A(n Incomplete) Record of What Jake's Looking At
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“ When was super depressed, I wasn’t working—I was always too depressed. Hemingway did his best work when he didn’t drink, then he drank himself to death and blew his head off with a shotgun. Someone asked John Cheever, ‘What’d you learn from Hemingway?’ and he said ‘I learned not to blow my head off with a shotgun.’ I remember going to the Michigan poetry festival, meeting Etheridge Knight there and Robert Creeley. Creeley was so drunk—he was reading and he only had one eye, of course, and had to hold his book like two inches from his face using his one good eye. But you look at somebody like George Saunders—I think he’s the best short story writer in English alive—that’s somebody who tries very hard to live a sane, alert life.
You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack Daniel’s every day. It’s probably better for your writing career, you know? I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist.
”— In an interview with The Fix, Mary Karr debunks the toxic mythology that it is necessary to be damaged in order to be creative. (via explore-blog)(via neil-gaiman)
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“I never contradict. I am in agreement with you as you utter your words of wisdom.” — Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie -
There’s little I enjoy more than solid-ass detective fiction repartee. (via Stumptown vol. 2 #1, written by Greg Rucka, illustrated by Matthew Southworth)
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“All the clichés of a city are new to any individual visitor and hence not clichés; just as love, in spite of the paltry means we have to express it, is, each time experienced, completely new: it can be pyrotechnic in its intensity or slow and tender but overwhelming, like a glacier passing over a landscape; or evanescent but glorious like the field of fireflies on Martha’s Vineyard in my youth—whatever it is, each time it is familiar and new at once, an overturning.” — Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs -
“Wouldn’t you call the person who builds a Wonderland—a Wonderland that you can see and touch and smell, that both is and is not Alice’s Wonderland, and is also some twelfth-century Islamic Robinson Crusoe’s Wonderland, is both East and West, Then and Now, Imaginary and Real, and somehow, because of its freedom in not being wearingly faithful, becomes above all your Wonderland, or yours and Sirena’s at once, as though you were intimate with her in some way, wouldn’t you call such a person a Purveyor of Dreams? You would, and some Frenchie critic subsequently did, and if you’re wondering what could possibly be wrong with being a Purveyor of Dreams—I mean, you could say, isn’t that what Art is for?—you should keep in mind that the desire to be that, to do that—to be the fittest at artistic survival—requires ruthlessness. Maybe that, really, is as good a definition as any of an artist in the world: a ruthless person.” — Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs -
Manohman am I jealous.
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“Your tongue was always swollen, raw, from being blown to atoms in your sleep.” — Junot Díaz’s “Miss Lora” (collected in This Is How You Lose Her) -
“But the world should understand, if the world gave a shit, that women like us are not underground. No Ralph Ellison basement full of lightbulbs for us; no Dostoyevskian metaphorical subterra. We’re always upstairs. We’re not the madwomen in the attic—they get lots of play, one way or another. We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” — from The Woman Upstairs, the excellent new novel by Claire Messud (my former teacher!) -
“‘I’m very happy for you,’ she said, in a conclusive tone, as if the shape of her life had now been decided.” — a line from Fiona McFarlane’s “Art Appreciation,” the story in the latest issue of The New Yorker -
(via Stumptown #3, written by Greg Rucka, illustrated by Matthew Southworth)
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“Our country is big, let us be big.” — Saunders, in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil -
“And Phil, carrying his brain under one arm, led the flustered Militia away from the border, hissing at them now and then to stop looking back so fearfully over their shoulders.” — a damn fine Saunders sentence, in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil -
“My advice to you is: Don’t get old! Have I said that? Remain young! Because once you get old you start misremembering, for example, that there were apple trees and rushing streams in your youth, when in fact the country where you spent your semester abroad was only a deep ugly gash in the earth.” — The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders -
My political ideology, basically (especially the second part). (via #58)
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“This was not judgment day—only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.” — the last lines of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice
