“There’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—‘Scratch a novelist and you’ll find a moralist.’ Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between a writer’s knowledge if what is and his vision of what ought to be?” – Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?
“What matters is that my uncle wouldn’t stop doing drugs. And that one night he got so wasted, he passed out on the railroad tracks and his friends left him there. Because there are people who will leave you on the railroad tracks and there are people who would never do something like that. Not to a friend, not to a stranger, not to an animal, not to a leaf.” — Leesa Cross-Smith, “Five Sketches of a Story About Death”
“You pull the pin out of a hand grenade, and in a few seconds it explodes and men in a small area get killed and wounded. That makes bodies to be buried, hurt men to be treated. It makes widows and fatherless children and bereaved parents. It means pension machinery, and it makes for pacifism in some and for lasting hatred in others. Again, a man out of the danger area sees the carnage the grenade creates, and he shoots himself in the foot. Another man had been standing there just two minutes before the thing went off, and thereafter he believes in God or a rabbit’s foot. Another man sees human brains for the first time and locks up the picture until one night years later, when he finally comes out with a description of what he saw, and the horror of his description turns his wife away from him.” — John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra
“Nothing else really matters but inspiration, being in an inspired relation to being, so that the activity of making art, the act itself, is more important than anything else, it’s more important than the artifact it produces, the thing that everyone sees or hears or reads, the thing they buy or sell, accept or reject.” — Mary Ruefle (interviewed by Bradley Harrison in Denver Quarterly)
“Look at me, I am telling you a truth here; there are girls on hot days you must kiss between the shoulders; there is the soft spot on the belly of a shorthaired dog; a rhubarb pie is baking; a thrush sings; fogs lift; waves break, days break, bread, hearts, vessels, understand? Look at me, don’t you miss it, understand?” – Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“There’s something about writing that demands a leave-taking, an abandonment of the world, paradoxically, in order to see it clearly. This retreat has to be accomplished without severing the vital connection to the world, and to people, that feeds the imagination. It’s a difficult balance.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”
“To follow literary fashion, to write for money, to censor your true feelings and thoughts or adopt ideas because they’re popular requires a writer to suppress the very promptings that got him or her writing in the first place.” – Jeffrey Eugenides, “Posthumous”
“Do you think it’s possible to live and not regret what you have done with your life? And do you think regret is an emotion, or something more like of a place a person comes to, where you could walk, you know, or sit, or lie in it, like in a house, and go to sleep?” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“The character of men, apparently, is incidental; virtue is the showershow of sparks erupting from the nose pressed to the grindstone.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“The secret is there isn’t any secret. No mystery. We know it all. We’re afraid to believe in what we know, and talk is the sound of our terror.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“You take a thing like love, and put it in a woman’s mouth, nine times out of ten, it comes out sounding like a threat.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“Beats me why so many of the finest things in life have got to stink so bad.” — Sam Michel, Strange Cowboy
“The most important predictor of obesity remains income level. Fast-food companies are dropping obscene amounts on advertising in low-income communities of color, and are targeting children. African-American kids see at least 50 percent more fast-food ads than do white children their age. A full 25 percent of all Spanish-language fast-food advertising in the U.S. is from McDonalds, and the average Latino will see about 290 McDonalds ads a year. In 2006, 9 percent of Upper East Side residents were obese, compared with 21 percent and 30 percent in East and Central Harlem and North and Central Brooklyn, two of the poorest stretches of New York City. Only 5 percent of Upper East Side residents had diabetes, compared to 10 percent and 15 percent in Harlem and Brooklyn. In these neighborhoods, between 1985 and 2000, the cost of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent while the price of junk food and soft drinks decreased by 15 percent and 25 percent respectively.” – Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “Seeing Red”
“Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything. The rabbis were interested in finding solutions to contradictions, and when three Jews meet they will have three answers to every question.” — Theodore Zeldin (interviewed in The Jewish Chronicle)
“Capitalism is itself a kind of social technology, one capable of organizing and managing a massive and complex division of labor without concentrating power over the system at any one point. But it is a technology that is much better suited to some tasks than others. When maximizing the output of commodities with the least input of human labor is posed as society’s main problem, capitalism’s defenders can point to it as an historically unsurpassed technology for this purpose.
“If, however, the main problem is to maintain the ability of the Earth to support an advanced civilization, and to ensure that the bounty of that civilization is shared out equitably, then the situation looks quite different. Since the system responds only to price signals, internalizing the externalities of ecological degradation entails an unceasing campaign of enclosures and commodification, in which every aspect of the natural world must be parceled up into pieces of private property, from carbon credits to fishing rights. And this same reliance on prices ensures that legitimacy of a person’s desires will always be equated with the money at their disposal, and the machine will reproduce a world that caters to the whims of rich countries and rich people. This is ever more of a problem when wage work is still the normal way of making a living, and yet less and less labor is actually required in production.” – Peter Frase, “Sowing Scarcity”
“A sensible old man is wise to hold on to a sensible old wife. The younger woman does not know that drama is wasted on an old man with cold mad eyes.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
“There may be cures to loneliness but marriage is not one of them.” – Christine Schutt, Prosperous Friends
“Most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.” — Elizabeth Wurzel, from The Cut
“As you get older, you start to realize that what actually holds relationships together is just liking the other person in the relationship, wanting them to be around, feeling like they increase the value of your time and that you, despite your evil cursed nature, can do the same for them.” — Jeanne Thornton (interviewed in Bookslut)
“It is possible to find fame at the wrong time. The gods get distracted and send their gifts too late or too soon. If fame comes when we still need it too much, that shining light of acceptance every artist dreams of and chases after, then fame can destroy us. If we still believe it is the answer to all of our needs, the proof that we are worthy creatures after all, it can burn us into position. Stunt us. Quickly turn us into plant matter. If we believe the light will give us all the sustenance we need, we shoot out roots into whatever shallow soil we may find ourselves in the moment we first feel its warmth, bending our bodies towards that radiant light. And bending ever further as it starts to find other targets.” — Jessa Crispin, Bookslut
“What sounds fresh today will stink rotten tomorrow. As a writer you must make a choice: try to catch up with the slang or create your own language that will be fresh and alive always, even after you pass.” – Mikhail Shishkin (interviewed by Jessa Crispin in “Sifting the Desperate Lies from the Truth”)
“If it is to remain something meaningful, philosophy does not have to limit itself to describing things, it has to make things happen, it has to effectuate a change. That’s why the locus of philosophy, the place where it dwells, is not the books, nor the academic papers, but the body of the philosopher. Philosophy does not exist properly unless it is embodied in a human being; in a sense, philosophy is word become flesh.” – Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy as an Art of Living” (emphases in original)
Litro, A Little London Literary Magazine published my story, “Lost Things and Missing Persons,” today in their Story Sunday. You can find it here if you like: http://www.litro.co.uk/
The editors changed a couple spellings to reflect British spelling. They also incited me to tighten up the ending of the story. Endings are probably my weakest spot as a writer. Several of my published stories needed to have their endings fixed after acceptance but before publication.
“The writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original; his only power is to combine the different kinds of writing, to oppose some by others, so as never to sustain himself by just one of them; if he wants to express himself, at least he should know that the internal ‘thing’ he claims to ‘translate’ is itself only a readymade dictionary whose words can be explained (defined) only by other words, and so on ad infinitum.” – Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (trans. Richard Howard)
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” – Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (trans. Richard Howard)
“Yttat” was published in the Fall 2012 issue of Mayday Magazine. I posted the link to that earlier this week; today I posted the story to the “Previously Published Stories” sidebar on this website.
I knew the story was going to be published by Mayday but lost track of when it was due to come out. It’s possible it was published several months ago. I didn’t know it had been published until this week.
It was published with typos. How did they get there? They were in the original submission Mayday accepted. Of course I thought I had adequately spell-checked and proofed the story before I sent it out. Of course I feel as any writer would feel upon making such mistakes (which I was not aware of until today).
The copy published here has had all its mistakes corrected–unless I missed any.
“You don’t become a great poet in your spare time.” – Jack Gilbert (interviewed by Gordon Lish in “Poetry Is the Art of Prejudice”)
“We are in danger from a glut of mediocrity of an extraordinary high calibre.” – Jack Gilbert (interviewed by Gordon Lish in “Poetry Is the Art of Prejudice”)
“In a work of art, there is a reason why everything happens. Sometimes the author doesn’t even know what the reason is, but some part of them has picked and chosen and arranged. And the art is getting all those demands right.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)
“You can’t just write by spilling the words on the page. You have to arrange them. And you have to arrange them not only in terms of one another, but with the sentences that came before, and the sentences you haven’t written yet. They have a demand.” – William H. Gass (interviewed by Greg Gerke in “Many-Layered Anger”)