Category: Lit & Crit

Until they’re all that is?Until they’re all that is?

“The blemishes of the mind, like those of the face, increase by age.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

Always is of high recurring frequencyAlways is of high recurring frequency

“To understand matters rightly we should understand their details, and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

Be of good courageBe of good courage

“It is more disgraceful to distrust than to be deceived by our friends.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

And then they stand their groundAnd then they stand their ground

“It’s not crime and criminals that are destroying the world; it’s petty little emotions like envy, all these silly squabbles that end up with good people hating one another.” — Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya (trans. Schmidt)

Maybe, maybe notMaybe, maybe not

“The more I write, the more I think it’s not a matter of old forms and new forms: what’s important is to write without thinking about forms at all.  Just write and pour out whatever’s in your heart.” — Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (trans. Schmidt)

Ourobos was a scribeOurobos was a scribe

“Sometimes people get obsessive about things, ideas, like a man who spends all his time, let’s say, thinking about the moon, staring at the moon.  Well, I have a moon of my own.  All I think about day and night is having to write.  I have to write, I have to.  I finish one story, and then I have to write another one, and then a third, and after that a fourth.  I write without stopping, like an express train; it’s the only way I know how.  Now, I ask you, what’s so beautiful and bright about that?  It’s a stupid life!  Here I am talking to you, I’m all worked up, and still I can’t forget for a minute that I’ve got a story to finish.  I see a could, like that one, shaped like a piano.  And all I can think is: I have to use that, one of my characters has to see a cloud shaped like a piano.  I smell the heliotrope, I make a mental note: a sickly-sweet smell, a widow’s color, use it to describe a summer evening.  Every word you and I are saying right now, every sentence, I capture an lock up in the back of my brain.  Because someday I can use them!  When I finish working, I go out to the theater, or go fishing, to relax and get away from everything.  Do you think I can?  No, a great iron cannonball starts rolling around in my head, an idea for a new story, and I’m hooked, I can feel my desk reeling me in, and I have to go write and write.  All the time!  And I never get any rest.  I feel like I’m devouring my own life.” – Anton Chekhov, The Seagull (trans. Schmidt; emphasis in original)

War never endedWar never ended

“No sooner had the fighting of World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the United States seemed plunged once more into the anxiety that had prevailed while the guns were firing. A manipulated terror of godless Communism, coupled with an even greater one of nuclear war, made the 1950s a decade in which ordinary women and men feared to speak freely or act independently. Injected into this unhealthy atmosphere was a straitjacket demand for conformity to what was rapidly becoming corporate America. In a world that had just fought one of the bloodiest wars in history for the sake of the individual, millions were rushing into the kind of lockstep existence that by definition meant a forfeiture of inner life.” – Vivian Gornick, “The Cure for Loneliness”

Welcome to lifeWelcome to life

“Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears.” — Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Goldstein)

What’s a word that will make this interestingWhat’s a word that will make this interesting

“Most people, in daily currency, use words in what they think of as a fairly literal way. Consequently they are made uneasy if a writer does not use them similarly. They expect a novelist to know more words than they do, and to employ them with greater expertise than they can. Basically though, they expect a ‘story’ to begin at the beginning (wherever that may be). If the first four words aren’t literally ‘Once upon a time,’ the reader should be able to assume they’re taken for granted. The story should continue through exposition, climax, denouement, until on the last page the author can write ‘The End,’ and the reader may be confident there’s no more to come, that nothing that should have been said remains unsaid.

“The reader, then, expects to understand a work of fiction in the way he understands a conversation with his butcher, his bank manager, his wife, his colleagues at work, or even—in times of energy crisis—his candlestick maker or vendor. Or, pitching it a degree higher, he expects the fiction he reads to illuminate his own conversations with his hairdresser, his solicitor, his wife, his friends, even his Member of Parliament, because he knows that the author possesses ‘imagination’ while he probably does not.

“We are conditioned to read thousands of words every day. There are probably more of them in a single issue of the Times or the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph than there are in the average new novel; and we’re conditioned, because we lead such ‘busy’ lives, to read these words—whether in newspaper or book—as fast as we’re able to assimilate them. In practice, this means a general understanding of the surface meaning, the ‘factual’ content, rather than being persuaded, beguiled, influenced, stimulated and altered by the words. But the craft of even our best journalist is one thing, the art of our better novelists quite another. Or should be.” — Giles Gordon, “Fiction as Itself”

I blink and I am goneI blink and I am gone

“I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what writing is.” — Ingeborg Bachmann (quoted by John Taylor in “Reading Ingeborg Bachmann”)

The know-nothings no the worldThe know-nothings no the world

“Over the years I have found that many Americans—from readers to reviewers to critics to academics to publishers and of course to politicians—take pride in knowing almost nothing about the rest of the world. Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don’t they teach these literatures, they don’t read them.

