of the tragic poets and historians of antiquity, and of course we find it in Dante; it can lay claim to the highest dignity.

w.

whip-poor-will
wildebeest

You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific? They say it has no memory.

from an old New Yorker.

The art of writing.

Here.

venality

Cortázar

Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive.

... still attached to yourself by the act itself, by the indefinable aura of its proximity ...

His minuscule consciousness would be revealing important facts: that life is a movement upward with a final click, and is also a low ceiling, white and smelling of lavender, enveloping you in the bottom of a warm pit.

Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. - Chekhov

Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance, and even then the endless tide of deferred chores and anticipated engagements never ceases to break on our attention. There is always something else that needs doing.

As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.

In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.

Don't date a girl who reads.

You should date an illiterate girl.

Middle School

Pity for oneself as a child feels more pardonable than pity for the current model, and is almost as satisfying. And narratives of one’s former loserhood are always, to a degree, a form of self-flattery, since like the origin tales of costumed heroes they proceed by drawing a contrast between Before and After, and take for granted the presence, in the unformed embryonic superbeing, of seeds of greatness.

DeLillo

A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought a silence to her. How powerful and real. How deep a thing was madness. A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a teacup breaking.

They had the wanness of obsession, of powerful appetites confined to small spaces.

At the house no one spoke. They all moved quietly from room to room, watching him distantly, with sneaky and respectful looks. When he asked for some milk, Denise ran softly to the kitchen, barefoot, in her pajamas, sensing that by economy of movement and lightness of step she might keep from disturbing the grave and dramatic air he had brought with him into the house. He drank the milk down in a single powerful swallow, still fully dressed, a mitten pinned to his sleeve.
They watched him with something like awe. Nearly seven straight hours of crying. It was as though he’d just returned from a period of wandering in some remote and holy place, in sand barrens or snowy ranges—a place where things are said, sights are seen, distances reached which we in our ordinary toil can only regard with the mingled reverence and wonder we hold in reserve for feats of the most sublime and difficult dimensions.

No sense of the irony of human existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.

Smith

If anyone has recently learned a lesson about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is Wallace.

Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done ...

... a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals.

Chekhov on What You Usually Find in Novels.

A Duke, a Duchess who used to be a beautiful young woman, the Baron who lives next door, a left-wing novelist, an impoverished nobleman, a foreign musician, various stupid butlers, nurses, and tutors, a German estate manager, a gentleman, and an heir from America.

All the characters are unremarkable, yet sympathetic and attractive people. The hero saves the heroine from a crazed horse; he is strong-willed and he shows his strong fists at every opportunity.

The sky is wide, the distances are vast and the vistas are broad, so broad that they are impossible to understand … this, in short, is Nature.

Friends are blond. Enemies are red-headed.

A rich uncle—liberal or conservative—according to circumstances. His death is more useful to the protagonist than his advice.

An aunt who lives in the remote provincial town of Tambov.

A doctor with a concerned expression on his face, who gives people hope for the coming health crisis. He has a walking stick with a bulb, and he is bald. And where there is a doctor, there are illnesses; arthritis caused by overwork, migraines, inflammation of the brain. A man wounded in a duel, and advice to go to the spa.

A servant who worked for the old masters and is ready to sacrifice everything for them. HE is a very witty fellow.

A dog that can do everything but talk, a parrot, and a nightingale. A dacha near Moscow and a mortgaged estate, somewhere in the South.

Electricity, which is stuck into the story for no reason.

A bag of Russian leather, a china set from Japan, an English leather saddle, a revolver that fires perfectly, an order on the lapel, and a feast of pineapples, champagne, truffles, and oysters.

Accidental overhearing, as a source of great discoveries.

A huge number of interjections, and of attempts to use technical terms whenever possible.

Small hints about important circumstances.

Very often, no conclusion.

Seven mortal sins at the beginning, and a wedding at the end.

The End.

Headphones.

Loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving.

False flowers & old words.

A-Z

An Alphabet of Celebrities.

with scarcely a backward glance.

Banished words.

Smith on Cortázar

I find myself more and more struck by controlled little gasps of prose, as opposed to the baggy novel. I admire the high reverence for the blank page shown by Kafka, Borges and Cortázar. Cortázar (recommended to me, actually, by Foster Wallace) writes as if every extra word is a sort of sacrilege. The instinct is almost religious, as if to say: and if it is to be stained, proceed slowly and with the utmost care. Which seems the exact opposite of the American/ English instinct: I must cover the world in my shit immediately.

Punctuate.

Commas are the worst because eight billion people have eight billion different ideas about where they're supposed to go.

Hemon on Borges

... Borges suggests that forgetting—that is, forgetting ceaselessly—is essential and necessary for thought and language and literature, for simply being a human being ... What makes human beings amazing is that we do not abandon our striving in the face of our constant failure to transcend our mortal, biological limits.

Carver

Chekhov. I suppose he's the writer whose work I most admire. But who doesn't like Chekhov?

Roth

Wikipedia v. The Human Stain

If a dog attacks you,

the best thing to do is offer it your forearm—always the less dominant, and at its thickest point just below the elbow, rather than near the wrist—while using your strong hand to strike the point where the neck joins the head, an area where dogs are particularly vulnerable to fatal blows.

Your arm will likely suffer significant injury, but you will be allowed the opportunity to put the dog in a state of submission and you will have protected more important parts of your anatomy, like the throat.

Andy Warhol's tumblr would have been fucking awful.

You scroll for too long and you begin to notice a pattern, patterns, and their persistence increases as the scrolling continues. You look far enough over your shoulder and you'll witness, just before falling, nothing more than similarities, sameness in all things.
You wonder if it has always been this way, this inability to truly distinguish, despite the direct and exhaustive effort to do so, that the energy expended on existing as a markedly and altogether different individual is the very same endeavor that ensures, doubtlessly, homogeneity.
You suppose that the difference is only the ability to discern it with the relative ease that our moment in history privileges us, and the technology which amplifies this trend, unbeknownst to its users, makes it stand out all-the-more glaringly.
It’s just that images have more of a perceptible signature. They possess a visual accompaniment, so they stand out more in our memory than an idea, alone and amorphous, invisible in the air it was just spoken into.
We’ve always done the same thing with thoughts that we do with image files now, repeating ourselves and one another endlessly.
We've just made it easier to spot.

Eugenides

You just delve into certain subjects, and the patterns start to crop up. With Middlesex, the narrator’s grandparents were silk farmers. I was interested in writing about that and the town in Asia Minor they came from. Then, as I started reading about silk, I came upon the legend of the Chinese princess said to have discovered it. This is a beautiful story, and it immediately seemed to have a connection with the story I was writing. So when you’re working on something, especially something as long as Middlesex—I think Joyce said this—everything out in the world seems to refer to your story. You constantly find things that metaphorically align with what you’re working on. Slowly, as you write the book, you become aware of these correspondences, and then you make them cohere into a pattern. So in the case of Middlesex, the thread of silk becomes a metaphor not only for genetic transmission but for storytelling itself.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Memories

Are hunting horns whose sound dies in the breeze

Draw something resembling anything.

C'est arrivé près de chez vous

The old man.

"Ay," he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood.

Nabokov

Toska - noun /ˈtō-skə/ - Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness.

No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.

Maximus to Gloucester

Foer

Humans are the only animals that have children on purpose, keep in touch (or don't), care about birthdays, waste and lose time, brush their teeth, feel nostalgia, scrub stains, have religions and political parties and laws, wear keepsakes, apologize years after an offense, whisper, fear themselves, interpret dreams, hide their genitalia, shave, bury time capsules, and can choose not to eat something for reasons of conscience.

