Demolish the ruins as well

Outpost: Select gems from current reads.

Eats with Ozick and Lentricchia

I sat there thinking, sat there waiting, sat there making believe I was actually reading the books I had laid out in my lap when I had pushed back my chair back away from the table when the waiter had come and had put a cup of espresso in front of me and had fi lled the bread basket with some great-looking bread in it for me and had poured out for me a litt le dish of olive oil for me, and had, in every ordinary thing the fellow had done for me, in every conventional ministration the waiter had enacted for me, that the man had—the strictness, the covenant with protocol—got the tears to come from me again, carried me into a sort of small weeping again—so that, sure, sure, I guess I could not actually have sat there reading anything even if I had actually been trying to.

I sat there thinking: Hey, what do they make of me, the other people back behind me in this place, me, this pose-taker I am, this show-person sitt ing here, the ridiculous specs stuck to the nose, the broad black grosgrain ribbon swagged martially across the chest, the legs arranged at an important three-quarter torque, the auspicious-looking books laid out in the lap, the chair shoved back away from the table in an exhibition of a sort of magisterial, expansive remove?

I sat there thinking: Where the piss are they, the dirty stinking rats, not to be here now, not for them to see me looking like this now, not for them to be right this instant coming up on me from the back of me seeing me looking like this now?

(Gordon Lish, Collected Fictions)

They camped like explorers on the sittingroom floors

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A History of Nothing. 
Narrative elements: a week of hunting the overpasses, the exploration of countless apartments. With stove and sleeping-bag, they camped like explorers on the sittingroom floors. ‘They’re exhibits, Karen - this conception will be immaculate.’ Later they raced around the city, examining a dozen architectures. Talbert pushed her against walls and parapets, draped her along balustrades. In the rear seat the textbooks of erotica formed an encyclopedia of postures - blueprints for her own imminent marriage with a seventh-floor balcony unit of the Hilton Hotel.

Amatory elements: nil. The act of love became a vector in an applied geometry. She could barely touch his shoulders without galvanizing him into a spasm of activity. Some scanning device in his brain had lost a bolt. Later, in the dashboard locker she found a set of maps of the Pripet Marshes, a contour photogram of an armpit, and a hundred publicity stills of the screen actress.

Very much loving The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard.

In a state of perpetual jet lag

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I stretched out on the bed, exhausted, my mind clear, and I fell asleep almost immediately (I couldn't tell you how many times I've slept like this). When I woke up the sun was filling the room, it was humid, I was sweating, I was completely dressed, my shirt was sticking to me, I hadn't showered since the previous night, I hadn't taken off my shoes. I groped my way to the bathroom and I examined my face in the mirror, expressionless, rings under my swollen eyes, a vacant look, inscrutable, still sleepy, eyes a worn gray color with a faint glint of silver, veiled by the almost milky white of the cornea, which was marked by small, burst blood vessels. A murmur of inarticulate street noise, sounds of engines and car horns, reached the room, softened by the double-paned glass of the hotel windows. I walked over to the window, the panes were dirty, smudged with dirt and filth, with the residue of urban pollution stuck like a coating to the glass. I looked at the street below, at the morning trafic of Beijing, buses caught in traffic jams, passersby, strange, distant, who seemed to be moving more through the thick fog of my imagination than in the actual streets of Beijing. Since the previous night, since Marie's phone call in the train, I was perceiving the world as if in a state of perpetual jet lag, causing a slight distortion in the fabric of reality, a shift, a misalignment, giving rise to a miniscule yet fundamental incompatibility between the familiar world around me and the removed way, distant and hazy, in which I perceived it.

(Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Running Away... Dalkey Archive)


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Waiting

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It is possible that you have glimpsed me planting seeds in the garden and have wondered why they did not come up at once – and by the same token you may have seen things come up in the graden during one of your rare visits, the beans breaking the surface like big-eared birds, without remembering having seen me plant them.  That intervening time during which one can become bored or impatient or inattentive is known as the waiting period, a thing both unbearable and necessary.  For the planting of the seed and then the waiting for it to come up nad, when it is up, the waiting for it to flower and set fruit, and then the waiting period, and then the waiting for the fruit to mature – and yet it does not end there, for one must often wait for the fruit, that is, the vegetable, to cook and be served on a plate at the proper time, lunch or dinner, when it is likely to be gobbled up in a flash – this succulent squash that was not only months in the growing but also centuries or even millennia in the developing and perfecting: here it is, swallowed down in a thoughtless gulp.  Surely there must be a better arrangement, you remark – or will, when you are old enough.  Yet I know of none.  For should I be able to plant my seeds in the garden one moment, for example, and be able to watch them sprout and push through the crust of earth the next moment and grow suddenly large and flower and fruit and ripen and bloat, leaves turn yellow, wither, collapse, all within some three or four minutes – so that when I wanted squash, say, or beans or lettuce, I merely walked down to the garden and threw a seed into the ground and stepped back and waited a few minutes for the result, as one waits for toast to emerge from the toaster or water to boil on the stove, then it might well follow that you too would be subject to the same or a similarly accelerated process.  For as I plant seeds in the garden and wait for them to germinate and grow and their fruit mature, so too have you been planted in the garden of life and are being watched over by someone who may also wonder why the process is so slow and involves so much waiting – and so on.  And yet from your point of view you are likely to feel a little pressed for time – as does perhaps the squash plant, who lies there on the ground pumping and straining away to produce a squash large enough for my plate and my meal, and all the time wishing it had another week or two of hot weather to get the thing out.

But you would do well to consider that the longer and heavier seems the waiting, the more vivid becomes the imagination; that is, those without imagination do not wait so much as simply sit staring vacantly into space.

Stanley Crawford, Some Instructions to my Wife

They laughed at the little old man's frenzy

Drlaobook

Influenced by liquor as they had never been influenced by the Young Men's Christian Association, the two college youths from back East, Slick Bromiezchski and Paul Conrad Gordon, came into the circus uttering wisecracks and having a hell of a good time generally.

Doctor Lao saw them at long range and came dashing up.  "Whatsah mattah Glod damn college punks come this place?" he demanded.  "You no savvee nothing here.  Glet to hell out!  This my show, by Glod!"

They laughed at the little old man's frenzy, threatening to sic the Japs on him if he didn't pipe down.  They quoted laws they made up on the spot to show him he couldn't prevent anyone who paid from looking at his circus.  Advising him to give up trying to be a Barnum and to go back to washing the smells out of shirt-tails, they wended their way to the peepshow and forgot him.

The Invention of Photography in Toledo

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Bitumen of Judea dissolves in oil of lavender in greater or lesser densities of saturation according to its exposure to light, and thus Joseph Nicéphore Niepce in the year of Thomas Jefferson's death photographed his barnyard at Chalon-sur-Saône.  Hours of light streaming through a pinhole onto pewter soaked asphalt into lavender in mechanical imitation of light focussed on a retina by the lens of an eye. 

The result, turned right side up, was pure de Chirico.

The Invention of Photography in Toledo, from Da Vinci's Bicycle

I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar.

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My name is Herbert Badgery.  I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity.  They come and look at me and wonder how I do it.  There are weeks when I wonder the same, whole stretches of terrible time.  It is hard to believe you can feel so bad and still not die.

I am a terrible liar and I have always been a liar.  I say that early to set things straight.  Caveat emptor.  My age is the one fact you can rely on, and not because I say so, but because it has been publicly authenticated.  Independent experts have poked me and prodded me and scraped around my foul-smelling mouth.  They have measured my ankles and looked at my legs.  It is a relief to not worry about my legs any more.  When they photographed me I did not care that my dick looked as scabby and scaly as a horse's, even though there was a time when I was a vain man and would not have permitted the type of photographs they chose to take.  Apart from this (and it is all there, neatly printed on a chart not three feet from where I lie) I have also been written up in the papers.  Don't imagine this is any novelty to me - being written up has been one of my weaknesses and I don't mention it now so that I may impress you, but rather to make the point that I am not lying about my age.

