Ourobos was a scribeOurobos was a scribe
“Sometimes people get obsessive about things, ideas, like a man who spends all his time, let’s say, thinking about the moon, staring at the moon. Well, I have a moon of my own. All I think about day and night is having to write. I have to write, I have to. I finish one story, and then I have to write another one, and then a third, and after that a fourth. I write without stopping, like an express train; it’s the only way I know how. Now, I ask you, what’s so beautiful and bright about that? It’s a stupid life! Here I am talking to you, I’m all worked up, and still I can’t forget for a minute that I’ve got a story to finish. I see a could, like that one, shaped like a piano. And all I can think is: I have to use that, one of my characters has to see a cloud shaped like a piano. I smell the heliotrope, I make a mental note: a sickly-sweet smell, a widow’s color, use it to describe a summer evening. Every word you and I are saying right now, every sentence, I capture an lock up in the back of my brain. Because someday I can use them! When I finish working, I go out to the theater, or go fishing, to relax and get away from everything. Do you think I can? No, a great iron cannonball starts rolling around in my head, an idea for a new story, and I’m hooked, I can feel my desk reeling me in, and I have to go write and write. All the time! And I never get any rest. I feel like I’m devouring my own life.” – Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (trans. Schmidt; emphasis in original)
Billy BraggBilly Bragg
War never endedWar never ended
“No sooner had the fighting of World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the United States seemed plunged once more into the anxiety that had prevailed while the guns were firing. A manipulated terror of godless Communism, coupled with an even greater one of nuclear war, made the 1950s a decade in which ordinary women and men feared to speak freely or act independently. Injected into this unhealthy atmosphere was a straitjacket demand for conformity to what was rapidly becoming corporate America. In a world that had just fought one of the bloodiest wars in history for the sake of the individual, millions were rushing into the kind of lockstep existence that by definition meant a forfeiture of inner life.” – Vivian Gornick, “The Cure for Loneliness”
Welcome to lifeWelcome to life
“Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears.” — Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Goldstein)
What’s a word that will make this interestingWhat’s a word that will make this interesting
“Most people, in daily currency, use words in what they think of as a fairly literal way. Consequently they are made uneasy if a writer does not use them similarly. They expect a novelist to know more words than they do, and to employ them with greater expertise than they can. Basically though, they expect a ‘story’ to begin at the beginning (wherever that may be). If the first four words aren’t literally ‘Once upon a time,’ the reader should be able to assume they’re taken for granted. The story should continue through exposition, climax, denouement, until on the last page the author can write ‘The End,’ and the reader may be confident there’s no more to come, that nothing that should have been said remains unsaid.
“The reader, then, expects to understand a work of fiction in the way he understands a conversation with his butcher, his bank manager, his wife, his colleagues at work, or even—in times of energy crisis—his candlestick maker or vendor. Or, pitching it a degree higher, he expects the fiction he reads to illuminate his own conversations with his hairdresser, his solicitor, his wife, his friends, even his Member of Parliament, because he knows that the author possesses ‘imagination’ while he probably does not.
“We are conditioned to read thousands of words every day. There are probably more of them in a single issue of the Times or the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph than there are in the average new novel; and we’re conditioned, because we lead such ‘busy’ lives, to read these words—whether in newspaper or book—as fast as we’re able to assimilate them. In practice, this means a general understanding of the surface meaning, the ‘factual’ content, rather than being persuaded, beguiled, influenced, stimulated and altered by the words. But the craft of even our best journalist is one thing, the art of our better novelists quite another. Or should be.” — Giles Gordon, “Fiction as Itself”
I blink and I am goneI blink and I am gone
“I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what writing is.” — Ingeborg Bachmann (quoted by John Taylor in “Reading Ingeborg Bachmann”)
The know-nothings no the worldThe know-nothings no the world
“Over the years I have found that many Americans—from readers to reviewers to critics to academics to publishers and of course to politicians—take pride in knowing almost nothing about the rest of the world. Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don’t they teach these literatures, they don’t read them.
“In any event, there is a kind of pride taken in how little we know about the rest of the world. And this is coupled with a belief that, if given the chance, all other people would want to be Americans, would want to enjoy our way of life, would want our political system, our economic system. And then of course we try to impose our tastes—for purely economic reasons—on the rest of the world. But at the end of the day, we are shocked and hurt and utterly bewildered at the fact that America is hated by many people and governments. And then we manage to turn even that into evidence of our superiority.