... if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it. The most light-sensitive parts of our eyes (those we need to see dim objects) are on the edges of the region we normally use for focusing.

... they like to swim in pairs, linked by their prehensile tails. Sea horses have complicated routines for courtship, and tend to mate under full moons, making musical sounds while doing so. They live in long-term monogamous partnerships.

a burstwise advance.

me-me.

Language & Colour [sic]

Violet doesn’t quite fit. The researchers think this is a consequence of how reddish hues occur at both ends of the spectrum.

Gladwell

Creation Myth.

Keep Writing

Because there is an abyss at the end of every line into which it is worth the trouble to cast oneself. Or charge into. Or disappear into.

Power Lunches

... the price of admission is a serpent’s tongue and a half-concealed stiletto.

nom de plume

Johnny Grovemumbler.

eye talk.

Floaters are deposits of various size, shape, consistency, refractive index, and motility within the eye’s vitreous humour, which is normally transparent. At a young age the vitreous is perfectly transparent but, during life, imperfections gradually develop. The common type of floater, which is present in most people’s eyes, is due to degenerative changes of the vitreous humour. The perception of floaters is known as myodesopsia. Floaters are visible because of the shadows they cast on the retina or their refraction of the light that passes through them, and can appear alone or together with several others in one’s field of vision. They may appear as spots, threads, or fragments of cobwebs, which float slowly before the observer’s eyes. Since these objects exist within the eye itself, they are not optical illusions but are entoptic phenomena.

Life in Color

Pantone, via the Paris Review.

Doctorow

A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen ...
Except the act of writing. So if he shoots birds and animals and anything else he can find, you’ve got to give him that. And if he/she drinks, you give him/her that too, unless the work is affected. For all of us, there’s an intimate connection between the struggle to write and the ability to survive on a daily basis as a human being. So we have a high rate of self-destruction. Do we mean to punish ourselves for writing? For the transgression? I don’t know.

the Art of Fiction.

I am the devil, and I am here to do the devil's work.

Seldom lies the devil dead by the gate.

Speak of the devil and his horns appear.

Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.

Between the devil and the depths of the sea.

The devil will find work for idle hands to do.

The devil is not so black as he is painted.

The devil is in the details.

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

With God, one never knows if it's just another trick of the devil.

to-do list.

lists in literature.

For me, the act of creating lists is concomitant with avoiding their completion. Rather than check anything off, I end up committing to an ongoing revision process, forever striving for the perfect to-do list.
It's much easier to keep a floating, abstraction of a list in my head.

Sublimation & Happiness

What Makes Us Happy?

... that seeing a defense is easier than changing it. Only with patience and tenderness might a person surrender his barbed armor for a softer shield. Perhaps in this, I thought, lies the key to the good life—not rules to follow, nor problems to avoid, but an engaged humility, an earnest acceptance of life’s pains and promises.

blödmensch

In the wake of our existence, in our parades and in our dances; touch, see and behold ...

Colors
&
Letters.

Berryman.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him.

Whisper.

David Foster Wallace.

Language.

Kafka.

Schwarzenegger.

Brief Interviews ...

The sort of glorious girl whose kiss tastes of liquor when she’s had no liquor to drink. Cassis, berries, gumdrops, all steamy and soft. Quote unquote ...
and long hair spilling all over, more than—beautiful lustrous hair ... like her hair grew her head instead of the other way around ...

seguir escribiendo

On the Drug War in Mexico: An Introduction.

The National Decay.

The Battle of Ciudad Mier.

Anyway, what doesn’t happen to you when young, you can’t avoid when old.

Spider song.

wordsmith

What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I've seen them. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it's just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn't picked out, Juliet wasn't picked out. You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.

via Literary Jukebox

... each seeks to lay hold of the ineffable and render it known, with the warm shock of recognition that truth so often carries.

The poetic and the veridical, the proven and the unprovable, the heart and the brain – like charged particles of opposing polarity – exert their pulls in different directions. Where they are brought together the result is incandescence.

from a book I'd like to pick up.

Where Do Sentences Come From?

A written sentence possesses a crippling inertia.

You’ll no longer feel as though a sentence is a glandular secretion from some cranial inkwell that’s always on the verge of drying up.

... you’ll also discover one of things writing is for: pleasure.

Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Autobiographical Cartoonists.

Written by Kim O'Connor,

Martyr.

Carl Dreyer: LA PASSION DE JEANNE D' ARC (1928) from cinema.antifono on Vimeo.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do.

Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.

Colin Nissan

At the open mic.

Brandon's poem, "Big Sur," was met with favorable reaction from his peers, from the parents and friends, professors, everyone in the audience. He was glad he read it.
Afterward, a group of them walked across the street for drinks at Jackson's apartment. It turned out Brandon and Oscar, a friend of Jackson's who was in attendance, had gone to the same high school. After Brandon left for the night, Oscar spent a few minutes sharing with the group why he'd never liked the guy.
The school paper put together an article about the event and Brandon's name and the title of his poem both were mentioned. The young journalist had called it, "Big Sir."

an ongoing series.

of poignant quotes.

Existing through fictions.

Keith Ridgway

I enjoyed this, but—and I'm aware this isn't the point of the article—it won't keep me from doing research.

I still have no interest in visiting Alcatraz.

We parse the world’s offerings into things tourists do versus things “locals” do, as if the mere act of residing somewhere confers a sense of style.

... the merit of an experience corresponds inversely to the number of people we’re obliged to share it with. In the urge to legitimize, singularize, and privatize our travel experiences, we trade the proverbial hell of other people for the hell of trying in vain to avoid other people.

Exclusivity threatens to become an end in itself, wherein we base our itineraries not on what’s actually worth seeing but on where other Americans aren’t.

Wanderlust.

From someone who was fond of cats.

... he would never let a drawing out of his hands if it was less than perfect.

Gorey.

Cortázar

For me, literature is a form of play. But I’ve always added that there are two forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then games that are very profound and serious. When children play, though they’re amusing themselves, they take it very seriously. It’s important. It’s just as serious for them now as love will be ten years from now. I remember when I was little and my parents used to say, “Okay, you’ve played enough, come take a bath now.” I found that completely idiotic, because, for me, the bath was a silly matter. It had no importance whatsoever, while playing with my friends was something serious. Literature is like that—it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.

I know many people who are always complaining, “Oh, I’d like to write my novel, but I have to sell the house, and then there are the taxes, what am I going to do?” Reasons like, “I work in the office all day, how do you expect me to write?” Me, I worked all day at UNESCO and then I came home and wrote Hopscotch. When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

But I distrust the baroque. The baroque writers, very often, let themselves go too easily in their writing. They write in five pages what one could very well write in one. I too must have fallen into the baroque because I am Latin American, but I have always had a mistrust of it. I don’t like turgid, voluminous sentences, full of adjectives and descriptions, purring and purring into the reader’s ear. I know it’s very charming, of course. It’s very beautiful but it’s not me. I’m more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers. Well, I write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economy. He taught me when I began to read him, being very young, that one had to try to say what one wanted to with economy, but with a beautiful economy.

On writing fiction.

points a-b.

Google Street View presents a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being.

The Grand Map

Writers, on the subject of love.

There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.
- Burroughs

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
- Russell

You don’t love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults.
- Faulkner

Faulkner

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

By temperament I'm a vagabond and a tramp. I don't want money badly enough to work for it. In my opinion it's a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.

I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man's capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.

On writing fiction.

Constance

a variable, the value of which can never change.

Full mooned nights are not responsible for a greater volume of crime or insanity.
Statistics suggest there is no related spike in any such behavior, but the flawed memory markers of emergency service personnel are the reason this myth endures: it is much easier to take notice of a full moon than it is to observe no moon or even a partial moon. On the evenings when police officers or firefighters deal with particularly unusual events, it is more common for them to remember looking up at the sky and seeing a full moon.
The absence of a moon does not call attention to itself.

Humbert Humbert

I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! Had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies — a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child.

2.5

The average human dream only lasts 2-3 seconds.

Fun with tired writing.

Turned out mildly poetic. I don't know.

Alcoholism.

The stumbling, leering-eyed parade of experience and subsequent unvanquishable memories that spill forth from one's relationship with the drink, the marching regret and unpardonable mistakes, scattered with jugglers who balance rational reasons why one better ought never drink again,

this spectacle is the foremost of those that finds one in need of a drink.

Chabon.

Shadow watched [the gun] pass between us with mild interest, holding, as a dog will, to the imperishable belief that anything might possibly be something edible.

Every story is the story of somebody's hard luck.

... don't think I didn't feel ridiculous, thrashing around out there like one of Picasso's wounded minotaurs, lumbering blindly after an angelic young girl ... While she danced, she kept her eyes closed and described solitary, interlocking circles across the floor, so that there were moments when I felt that she wasn't really dancing with me at all, but simply employing me as a kind of fulcrum, a hub on which to hang the whirling spokes of her own private revolutions ... I'd never been able to figure out exactly what was involved in slow dancing, so I contented myself, as I had since high school, with gripping my partner to me, letting out awkward breaths against her ear, and tipping from foot to foot like someone waiting for a bus. I could feel the sweat cooling on her forearms and smell a trace of apples in her hair.

The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim—even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon—feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is in my opinion why writers—like insomniacs—are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.

...

Chabon decried the state of modern short fiction, saying that, with rare exceptions, it consisted solely of "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story ... sparkling with epiphanic dew,"

Bissell via Dean

How you respond to failure is the real measure of an artist, and this means nurturing the violently arrogant and overly confident monster that lurks deep inside all of us. But you have to keep that maniacal bastard out of all polite company. You feed him and nurture him and draw strength from him, but you never, ever let him out, get water on him, or feed him after midnight.

Gladwell via Jacobs

Malcolm Gladwell, a noted and talented endorser, pointed out this self-­aggrandizing side of blurbing when I reached him. “People always ask me why I don’t tweet,” he said. “And my answer is that I blurb. They are, after all, conceptually identical: the short, targeted judgment in which the initiator draws attention to himself while seeming to draw attention to something else.”

Once, when I was driving through Colorado with a friend, traveling down a narrow mountain pass, we came upon an accident. A pickup truck and a car had collided, and from fifty feet away we could see the blood. We pulled over and ran to help. All the time I was running, all the time I was trying, with my friend’s help, to pry open the door of the car in which a nine-months-pregnant woman had been impaled through the abdomen, I was thinking: I must remember this! I must remember my feelings! How would I describe this? I do not think I behaved less efficiently than my nonliterary friend, who was probably not thinking such thoughts; in fact, I may possibly have behaved more swiftly and efficiently, trying in my mind to create a noble scene. Nonetheless, what I felt above all was disgust at my mind’s detachment, its inhumane fascination with the precise way the blood pumped, the way flesh around a wound becomes instantly proud, that is, puffed up, and so on. I would have been glad at that moment to be a literary innocent.

Space.

Letters of Note.

Brady

Summary

"Listen, Jake," he said, "are you really a Catholic?"
"Technically."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know."

irony & pity

Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

taxidermy

"You've a nice friend, Jake."
"He's all right, I said. "He's a taxidermist."
"That was in another country," Bill said. "And besides all the animals were dead."

Bub

Gardner

Aping another writer’s style is foolish, but the noblest originality is not stylistic but visionary and intellectual; the writer’s accurate presentation of what he, himself, has seen, heard, thought, and felt.

Such a novelist may hate nearly all of humanity, as Celine does, or large groups of people, as does Nabokov. What counts in this case is not that we believe the private vision to be right but that we are so convinced by and interested in the person who does the seeing that we are willing to follow him around.

