That’s what makes it excitingThat’s what makes it exciting
“Beneath any carnal attraction at all deep, there is the permanent possibility of danger.” – Marcel Proust, The Captive (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Author: Tetman Callis
I’ll wrassle ya fer itI’ll wrassle ya fer it
“Masculinity is, as a word, make-shift, and as a practical concept, uselessly broad, and wide open to opportunism and disingenuity. May infants make a claim to masculinity? Probably not, but everybody else can. Confidence and strength, both of mind and body, a willingness to pay a great price in defense of something nominally outside the realm of masculinity (e.g., a woman or child), a desire for hard-won power and glory, an appetite for raw life, a respect for law and order and genuine authority but a nearly unthinking willingness to destroy persons and institutions when necessary: men may have described and proscribed all that as essential to masculinity, but in practice all that it apparently means is that physicality—a larger frame, bigger muscles, and a hairy body—makes all the difference in the cultivation of psychological, emotional, mental states and conditions that favor, enhance, unleash, condone, sanction, and enjoy violence. Righteous, necessary violence, to be sure, but violence all the same. Masculinity—righteous, necessary violence—equals heroism, then? The bloody kind? The fierce kind? The blackly melancholy kind? The laconic kind? Certainly not the kind who ‘fought but stayed at home.’ It’s interesting to note that Orpheus, who went to Hell to rescue Eurydice, who harrowed, conquered, tamed Hell, may be considered a kind of apotheosis of the masculine, not for his bravery or skill, but because he was an idiot who could not do the one little last thing that would ensure victory over death and a life of happiness. Masculinity equals not merely heroism, but anti-heroism as well. It’s even possible that anti-heroism suits masculinity better than the strait-jacket of simple-minded and stiff-gestured heroism.” – Gary Amdahl, “Two Considerations of Masculinity”
Alien LovestockAlien Lovestock
Does it hurt yet?Does it hurt yet?
“It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. And the most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a great discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Not now that we know of those who shall here remain nameless (but they leave tracks as they pass)Not now that we know of those who shall here remain nameless (but they leave tracks as they pass)
“Just as we do not possess that sense of direction with which certain birds are endowed, so we lack the sense of our own visibility as we lack that of distances, imagining as quite close to us the interested attention of people who on the contrary never give us a thought, and not suspecting that we are at the same moment the sole preoccupation of others.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Topsy and the turviesTopsy and the turvies
“The rule among the human race—a rule that naturally admits of exceptions—is that the reputedly hard are the weak whom nobody wanted, and that the strong, caring little whether they are wanted or not, have alone that gentleness which the vulgar herd mistakes for weakness.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Hold it right thereHold it right there
“It’s impossible to escape yourself in writing a book; all the darkness or the beauty or fineness inside you will find its way out. Even a writer who’s willing to be inauthentic will be revealed, because the work will feel inauthentic to the reader.” – Averil Dean (interview with Erika Marks at On Writing, Publishing and Other Delicacies)
Morph was my nameMorph was my name
“We passionately long for there to be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do not pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years, we are unfaithful to what we once were, to what we wished to remain immortally. Even without supposing that death is to alter us more completely than the changes that occur in the course of our lives, if in that other life we were to encounter the self that we have been, we should turn away from ourselves as from those people with whom we were once on friendly terms but whom we have not seen for years.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Eat meEat me
“Theories and schools, like microbes and corpuscles, devour one another and by their strife ensure the continuity of life.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Under its own spellUnder its own spell
“If habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first, whose cruelties it lacks as well as its enchantments.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Case yer wonderin who’s in chargeCase yer wonderin who’s in charge
“Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to kindness and wisdom we make promises only; pain we obey.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Allowances can be madeAllowances can be made
“The most dangerous of all concealments is that of the crime itself in the mind of the guilty party. His constant awareness of it prevents him from imagining how generally unknown it is, how readily a complete lie would be accepted, and on the other hand from realising at what degree of truth other people will begin to detect an admission in words which he believes to be innocent. In any case there was no real need to try to hush it up, for there is no vice that does not find ready tolerance in the best society, and one has seen a country house turned upside down in order that two sisters might sleep in adjoining rooms as soon as their hostess learned that theirs was more than a sisterly affection.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
This is going to hurt you more than it is going to hurt meThis is going to hurt you more than it is going to hurt me
“The flip side of brutality and evil is, dependably, sentimentality. The hit man kissing the picture of his sainted mother before he exterminates a mark, the mawkish evocations of home and youth in Nazi propaganda, the image of the pristine Southern belle under siege that propelled so many lynchings, the need for cleansing, cleansing…. Sentimentality is the perfume that disguises, and even justifies, this lust for brutal cleansing and killing. But the inverse is also true: that an attitude, or a pose, of cool and bracing willingness to face evil and brutality, and to dismiss its opposite as wish fulfillment, might function as a sea wall against a tide of shame and grief so heavy that it can’t be faced directly. The stink of mistakes made, or possibilities lost, can make an image of the good intolerable. If it is too expensive to look at what might have been and realize that one may just not have been good enough, it can be a comfort to think that it was never possible in the first place. This evasion is possible on a societal level, as well as in the private hearts of individuals. The novel is the best tool we have for understanding the one level in terms of the other.” – Tom Piazza, “The Devil and Gustave Flaubert”
You don’t want to get any on your handsYou don’t want to get any on your hands
“Writers are a pretty low class. True, it’s not a bad thing to meet them once in a way, for thanks to them, when one reads a book or an article, one ‘gets to know the inside story,’ one ‘sees people in their true colours.’ On the whole, though, the wisest thing is to stick to dead authors.” – Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Get back to workGet back to work
“We can as we choose abandon ourselves to one or other of two forces, of which one rises in ourselves, emanates from our deepest impressions, while the other comes to us from without. The first brings with it naturally a joy, the joy that springs from the life of those who create. The other current, that which endeavors to introduce into us the impulses by which persons external to ourselves are stirred, is not accompanied by pleasure, but we can add pleasure to it, by a sort of recoil, in an intoxication so artificial that it turns swiftly into boredom, into melancholy—whence the gloomy faces of so many men of the world, and all those nervous conditions which may even lead to suicide.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Sloths and dogs, hummingbirds and guppies, mayflies and mitesSloths and dogs, hummingbirds and guppies, mayflies and mites
“I usually compare the novel to a mammal, be it wild as a tiger or tame as a cow; the short story to a bird or a fish; the micro story to an insect (iridescent in the best cases).” – Luisa Valenzuela (as quoted in Robet Shapard’s “The Remarkable Reinvention of Very Short Fiction”)
Being individuals togetherBeing individuals together
“It is very rarely that any of us has the courage of his own originality and does not apply himself diligently to resembling the most approved models.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Deflation of the demosDeflation of the demos
“It would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want of breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispensed when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything which has only a fiduciary value.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
The long way aroundThe long way around
“An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Free at lastFree at last
“A dead writer can at least be illustrious without any strain on himself. The effulgence of his name stops short at his gravestone. In the deafness of eternal sleep he is not importuned by Glory.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Wanton top, ceaselessly a-spinWanton top, ceaselessly a-spin
“The short story has been all over and there’s no telling where else it will go. All over, but not everywhere. It’s not an exhaustible form, any more than the novel is or the poem.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
The decisive recordThe decisive record
“Character is a function of language—a collection of errors and deviations that resonate with certain behaviors. As with every other element in fiction, it is a record of a writer’s decisions.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
No fun at partiesNo fun at parties
“Character starts with the alphabet. Letters: words: sentences. Any individual human is immensely complex and contradictory and it would be sheer tedium to encounter this complexity, fully and accurately recorded on the page. ‘Fleshed out,’ I believe the term is.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”)
The ghosts that haunt usThe ghosts that haunt us
