December 2009
19 posts
“Any schoolboy can do experiments in the physics laboratory to test various...”
– Milan Kundera
[On sitting beneath the projector’s beam in the movie theater as a child]: “I would look at that light as a pious boy might react to a shaft of sunlight in a cathedral. I still find it a slightly mystical experience. Something to do with forbidden and secret things.”
-David Lean
I picture a man standing inside an opaque sphere. Every time a familiar concept is exploded; every time the original metaphor is resurrected from the husk of an idiom; every time he sees a word as dangling from the end of its etymology; a small patch of the sphere turns transparent and then slowly crusts over again.
The sphere, of course, is language.
You’re a young writer. You admire an older writer, and you want to get to where that older writer is. You imagine that all the energy that your envy is putting into it has somehow been transferred to him, that there’s a flipside to it, a feeling of being envied that’s a good feeling the way that envy is a hard feeling. You can see it as the idea of being in things for some kind...
David Simon is responsible for one of the greatest feats of storytelling of the past century, and that’s the entire five-season run of the television series The Wire. If that sounds like hyperbole to you, then you haven’t watched the show yet. It is the most intricate web of character, motivation, insight, action, repercussion, and emotion that’s ever been on TV, and it rivals the grand novels of...
I watched as a man and woman crawled out of a window from WTC 2, held hands, and jumped. They floated down together and landed next to me with a dead thump.
They were above the fire line.
I looked at them for a few seconds, horrified, and then stumbled over to the side of a deli and vomited. I took off running. A few minutes later I heard a rumbling. I turned around and saw a huge cloud of dust...
My obstinate rejection of time is now taking its revenge on me. Its passage never existed for me. I never felt it as a river that could dry up. It was all around me, inexhaustible, a sea. I drifted about in all directions; it seemed natural to go on this way. My time would never run out. Everything I undertook was for eternity, and eternities were at my disposal, even for the smallest projects.
...
OK LOOKMOTHERFUCKERS
We took or bikes to the quarry, threw on our walkmen, went down deep.
In the gloom we listened to Billy Joel, Pavement, mined copper and zinc.
We came out with our jean-jacket pockets full.
We biked back to my place, stopping for dark beer and honeycomb toffee.
We listened to the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and smiled and laughed,
window open, crows weaving in murders outside my...
“Nature is our enemy, we must always fight against Nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal state. You may be sure that God has not put anything on this earth that is clean, pretty, elegant or accessory to our ideal; the human brain has done it. It is we who have introduced a little grace, beauty, unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it, interpreting...
We are increasingly fluent in images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments.
-2666
He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat, and he looked quickly around to...
The easy possibility of letter-writing must have brought into the world a terrible disintegration of souls. It is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How...
“Reaching the peak of Igikpak, that majestic mount, feeling the smooth Alaskan wind rustle against my cheeks, watching over this vast yet tender land that epitomized so much of America’s resplendent pulchritude, and slowly squeezing the trigger on the wolf cub I’d been tracking through my crosshairs, I suddenly felt in my heart something I had always known to be true: the...
Hal notes that “ducks’ trade secret” for flourishing in their cold, wet environment is their “oily exudationary layer,” which if compromised by “a mom using a spray bottle with a weak boric acid solution to scrub the duck clean and oil-free before a son picks it up” will cause the duck to “fall prey to the full fury of the wet, cold environment in which it makes its natural home.”
Pennies seem more like a synecdoche of fear and aggression—have pennies at the ready, ready to direct them outward, lest the pennies come back your way, for you to have to lug around, or keep in a jar.
“So but I’d always feel strange, then, when we fucked. It was like an all-body hallucination—that, beginning at opposite ends of the world, we hurtle toward each other, each bound for the opposite point that had launched the other, and that in the best of worlds we’d pass each other in opposite flight, impossibly close, sliding past each other like two planes of glass, too smooth to touch. But...