“I think that it’s of absolute importance that the literature and intellectual thought of the rest of the world be readily available in this country, and that these be valued and respected. Otherwise, we become this strange, isolated country that survives only because it possesses the military and economic dominance that it does, not because it is the epitome of civilization and freedom. There should be an immersion in this country’s schools of world literature.” – John O’Brien (Director, Dalkey Archive Press)
You can dislocate your shoulder doing thatYou can dislocate your shoulder doing that
“A foundation will be far more likely to fund third-rate poets reading to beleaguered schoolchildren than fund the publication of some of the most important foreign literary works. Foundations of course are forever patting themselves on their backs for being so diverse and multi-cultural, but they intend these sentiments to have a very limited application.” – John O’Brien (Director, Dalkey Archive Press)
Condensed confessionsCondensed confessions
“There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.” – Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Goldstein)
You get a discount on large ordersYou get a discount on large orders
“There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand different copies.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Bist du loco, quizas?Bist du loco, quizas?
Awaiting discovery just above the diaphragmAwaiting discovery just above the diaphragm
“If there is a pure love, exempt from the mixture of our other passions, it is that which is concealed at the bottom of the heart and of which even ourselves are ignorant.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Worse on the wayWorse on the way
Sometimes you just gottaSometimes you just gotta
Righty-tighty, lefty-looseyRighty-tighty, lefty-loosey
“There are no accidents so unfortunate from which skillful men will not draw some advantage, nor so fortunate that foolish men will not turn them to their hurt.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Who you foolin’?Who you foolin’?
“The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
But they get them all lined up straightBut they get them all lined up straight
“Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
I shall not think about itI shall not think about it
“Most artists fail in what they try to do. The reasons range from an encyclopedia of faults and mistakes to the myriad variants of bad luck. The fact is too melancholy to tempt much contemplation.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Flower Power”
This amount of sugar can induce shock or even coma (sweet dreams are made of these)This amount of sugar can induce shock or even coma (sweet dreams are made of these)
And vice versaAnd vice versa
“To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it. To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered. To consider the world from first principles, to think about how well it would work if everything were different, is to be ready to throw away everything you know. Radical idealism and a sense of limitless possibility are the brighter facets of absolute rejection.” — Larissa MacFarquhar, “Requiem for a Dream”
Dropping Back to PuntDropping Back to Punt
Another of my stories was published today. I’ll post a link to Facebook tomorrow, maybe, but for my three loyal homies, here’s the link here and now:
http://kneejerkmag.com/2013/07/dropping-back-to-punt-by-tetman-callis/
Shits happenShits happen
“A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself. We are occasions. We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women. We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives.” – Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (trans. Goldstein)
Start me upStart me up
“Only in being granted the power to hurt, and the chance to wield it, can we ever hope to rekindle the fires of youth.” — Anthony Lane, “The Evil That Men Do”
Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be kingPoor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
“Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master. The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still; this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo. And as the lesser surrenders to the greater, that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so the greatest, too, surrenders and for the sake of power stakes–life. The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death. And where sacrifice and service and loving glances are, there too is will to be master. There the weaker steals by secret paths into the castle and even into the heart of the more powerful–and steals the power.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)
We miss the days of public executionsWe miss the days of public executions
“A scene in ‘Gangster Squad,’ featuring a shoot-out in a cinema, was cut and replaced after the killings in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20th of last year. And the première of ‘Jack Reacher,’ in Pittsburgh, on December 15th, was postponed after the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, the previous day; the film begins with citizens being gunned down by a sniper with a high-powered rifle. These reactions were respectful and responsible. To claim that all due respect has now been paid, however, or that all ethical responsibilities have been fulfilled, would be disingenuous. The issue of screen violence carries far less weight, in such fathomless horrors, than that of gun control; the connection between what a disturbed and resentful young man used to watch, or play on his computer, and what he then wreaks in public with an assault weapon wouldn’t matter if he couldn’t lay his hands on such a weapon in the first place. Yet the connection, however oblique, exists. You can argue that evil will always seek a blueprint and find a way, but we are still obliged, I think, to pass beyond the pathology of the madman and pose a vaster and no less vexing question. What does it mean for the majority of us, the nonviolent millions, that, year after year, we should observe such a rising flood of savage fictional acts that, after a while, we scarcely notice or mind?” – Anthony Lane, “Violent Screen”
Resistance is futile (and not much fun, and rather suburban)Resistance is futile (and not much fun, and rather suburban)
Finding the lightFinding the light
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP7DCXIrY2E
Better to be loathedBetter to be loathed
“If you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.” — Margaret Thatcher
The crucial splitThe crucial split
“In politics if you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.” — Margaret Thatcher