Turning and Turning

Jun 4

“Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners’ attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity—you did not sabotage someone else’s narration if it was satisfying to the audience…Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being told the story…It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth—reality is the fastest American commodity.” Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Jun 2

“All fears are memories of other fears, so my first thought was, again, Here it is.” Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (SO great.)

“When you’re young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?” Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Good, but Barnes is still massively overrated.)

Jun 1

“Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had the experience of failing to get a girlfriend? At least the humiliation of that would have added to our general wisdom, given us something to negatively boast about…We know from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.” Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself…I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself…Who knows how my life would have developed if I had not met Paul Wittgenstein at the height of the crisis that, but for him, would probably have pitched me headlong into the literary world, the most repellent of all worlds, the world of Viennese writers and their intellectual morass, for at the height of this crisis the obvious course would have been to take the easy way out, to make myself cheap and compliant, to surrender and throw in my lot with the literary fraternity.” Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew

“In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature.” Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew (tr. David McLintock)

Books I have read and liked recently but from which I was too lazy to post

Like Life, Lorrie Moore

Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, Lorrie Moore

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker

Mar 28

Actual, real life sentences from the book I am reading…

…The Psychology of Love, Eds. Sternberg and Barnes:

“Love is an Austro-Hungarian Empire uniting all sorts of feelings, behaviors, and attitudes.”

“Indeed, the expression ‘Don’t leave home without it!’ might be more important with reference to love than to one’s American Express card.”

Oh my god, scientists (or, at least, this dude). Don’t try to be funny. It hurts.

Mar 25

“Pathetic fallacies, projections, substitutions and displacements were part of the inevitable traffic between any mind and its habitual surroundings, but the pathological intensity he had brought to these operations made it vital for him to see through them. What would it be like to live without consolation, or the desire for consolation? He would never find out, unless he uprooted the consolatory system that had started on the hillside at Sainte-Nazaire and then spread to every medicine cabinet, bed and bottle he had come across since; substitutes substituting for substitutes; the system was always more fundamental than its contents, and the mental act more fundamental still. What if memories were just memories, without any consolatory or persecutory power? Would they exist at all, or was it always emotional pressure that summoned images from what was potentially all of experience so far?” Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (Holy god this paragraph)

“These sharp sensations lowered his defences further, and he was overwhelmed by an expanding rush of sympathy for the ruined human being in front of him. During its fleeting life, this vast sense of tenderness reduced his mother’s personality to a detail, and his relationship with her to a detail within a detail.” Edward St. Aubyn, At Last (When it’s over I will have no reason left to live.)

“Two years ago, I was afraid of wanting anything. I figured wanting would lead to trying and trying would lead to failure. But now I find I can’t stop wanting. I want to fly somewhere on first class. I want to travel to Europe on a business trip. I want to get invited to the White House. I want to learn about the world. I want to surprise myself. I want to be important. I want to be the best person I can be. I want to define myself instead of having others define me. I want to win and have people be happy for me. I want to lose and get over it. I want to not be afraid of the unknown. I want to grow up and be generous and big hearted, the way people have been with me. I want an interesting and surprising life. It’s not that I think I’m going to get all these things, I just want the possibility of getting them. College represents possibility. The possibility that things are going to change. I can’t wait.” Friday Night Lights, Tyra’s college essay

Mar 23

“Moreover there was a burglarious aspect to doing it with Betty which he had never come across before. There were the clothes for instance…slow divestment was an apprenticeship he had never had to serve, his partners gladly casting off whatever they had on the quicker to enjoy Graham’s charms…he finds the fumbling attendant on her urgent and only partial deshabille particularly exciting as it comes always with the sense that he is breaking in.” Alan Bennett, “The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes,” Smut (This is a delightful little collection!)

I made it 75 pages into Kate Zambreno’s Green Girl…

…which, considering, the radically uneven quality of the writing, is a minor miracle. Winner of the Bestworst Sentence Award:

She blots a pink heart on the tissue—the pink heart that is her heart of darkness.

“

It’s this past summer at a country club in New Jersey where the pool twinkles like 1985. I am reading aloud to a friend from a David Foster Wallace essay in which he talks about how a man who puts his hand at a woman’s abdomen while his mouth is between her legs is selfish. Because he wants to know if she comes. He’s in it for his ego. Then we talk about cheaters, because I’m telling my friend about a man who was great at that, while he was married. And we talk about the fact that I’ve been with married men, which I feel taught me to be careful not to get hurt, to know that one day it could happen to me. And she feels it is because I’m worried about losing people, like I lost my parents, so I don’t ever put myself in a position to lose. She says I’m just a catalyst for more loss…

This time we were in the bar where we’d met, where he knew everyone and he likened me to a jar of cherries beside his glass of Scotch and he kissed me there at the bar and it was the kind that doesn’t stop until a full stop. We left together and outside in the street he lifted me into his arms with my legs around his waist and he threw me up against a brick wall. On the way to my apartment a taxi almost hit us and we laughed. He carried me inside and the bottles in my bar stand shook. He threw me on my bed and it was the ideal mix of laughing and panicked desire and he took half my clothes off and his phone rang. We were doing midnight things but across the rest of the city it was 8:00 P.M. and with one hand on my waist, he picked up the phone and said, Yeah honey, don’t worry, having a drink with Brian, I’ll bring home a pizza.

More than the illicitness of the sexuality, there’s a sexuality to the selfishness. To doing precisely what you want to do. Being crudely, smilingly, on the side of the winners. I’m arguing for Wild Moments, because you never know what your last one will be.

” Lisa Taddeo, “Why We Cheat” (I know the writing needs some editing, and that Jezebel hated it, but you know what? I love this piece.)

Mar 20

“He wasn’t going to scold himself for a lack of particularity in experiencing his sexual pleasure. All sex was prostitution for both participants, not always in the commercial sense, but in the deeper etymological sense that they stood in for something else. The fact that this was sometimes done so effectively that there were weeks or months in which the object of desire and the person one happened to be in bed with seemed identical could not prevent the underlying model of desire from beginning to drift away, sooner or later, from its illusory home.” Edward St. Aubyn, Some Hope (Curse you for writing every thought in my brain.)