“‘Do you hear voices?’ asks the doctor. I say yes. What I hear is the muttering phantom, the mouse gnawing at the door. The wind in the mind of the trees. Nothing mindful or coherent. From the muttering, I try to make coherence: people call this voice, but why not call it character? If character is a locus which allows one to speak… ‘certain sorts of sentences?’ Suppose I observe or remember in a person a quirk, a gift, a flaw. An exemplary tic. How does that tic or quirk or flaw influence how a person perceives and therefore words experience? The worded experience, the linguistic field, is character and voice at once, a record of perception. So, yes: I go word by word by ear for as long as I can, according to my awareness of what I’ve said and did not mean to say. And yes: this is messy and inefficient and—worst—insufficient, particularly in longer fictions. Insufficient because you don’t get structure by keeping your ear to the ground. You have to stand up, and I never want to do so too soon, never want to see too far or control too much, which for me feels deadly. The ordering impulse is crucial but I don’t want it to be dominant or inhibiting. When it’s dominant the terms we commonly use—character, voice, plot, setting—begin to make sense; the story bleeds out; it’s anybody’s. More chatter in a chattering world.” – Noy Holland (in Hilary Plum’s “Stop Up Your Ears and Secede”; emphases and ellipsis in original)
It’s right in front of you and you’re headed straight for itIt’s right in front of you and you’re headed straight for it
“We may, indeed, say that the hour of death is uncertain, but when we say this we think of that hour as situated in a vague and remote expanse of time; it does not occur to us that it can have any connexion with the day that has already dawned and can mean that death—or its first assault and partial possession of us, after which it will never leave hold of us again—may occur this very afternoon, so far from uncertain, this afternoon whose timetable, hour by hour, has been settled in advance. One insists on one’s daily outing so that in a month’s time one will have had the necessary ration of fresh air, one has hesitated over which coat to take, which cabman to call; one is in the cab, the whole day lies before one, short because one must be back home early, as a friend is coming to see one; one hopes that it will be as fine again tomorrow; and one has no suspicion that death, which has been advancing within one on another plane, has chosen precisely this particular day to make its appearance, in a few minutes’ time.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Where would we be without us?Where would we be without us?
“Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which you perhaps have experienced.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
We’ve got a pill for thatWe’ve got a pill for that
“Medicine being a compendium of the successive and contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners, when we summon the wisdom of them to our aid the chances are that we may be relying on a scientific truth the error of which will be recognised in a few years’ time. So that to believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were a greater folly still, for from this mass of errors a few truths have in the long run emerged.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
Ghosts trapped in a crumbling prisonGhosts trapped in a crumbling prison
“It is in sickness that we are compelled to recognise that we do not live alone but are chained to a being from a different realm, from whom we are worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might perhaps succeed in making him sensible of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like discoursing in front of an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the tides, and with which we should be appalled to find ourselves condemned to live.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)
The price of everythingThe price of everything
“(a) We live in a society of commodities—that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human interrelationships. (b) In our commodity society there exists a general trend toward a heavy concentration of capital which makes for a shrinking of the free market in favor of monopolized mass production of standardized goods; this holds true particularly of the communications industry. (c) The more the difficulties of contemporary society increase as it seeks its own continuance, the stronger becomes the general tendency to maintain, by all means available, the existing conditions of power and property relations against the threats which they themselves breed. Whereas on the one hand standardization necessarily follows from the conditions of contemporary economy, it becomes, on the other hand, one of the means of preserving a commodity society at a stage in which, according to the level of the productive forces, it has already lost its justification. (d) Since in our society the forces of production are highly developed, and, at the same time, the relations of production fetter those productive forces, it is full of antagonisms. These antagonisms are not limited to the economic sphere where they are universally recognized, but dominate also the cultural sphere where they are less easily recognized.” – Theodor W. Adorno, “A Social Critique of Radio Music”
That’s why bullets are made out of leadThat’s why bullets are made out of lead
“Diplomats know that, in the scales which ensure that balance of power, European or otherwise, which we call peace, good feeling, fine speeches, earnest entreaties weigh very little; and that the heavy weight, the true determinant consists in something else, in the possibility which the adversary enjoys, if he is strong enough, or does not enjoy, of satisfying a desire in exchange for something in return.” – Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (trans. Moncrieff and Kilmartin)