January 9, 2013
“Actually, no.”

“That was one of my reasons for splitting with Kuzmin. Of course, political views should not be the reason for splitting with someone. Actually, no. It is precisely political views that should be the reason, because politics is not soccer; your affiliation is not something you wear on Saturdays and then put away for the rest of the week. And there is a sense in which some of the things we value about soccer, or culture more generally—consensus, coexistence, “peace”—are impossible in politics, not because only one side can win, but because, as a result of its winning, everything will change.”

-Kirill Medvdev, It’s No Good

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October 15, 2012
"

When I wrote I Love Dick, I was a complete outsider, so it was a very reckless, wild I. Now that my work has been more widely circulated, to continue to write from that outsider position would be false. It seemed easier to convey Catt Dunlop’s vortex through the third person.

I figured that out when I wrote Torpor. In a way Torpor is the prequel to I Love Dick: how could the characters have come to this insane point where, as a couple, they’re writing love letters to this third person? The story of how that happens is the story of his background as a child survivor of the Holocaust, their marriage, her abortions. In order to tell that story truthfully I had to be ruthless with the characters and sometimes turn them into clowns. You can’t really do that with the first person: you can’t turn the I into a clown, particularly if you’re a woman. People will say: “Oh my God, she hates herself, I feel so sorry for her, she should get therapy.” The only way you can turn your female I into a clown is to make her a third person character. The material in Torpor was really more personal—I Love Dick was all shtick, people say it was confession, but it was all shtick, a stand up routine. Torpor was a much more personal book, and in order for it to be personal and psychological to that degree, I needed the freedom to move those characters around, as you can do in the third person.

"

— Chris Kraus, interviewed by Giampaolo Bianconi in Rhizome about her new novel, Summer of Hate (via emilygould)

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(Notes: 21)
  
May 13, 2012
“First of all, what job?”

When he was 28, Flaubert went on a trip to Egypt so that he could spend time visiting prostitutes and looking at ruins. Here is a letter he wrote to his mother while traveling down the Nile:

…Now I come to something that you seem to enjoy reverting to and that I fail completely to understand. You are never at a loss for things to torment yourself about. What is the sense of this: that I must have a job—“une petite place,” you say. First of all, what job? I defy you to find me one, to specify in what field, what it would consist in. Frankly, and without deluding yourself, is there a single one that I am capable of filling? You add: ‘One that wouldn’t take up much of your time and wouldn’t prevent you from doing other things.’ There’s the delusion! That’s what Bouilhet told himself when he took up medicine, what I told myself when I began law, which only just failed to kill me with bottled-up fury. When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds—like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

In short, it seems to me that one takes a job for money, for honors, or as an escape from idleness. Now you’ll grant me, darling, (1) that I keep busy enough not to have to go out looking for something to do; and (2) if it’s a question of honors, my vanity is such that I’m incapable of feeling myself honored by anything: a position, however high it might be (and that isn’t the kind you speak of) will never give me the satisfaction that I derive from my self-respect when I have accomplished something well in my own way, and finally, if it’s for money, any jobs or job that I could have would bring in too little to make much difference to my income. Weigh all those considerations: don’t knock your head against a hollow idea. Is there any position in which I’d be closer to you, more yours? And isn’t not to be bored one of the principal goals of life?

Happy Mother’s Day!

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(Notes: 4)
  
February 7, 2012
New Grub Street

George Gissing wrote this in 1891, but it’s basically what I imagine the magazine writers of today say to each other when they talk about their jobs. The one talking is a 25-year old sort-of freelance writer named Jasper:

“I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives. If only I had the skill, I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you; and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity. For my own part, I shan’t be able to address the bulkiest multitude; my talent doesn’t lend itself to that form. I shall write for the upper middle-class of intellect, the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can’t distinguish between stones and paste. That’s why I’m so slow in warming to the work. Every month I feel surer of myself, however. That last thing of mine in The West End distinctly hit the mark; it wasn’t too flashy, it wasn’t too solid. I heard fellows speak of it on the train.”