He must learn … to distinguish the subtlest differences between the speech and feeling of his various characters, himself as impartial and detached as God, giving all human beings their due and acknowledging their frailties. Insofar as he pretends not to private vision but to omniscience, he cannot as a rule, love some of his characters and despise others.

No one readily admits that his hatreds are irrational. The stubborn conviction that one is right to spurn most kinds of people can itself be a stymieing force. Character defects fed by self-congratulation are the hardest to shed.

…studying his characters’ most trivial gestures in the imagined scene to discover exactly where the scene must go next …

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.

since art does not afford the testable certainties of geometry or physics.

"you aren't" or the fairly more assertive "you're not."

Or the writer may slide into alcoholism, the number one occupational hazard of the trade.

More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.

It's hard to live down one's shoddy publications, and it's hard to scrap cheap techniques once they've worked. It's like trying to stop cheating at marriage or golf.

Paraphrase Addendum:

Detail is the life blood of fiction; show, don't tell; who are our characters and what do they do; don't manipulate fiction and bully characters into actions unnatural to them; don't interrupt the action to preach; read to see how things are done, how I would do them differently and why & if it would be better; plot is not meant to be a series of surprises but an increasingly moving series of recognitions or moments of understanding; good fiction does not deal in codes of conduct. It affirms responsible humanness; tell stories in terms of dilemma, suffering and choice; be the servant of the story.

Let no one tell you that all good writers eventually get published.

... some [fiction] is rejected because it was sent to the wrong kind of publisher, or because it never got past the slush-pile reader, who's tired and maybe not too bright, or because the publisher has a backlog, or because the editor cannot stand stories about cows ... One should fight like the devil the temptation to think well of editors. They are all, without exception—at least some of the time—incompetent or crazy ... It is useful, in short, for young writers always to think of editors as limited people, though if possible one should treat them politely.

This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer's process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next, he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.

Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer wrote from "inspiration," or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect ... most stories and novels have at least moments of the real thing, some exactly right gesture or startlingly apt metaphor, some brief passage describing wallpaper of the movement of a cat, a passage that somehow shines or throbs as nothing around it does, some fictional moment that, as we say, "comes alive." It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive—literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell—it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, wiling to give up almost anything for his art ...

... the fundamental concepts of fiction—how one event must cause another ... ; how characters' motives must be shown dramatically, not just talked about; how setting, character, and action must interpenetrate, each supporting and infusing the others; how plot must have rhythm, so that in some way it builds in intensity toward an emotional high point; how the narrative must have design, a firm structure that gives every part value but does not vulgarly call attention to itself; how style, plot, and meaning must finally be all one ... a story is like a machine with numerous gears: it should contain no gear that doesn't turn something ...

A familiar piece of art.

Jake

"I don't believe it."
"Well," I said, "don't ask me a lot of fool questions if you don't like the answers."
"I didn't ask you that."
"You asked me what I knew about Brett Ashley."
"I didn't ask you to insult her."
"Oh, go to hell."
He stood up from the table his face white, and stood there white and angry behind the little plates of hors d’œuvres.
"Sit down," I said. "Don't be a fool."
"You've got to take that back."
"Oh, cut out the prep-school stuff."
"Take it back."
"Sure. Anything. I never heard of Brett Ashely. How's that?"
"No. Not that. About me going to hell."
"Oh, don't go to hell," I said. "Stick around. We're just starting lunch."

Nineteen-hundred & seventy-four.

The Monks

star light, star bright

As she gazes at Milton in the newsreel, her eyes fill with tears and she says out loud, "There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you."

secondhand glasgow grin

—

from Powers of Horror, 9 of Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head

The power of horror is contagious. It figures but it disfigures as well: the source of a resurgence in our representations that cut through the forms, volumes, contours to expose the pulsing flesh. From disfiguration to expressionism, to abstraction, to minimalism—and back.

... pain has neither subject nor object: between the two, it corrupts and spreads.

Have you ever noticed how a mask, a false face, terrifies young children, even when its features are laughing? No doubt that's because decapitation is intrinsically implied.

The technology changes; voyeurism itself never ceases to paint, sculpt, photograph.

Because such is the power of horror: it subjugates, it gains a following, it creates sects.

from Cannibal Margin from Régis Michel's "Alibi?" in the introduction to Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head

But is repudiating the ghost enough to domesticate the darkness?

The public only condescends to the mythical splendor of illustrious patronymics, tutelary figures in a beatific Pantheon where ritual reverence prevails over visual pleasure, if not existential experience. And scholars only react to this dissonant language in the panicked mode of a closet Freudian, which consists of refusing to see the difference in order to preserve the integrity of a world ruled exclusively by the law of the same.

Law of Bronze, from Régis Michel's "Alibi?" in the introduction to Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head

It has already been a long time since museums entered the mechanized age of the culture industry. And analysis has lost none of its relevance. In fact, it is more topical than ever. One is tempted to believe that the end of the century resolved to illustrate these theses with renewed care. Because mass culture had devastating effects on the institution. It seems as if renovating its walls was inversely proportionate to renovating its ideas. Under the polished molding and the pompous paneling, it's the same scene repeated ad nauseam: it's the same idiom that pervades throughout like a learned esperanto. This repressive language, in which the angular myths of bourgeois identity thrive—nineteenth-century ideology: artists as subject (master), work as causality (linear), and history as origin (archeological)—accommodates no dissonance, no dissidence, no difference: it became the natural language (some would say the jargon) of the institution. By adopting the history of art as the universal vulgate—this universality understood of course by one class or caste—museums condemned themselves to authoritarian sermonizing on repetitive values. To the bronze law of the culture industry: the triumph of the identical. Thus they bear a manifest responsibility in this unforeseen process of the reduction of meaning (and the sterilization of works). One would expect them to be, above all else, places of freedom, diversity, and alterity. But, regrettably, that isn't the case. The very discourse of history, which is a discourse of truth, where, in its obsolete form, one ignores the linguistic turn, forbids them to be pluralist. And the hierarchical constraints of the government, which is not really made to manage intellectual products, impose on them the yoke of uniformity. Which brings us back to the ideological role (see Althusser) of the workings of the state. Here the culture industry takes up the regrettable task of training minds that Nietzsche mocked. Grand exhibitions, which are, for the most part, monographs, adhere to the intangible paradigm of mural biography, or the Vasariism of picture molding. And the economic stakes, which never cease to grow, promote the profitable development of an advertising ideal that changes the artists on display into human sandwiches. It is not at all a question of stimulating the eye of the spectator. Very much the opposite: taming his gaze. With the help of a monist credo meant to determine how the works are to be glossed. Museums are thus becoming a crucial mechanism in the standardization of prefixed knowledge: of a culture in pieces.

Cortázar

...no weeping can last forever, widows remarry.

When we dream we give free reign to our aptitude for madness. At the same time we suspect that all madness is a dream that has taken root.
Popular wisdom: The poor guy's crazy, a dreamer ...

You begin to feel what you have always felt, the inexplicable attraction of intellectual suicide by means of the intellect itself. The scorpion stabbing itself in the neck, tired of being a scorpion but having to have recourse to its own scorpionness in order to do away with itself as a scorpion.

Talita slid up on the bed a little and leaned against Traveler. She knew that she was by his side again, that she had not drowned, that he was there holding her up on the surface of the water and that actually there was pity, a marvelous pity. They both felt it at the same moment, and they slid toward each other as if to fall into themselves, into the common earth where words and caresses and mouths enfolded them as a circumference does a circle, those tranquilizing metaphors, that old sadness satisfied with going back to being the same as always, with continuing, keeping afloat against wind and tide, against call and fall.

... it was a little like the look the monsters gave when it occurred to them from time to time to look at each other with a look that was both furtive and total at the same time, secret and much clearer than when they would look at each other for a long time, but a person isn't a monster without good reason ...

You have seen very well that misfortune is, let's say, tangible, perhaps because out of it comes the separation into subject and object. That's why memory is so important, that's why it's so easy to describe catastrophes.

... vacant lots where an old tin can could be used to slit a throat almost as if the two objects were in agreement.

... through which one can out onto an open beach, an extension without limit, the world beneath the eyelids that the eyes turned inward recognized and obeyed.

Now he couldn't drink any more even if he was thirsty.

Talita didn't say anything, but she lifted her upper lip like a festoon and let out a sigh that had its origins in what is called the first signs of sleep.

... he looked into the street where a defenseless open newspaper let itself be read by a starry sky that seemed almost touchable.

In the name of the past we carry out the greatest deceits in the present.

Explanation is a well-dressed mistake.

Finally they would go to bed with latent ill-humor, and spend the whole night dreaming about happy and funny things, which was probably a contradiction of terms.

Perhaps there is a place in man from where the whole of reality can be perceived. This hypothesis seems delirious. Auguste Comte declared that the chemical composition of a star would never be known. The following year Bunsen invented the spectroscope.

And that's why the writer has to set language on fire, put an end to its coagulated forms and even go beyond it, place in doubt the possibility the language is still in touch with what it pretends to name. Not words as such any more, because that's less important, but rather the total structure of language, of discourse.

You're like the salamander, you live in a world of perpetual pyromania.

The ambivalence of the noose, its natural function sabotaged by a mysterious tendency towards neutralization. I think that's what they call entropy.

She had to keep on blinking because the sweat was getting into her eyes. Her tongue felt salty and covered with something that could have been sparks, little stars running back and forth and bumping into her gums and the roof of her mouth.

Words are like us, they're born with one face and what can you do about it.

... his sense of absence and silence was much more than just an extreme recourse, a metaphysical impasse. One day in Jerez de la Frontera I heard a cannon-shot twenty-five yards away and I discovered another meaning of silence. And dogs that can hear a whistle inaudible to us ...

We're all chasing purity, breaking old daubed blisters ...

And so what? Man is the animal who ask.

The original use of words (?). Probably an empty phrase.

Lives which end like literary articles in newspapers and magazines, so pompous on page one and ending up in a skinny tail, back there on page thirty-two, among advertisements for second-hand sales and tubes of toothpaste.

You can feel the night coming on at this hour, even though you can't see it.

He had his book open on his knees and gave the posed impression that he would like to keep on reading.

... brought together without any clash, not juxtaposed or overlapped but merged, and in the effortless removal of contradiction there was the sensation of being where one should be, in the essential place, as when one is a child and has no doubts that the living room will be there for a whole lifetime: an inalienable belonging ... There was another person in the place ... who was silently helping him choose the peaceful spot, the way a person participates in some dreams without even being there, and we take it for granted that the person or thing is there and participates; a force with no visible manifestations, something that is or does through a presence that can do without appearances.

... that aesthetic orders are more a mirror than a passage for metaphysical anxiety.

I loved ... [g]iving testimony, fighting against the nothingness that will sweep us all away. That's how in the air of the soul little things like that will linger, a sparrow that belonged to Lesbia, some blues that in the memory will fill the small space saved for perfumes, stamps, and paperweights.

Like words lost in childhood, heard for the last time by old people who are heading towards death ... The vanity of believing that we understand the works of time: it buries its dead and keeps the keys.

Money talks & bullshit walks.

Camus

A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.

gila

Hotel Particulier

... cuspidors,
glasses, anxiety
you don't get crabs that way,
and what you don't know will hurt somebody else ...

parallelism

Opinion Column

Newly-sharpened pencils.