“It’s a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that it is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leaves the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
Category: Lit & Crit
“Let’s say, for a moment, that the character of a city has an effect on its inhabitants, and that it sets the frequency on which it calls out to the migratory. People who are tuned a certain way will heed the call almost without knowing why. Thinking that they’ve chosen this city, they’ll never know that the city chose them. Let’s say, for a moment, that the literal situation of a city can leak out into the metaphorical realm. That the city is the vessel and we are all merely beings of differing viscosity, slowly taking on the shape of that into which we are poured.” – Jessa Crispin, “Talking to the Dead: Channeling William James in Berlin”
“I don’t see how people don’t write about sex. And also, when are you not writing about sex?” — Eileen Myles (quoted by Jen Graves in “Slog,” November 16, 2012)
“running and fucking
help clear the head
if only I could
fuck and run forever”
— Dan Grace, “The Solution to All Our Ills”
“Primitive – and not so primitive – peoples commonly attempt to bargain with nature,
through prayer, through sacrifice or through ritual persuasion. In doing so they are explicitly adopting a social model, expecting nature to participate in a transaction. But nature will not transact with men; she goes her own way regardless – while her would-be interlocutors feel grateful or feel slighted as the case befits.” – Nicholas Humphrey, “The social function of intellect” (emphasis in original)
“It is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A. V. Miller)
“What makes robbers bold but too much lenity?” – William Shakespeare, King Henry VI. Third Part
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” – George Harrison, “Any Road”
“The pretzel is said to have been invented almost fourteen hundred years ago in a monastery in southern France where a monk frugally twisted leftover scraps of dough into a shape like that of arms folded in prayer, with the three openings representing the Trinity.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“The result of planting apple seeds is a series of trees whose fruit is unpredictable.” – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals
“What do you want to see come into the world? How can you bring it into the world today, even just a little bit?” — Bud Smith, “Four Memories of Giancarlo DiTrapano”
“Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writers can be only so conscientious about truth before becoming paralyzed.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Writing is hard, or everyone would do it.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “The Art of Dying”
“Perhaps no other culture has valued the contrived happy ending as much as ours.” – Stephen Beachy, “Who Is the Real JT LeRoy?”
“It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment” (trans. Francis McDonagh)
“Never say never, because it’s never never.” – Yoko Ono, “Bad Dancer”
“The average man is not a coward; but neither is he endowed by nature only with the rare faculty of seizing intuitively the proper course at a critical moment. He gains it, some more, some less, by experience or by reflection.” – Captain A. T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783
“Most of the authors of the New Testament did not write particularly well, even by the forgiving standards of the koiné—that is, ‘common’—Greek in which they worked. The unknown author of the Letter to the Hebrews commanded a fairly distinguished and erudite style, and was obviously an accomplished native speaker of the tongue; and Luke, the author of both the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, wrote in an urbane, unspectacular, but mostly graceful prose; the author of the first letter attributed to Peter was clearly an educated person whose primary language was a fairly refined form of Greek, while the author of the second letter wrote in a somewhat bombastic style, of the kind classically called Asiatic Greek; but the language of most of the canon is anything but extraordinary. Paul’s letters possess an elemental power born out of the passion of his faith and the marvel of what he believes has been revealed to him, and his prose occasionally flowers into a plain but startling lyricism; but his Greek is generally rough, sometimes inept, and occasionally incoherent. The Gospel of Mark contains obvious solecisms and is awkwardly written throughout. The prose of the Gospel of Matthew is rarely better than ponderous. Even the Gospel of John, perhaps the most structurally and symbolically sophisticated religious text to have come down to us from late antiquity, is written in a Greek that is grammatically correct but syntactically almost childish (or perhaps I should say, ‘remarkably limpid’), and—unless its author was some late first-century precursor of Gertrude Stein—its stylistic limitations suggest an author whose command of the language did not exceed mere functional competence. Then, of course, the book of Revelation, the last New Testament text to be accepted into the canon—it was not firmly established there throughout the Christian world until the early fifth century—is, if judged purely by the normal standards of literary style and good taste, almost unremittingly atrocious. And, in the most refined pagan critics of the new faith in late antiquity, the stylistic coarseness of Christian literature often provoked the purest kind of patrician contempt. This is all evidence, however, of a deeper truth about these texts: They are not beguiling exercises in suasive rhetoric or feats of literary virtuosity; rather, they are chiefly the devout and urgent attempts of often rather ordinary persons to communicate something ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ that transcends any language, but that nevertheless demands to be spoken, now, here, in whatever words one can marshal. This is the special amphibology of Christian scripture. Whereas the Jewish Bible represents the concentrated literary genius of an ancient and amazingly rich culture—mythic, epic, lyric, historical, and visionary, in texts assembled over many centuries and then judiciously synthesized, redacted, and polished—the Christian New Testament is a somewhat unsystematically compiled and pragmatically edited compendium of ‘important documentation’: writings from the first generation of witnesses to the new faith, the oldest ambassadors to us from the apostolic and early postapostolic ages, consisting in quickly limned stories, theological discourses, and even a bit of historically impenetrable occasional writing. As such it draws one in by the intensity, purity, and perhaps frequent naiveté of its language, not by the exquisite sheen of its belletristic graces.” – David Bentley Hart, “Introduction,” The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“Thou that dost inhabit in my breast, leave not the mansion so long tenantless, lest, growing ruinous, the building fall, and leave no memory of what it was! Repair me with thy presence.” – William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona
“There really is no reason / for much of anything humans do / once you get past hunting and fishing, / farming and shelter building. / Oh, sure, art makes sense too / if you look at the cave drawings. / Everything else is an agreed-upon / arrangement we promise / not to make fun of each other for— / sitting at desks making up stuff— / then we exchange pieces of paper / we agreed upon has value, / sometimes we laugh, / sometimes we cry, depending. / Nowdays everybody wants me to / buy a lot of gold but I would rather / have some dirt and a few seeds.” – Greg Kosmicki, “The Lucky Ones” (spelling in original)
“I was committed for two weeks to a mental health hospital for depression and suicidal behavior. Two weeks doesn’t sound long, but let me assure you that time is, in fact, relative. Imagine, if you will, being driven off in the middle of the night, poked and prodded by a doctor, having everything about you catalogued from your earrings to your underwear, being stripped and shoved in a shower, dressed in ill-fitting pink scrubs, marched out to a white-walled cage, and then watched. Watched by a panel of placating smiles, who ask questions for which they’ve already decided the answers. Watched as you color with the bright colored crayons, smile at everyone, swallow your pills, laugh too much, line up for the cafeteria, attend group and circle the happy face when you just want to yell, ‘I’m not in kindergarten!’ But you don’t because you want out, and, perhaps even more so, because you’re afraid you shouldn’t be let out. Sometimes I think I could spend a lifetime finding words in those two weeks alone.” – Beth McKinney, Rattle 56
“I get a lot of inspiration from just going out and pretending I’ve never been to this planet before. It’s a great way to remember just how absurd, strange, beautiful, and unlikely everything is.” – Brendan Constantine, Rattle 58
“I write poetry because I am looking for home.” – Echo Wren, Rattle 59
“I write because I am irritable and impossible to live with if I don’t.” Yamini Pathak, Rattle 59
“Poems are happening in plain view every day.” – Lowell Jaeger, Rattle 59
“I started writing poems because in the English language there is only one word for ‘dream’.” – Megan Falley, Rattle 59
“To be a good reporter it is first necessary to perceive. The commonest mistake is to call upon the imagination to supply what the eye has not been able to take in. A reporter should be all perception.” – Ron Grossman, “Adding booksmarts to street-smart journalism”
“The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination.” – Karl Ove Knausgaard, “What Writers and Editors Do” (trans. Martin Aitken)
“The absence of any explicit signifier functions by itself as a signifier.” – Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith)