February 2010
40 posts
January 2010
100 posts
Compare & contrast.
“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word for word, as I work through a...
“Who does Jacques Derrida write for, who does Frank Stella paint for, who does...”
– Peter Eisenman (via hydeordie) (via sympathyfortheartgallery)
“If you want to have a more interesting life, you will make some effort. It’s about the organization of one’s life. I am still shocked that so many people are not more creative, by which I mean more demanding of themselves.
“The main question we need to be asking ourselves is: Do I try to be necessary to the evolution of language? Do I try to be original? And being...
“The magazine is the print format closest to the blog: short articles that come out serially. The difference is the issue format. The beautiful thing about issues is that they begin and end.
“I love flipping through a magazine, reading the pieces that catch my eye, then doubling back and scanning for the morsels I didn’t notice. Again: exploring the walls of a...
— “The Future,” Teddy Thompson
My...
“But before you start broadcasting your message, you must first attend to the setting: where and when your novel takes place, its social mileau, its bricks and mortar. The favored approach is to omit this entirely… . Try to create an absolute nothingness in which, from time to time, a phone receiver or a pair of pert breasts materializes as the protagonist forms the intention to use...
Umbrella Weather
To be drawn out of doors by the first sign of rain on the window, to be happier drenched than dry, to go out in weather that others come in from, warrants a stare from passing faces, and i know what it means: there goes someone with serious problems. Problems I have, and a nasty stammer to prove it. But when I run into streets that are shiny, my love of the downpour doesn’t mean I’m courting...
“We are increasingly fluent in images with no handhold, images freighted with all...”
– Roberto Bolaño, 2666
“Your are a professional writer?” he said.
“Some say so,” I said.
“Tell me” — he said, “do you set a certain time of day aside for writing, whether you feel like it or not, — or do you wait for inspiration to strike, night or day?”
“A schedule,” I said, remembering back so many years; I got some of his respect back. “Yes,...
Life Story
After you’ve been to bed together for the first time, without the advantage or disadvantage of any prior acquaintance,
the other party very often says to you, Tell me about yourself, I want to know all about you,
what’s your story? And you think maybe they really and truly do
sincerely want to know your life story, and so you light up
a cigarette and begin to tell it to them, the...
ANNABELLE MATHIS: Besides, you're married, aren't you?
ROGER STERLING: I am.
ANNABELLE MATHIS: Still or again?
ROGER STERLING: You know it's again. Don't get cute.
ANNABELLE MATHIS: I heard she's a teenager. Probably too jealous to let you have a business dinner with me.
ROGER STERLING: Gonna need a reason.
ANNABELLE MATHIS: Because I know you're good at this — advertising, I mean. Tomorrow night. Somewhere French.
I just subscribed to the Paris Review; it turns out that they ship international free of charge. While I’m waiting for the mail to come, I have a few bits & pieces like this, which I copied out from the Spring ‘09 issue I read in my aunt’s house in Brookline, to tide me over:
“Her father has had cancer on his cheekbone & one on the top of his left ear. The ear is...
“Opening a kilo of coke takes time. The outside layer of this particular package bears a colorful pattern of palm trees that makes it look like a birthday present, a thick paperback maybe. Other layers nest beneath the trees: layers of plastic, of carbon paper, of tracing and butcher paper, one stamped producto de calidad and numbered. Below the first layers, the entire brick is slathered in...
“Put your left hand on the table. Put your right hand in the air. If you stay that way long enough, you’ll get a plot,” Margaret Atwood says when asked where her ideas come from. When questioned about whether she’s ever used that approach, she adds, “No, I don’t have to.”
— Margaret Atwood, responding to an interview for “How to Write a Great...
Governments always conspire against The population and often This is not even malice; Just nothing better to do. I’m with the Kurds and the Serbs and the Iraqis And every defiant nation this jerk Ethnic crazy country bombs — World leaders can claim What they want about terror, As they wholesale helicopters To the torturers —
But I’m straight out Of my tribe from my great grandma Merton Pure...
“You must sympathize,” say the innocent country girls in Italo Calvino’s novel The Nonexistent Knight. “Apart from religious services, tridua, novenas, work in the fields, threshing, the vintage, the whipping of servants, incest, fires, hangings, invading armies, sack, rape, and pestilence, we have seen nothing.”
— From Michael Dirda’s review of Umberto...
Bad History
Columbus liked to wear giant plumed hats, and was fond of a woman he later sold for beads.
The Civil War started sometime in an early morning rain, and continues to this day. Nietzsche said that all that glistens is gold. Chaucer told tales of lovers without conscience. The houses in heaven have several rooms. God ran off Lucifer because of my pride. I wrote a bad check to buy the ring and...
“What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That’s all it means. Don’t try to picture the waste or it will alarm you.”
— Nicholson Baker, THE ANTHOLOGIST
The Wood-Pile
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day I paused and said, “I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.” The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went down. The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from...
Cable News
We feel it sweet to behold sailors in distress – the vexéd sea – not out of pleasure in the distress of others, but because their distress is the measure of our security.
— Lucretius