Peter Carey, Illywhacker

But the solipsism gets us all.

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But the solipsism gets us all.  Everyone is writing "Ulysses" all day long, within himself, and when we speak we speak sentences out off an inward context -- only the tip of the iceberg appearing above the surface.  So that you heard only the clause beginning with "but," and not what preceded it.

What I should have said to you about being a writer would have gone something like this: One has the choice now of coming before the world as a writer or actually being one.  The Mailers and the Angries are dissatisfied with what you call the rapping on the cell wall, and they have decided to make a public appearance in the writer's role.  I don't take you for a silly man.  You are nothing like an Angry; still you were encountering difficulty in the role, and wanted to be acknowledged by the others.  It seemed to me a trivial thing for you to be doing.  You had it all over most of the people there anyway, and weren't denied publication, and you might therefore have gone a little more softly with them, less gifted and less lucky as they were.  An odd tightness or hardness came over you when they criticized you.  I saw my own pale tense face twenty years ago, and I spoke and no doubt I said the wrong thing.  I owed you this explanation then but didn't offer it because I was distracted, annoyed with the whole conference and angry with myself for having gotten into it.

Saul Bellow to Arno Karlen, August 17, 1961

Saul Bellow, Life and Letters, “Among Writers,” The New Yorker, April 26, 2010, p. 53 (abstract only online.  Email me and I'll hook it to you)

The Brotherhood of the Grape

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Then it happened.  One night as the rain beat on the slanted kitchen roof a great spirit slipped forever into my life.  I held his book in my hands and trembled as he spoke to me of man and the world, of love and wisdom, pain and guilt, and I knew I would never be the same.  His name was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.  He knew more of fathers and sons than any man in the world, and of brothers and sisters, priests and rogues, guilt and innocence.  Dostoyevsky changed me.  The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler.  He turned me inside out.  I found I could breathe, could see invisible horizons.  The hatred for my father melted.  I loved my father, poor, suffering, haunted wretch.  I loved my mother too, and all my family.  It was time to become a man, to leave San Elmo and go out into the world.  I wanted to think and feel like Dostoyevsky.  I wanted to write.

 
The week before I left town the draft board summoned me to Sacramento for my physical.  I was glad to go.  Someone other than myself could make my decisions.  The army turned me down.  I had asthma.  Inflammation of the bronchial tubes. 
 
"That's nothing.  I've always had it."
 
"See your doctor."
 
I got the needed information from a medical book at the public library.  Was asthma fatal?  It could be.  And so be it.  Doystoyevsky had epilepsy, I had asthma.  To write well a man must have a fatal ailment.  It was the only way to deal with the presence of death.
 
Buy it at your local independent bookstore:
 

It's like throwing a dart at a map

I was one with a long love affair with the Pixies, coming down squarely on the Kim Deal side of the chasm in later years. But this description of Frank Francis Black's songwriting process hits the nail without even reaching for the studfinder:


Discussing his method now, he likens it to a journey that can begin anywhere. "You need words to a song," he says, revving up like a motor. "You got some music, you've determined that a particular syllable or a certain syncopation works particularly well at a particular moment. So what's the harm in saying, OK, I'm going to take this random word from the vocabulary of the English language, or any language, and stick it right here? So I'm going to build from there. What does that word remind me of? It doesn't matter. It's like throwing a dart at a map. You gotta go somewhere. OK, there's the starting word: 'gigantic.' Where are (we) going to go from there? OK, go. That works well for me. It frees me – it doesn't mean I have to be some sort of sage, or that I have all this important shit in my heart that I have to share with everybody. It frees me from all that kind of precious singer-songwritery stuff. And I can be like, hey man, that's where I threw the dart.

Ben Sisario's 33-1/3 book on Pixies' Doolittle