So far the whole book is this good. I especially like, “the people who like to feel that what they are reading has some special cleverness, but who can’t distinguish between stones and paste.” What up, New York Magazine readers!

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(Notes: 5)
  
January 30, 2012
Inferno

“My girlfriend and I were standing in our kitchen—while I pondered the hopelessness of writing a book about a poet. Well she tooted. Have you ever considered the demographic you are writing for. Yes I have as a matter of fact. While I lowered her into a shallow grave.” -Eileen Myles, Inferno

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(Notes: 3)
  
September 21, 2011
chagrinternet:

chagrinternet:

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(Notes: 3)
  
September 13, 2011
Ellen Willis on Bruce Springsteen

“I especially enjoyed the way he moved, acting out each song (dancing down the street, mounting his Harley) with just the right mixture of drama and self-parody, projecting a sense of maleness that depended not on the exclusion or denigration or conquest of women but on his appreciation of his body and what it could do.”

That’s the best description of Bruce that I have ever read. Remember when he performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, and accidentally slid his crotch directly into the camera lens, and instead of thinking it was gross and awful everyone just thought it was funny, and that Bruce was just as much a treasure as always?

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April 11, 2011
"There is no Hitler building as such. We are quartered in Centenary Hall, a dark brick structure we share with the popular culture department, known officially as American environments. A curious group. The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are here to decipher the natural language of the culture, to make a formal method of the shiny pleasures they’d known in their Europe-shadowed childhoods — an Aristotelianism of bubble gum wrappers and detergent jingles."

— Don DeLillo, White Noise, p. 9. (via keyholez) (If you, like me, are somebody who reviews things or writes about culture in a non-fictional way, I think it’s healthy to check in with this quote every once in a while. Otherwise you can end up writing like Zizek or Jonathan Lethem.)

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(Notes: 13)
  
April 6, 2011
More Tocqueville

Sorry, I’ll stop after this, but one of the really nice things about “Democracy in America” is although Tocqueville is a genius at making fun of Americans, he isn’t petty. He saves his serious criticisms for the country’s serious wrongs, like slavery or the treatment of Indians.

That said, check out what a genius he is at making fun of us! This excerpt is a bit long, but I promise that almost every sentence is funnier than the one that came before it:

“Americans, in their relations with foreigners, seem impatient of the slightest censure and insatiable in their appetite for priase. They are pleased by the merest of commendations and seldom satisfied by the fullest. They pester you constantly for your praise, and if you hold out against the importuning, they will laud themselves. Doubtful perhaps of their own merit, they wish to have its portrait constantly before their eyes. Their vanity is not only greedy but also restless and envious. It gives nothing yet is always asking to receive. It is simultaneously grasping and argumentative.

I say to an American that he lives in a beautiful country. He replies, “Yes, indeed, there is none other like it in the world!” I admire the liberty that its inhabitants enjoy, and he responds, “Liberty is a precious gift, but very few peoples are worthy of it.” I remark on the purity of morals prevailing in the United States: “I can imagine,” he says, “that a foreigner struck by the corruption that is so glaringly apparent in all other nations might be surprised by such a sight.” Ultimately I leave him to contemplate himself, but he returns to my side and refuses to leave until he has made me repeat what I have just told him. A patriotism more trying or loquacious is impossible to imagine. It wearies even those who honor it.”

Ultimately I leave him to contemplate himself, but

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(Notes: 1)
  
April 6, 2011
Tocqueville

I’m about 700 pages in to Democracy in America, and I keep thinking about how bored I would have been by this book had I been forced to read it in high school. Actually it’s the best.

Here’s a quote from a chapter called “ON THE GRAVITY OF AMERICANS AND WHY IT DOES NOT PREVENT THEM FROM ACTING RASHLY”: “An American, instead of dancing joyously in the public square in his hours of leisure as many people of similar occupation still do throughout much of Europe, may retire to his private sanctum to drink alone. Such a man will savor two pleasures at once: while thinking about business he can become decently inebriated in familial seclusion. I used to think that the English were the most serious-minded people on earth, but now that I have seen the Americans, I have changed my mind.”

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(Notes: 1)
  
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