“In any event, there is a kind of pride taken in how little we know about the rest of the world. And this is coupled with a belief that, if given the chance, all other people would want to be Americans, would want to enjoy our way of life, would want our political system, our economic system. And then of course we try to impose our tastes—for purely economic reasons—on the rest of the world. But at the end of the day, we are shocked and hurt and utterly bewildered at the fact that America is hated by many people and governments. And then we manage to turn even that into evidence of our superiority.

“I think that it’s of absolute importance that the literature and intellectual thought of the rest of the world be readily available in this country, and that these be valued and respected. Otherwise, we become this strange, isolated country that survives only because it possesses the military and economic dominance that it does, not because it is the epitome of civilization and freedom. There should be an immersion in this country’s schools of world literature.” – John O’Brien (Director, Dalkey Archive Press)

You can dislocate your shoulder doing thatYou can dislocate your shoulder doing that

“A foundation will be far more likely to fund third-rate poets reading to beleaguered schoolchildren than fund the publication of some of the most important foreign literary works. Foundations of course are forever patting themselves on their backs for being so diverse and multi-cultural, but they intend these sentiments to have a very limited application.” – John O’Brien (Director, Dalkey Archive Press)

Condensed confessionsCondensed confessions

“There are no gestures, words, or sighs that do not contain the sum of all the crimes that human beings have committed and commit.” – Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend (trans. Goldstein)

You get a discount on large ordersYou get a discount on large orders

“There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand different copies.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

Awaiting discovery just above the diaphragmAwaiting discovery just above the diaphragm

“If there is a pure love, exempt from the mixture of our other passions, it is that which is concealed at the bottom of the heart and of which even ourselves are ignorant.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

Righty-tighty, lefty-looseyRighty-tighty, lefty-loosey

“There are no accidents so unfortunate from which skillful men will not draw some advantage, nor so fortunate that foolish men will not turn them to their hurt.”  — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

Who you foolin’?Who you foolin’?

“The contempt of riches in philosophers was only a hidden desire to avenge their merit upon the injustice of fortune, by despising the very goods of which fortune had deprived them; it was a secret to guard themselves against the degradation of poverty, it was a back way by which to arrive at that distinction which they could not gain by riches.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

But they get them all lined up straightBut they get them all lined up straight

“Those who apply themselves too closely to little things often become incapable of great things.” — Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)

I shall not think about itI shall not think about it

“Most artists fail in what they try to do.  The reasons range from an encyclopedia of faults and mistakes to the myriad variants of bad luck.  The fact is too melancholy to tempt much contemplation.” – Peter Schjeldahl, “Flower Power”

And vice versaAnd vice versa

“To think continuously about changing the world is to spend your life looking at what is bad in it.  To be attached to the world is to be attached to the world as it is, and not for any reason, because reasons can always be countered.  To consider the world from first principles, to think about how well it would work if everything were different, is to be ready to throw away everything you know.  Radical idealism and a sense of limitless possibility are the brighter facets of absolute rejection.” — Larissa MacFarquhar, “Requiem for a Dream”

Shits happenShits happen

“A long passage of life together, and you think he’s the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he’s just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don’t know who he really is, he doesn’t know himself.  We are occasions.  We consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women.  We take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex.  We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone.  Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special.  We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love.  To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation.  Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have?  Time passes, one goes, another arrives.” – Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment (trans. Goldstein)

Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be kingPoor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king

“Where I found a living creature, there I found will to power; and even in the will of the servant I found the will to be master.  The will of the weaker persuades it to serve the stronger; its will wants to be master over those weaker still; this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo.  And as the lesser surrenders to the greater, that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so the greatest, too, surrenders and for the sake of power stakes–life.  The devotion of the greatest is to encounter risk and danger and play dice for death.  And where sacrifice and service and loving glances are, there too is will to be master.  There the weaker steals by secret paths into the castle and even into the heart of the more powerful–and steals the power.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)

Stepping outStepping out

“In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have really long legs.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)

Stick a fork in itStick a fork in it

“People often ask how I know when I’m done—not just by when I’ve come to the end, but in all the drafts and revisions and substitutions of one word for another how do I know there is no more to do?  When am I done?  I just know.  I’m lucky that way.  What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.” – John McPhee, “Structure”

You missed your exitYou missed your exit

“If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that.  You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.” – John McPhee, “Structure”

The contemptive labor of rebirthThe contemptive labor of rebirth

“What is the greatest thing you can experience?  It is the hour of the great contempt.  The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also.

“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my happiness?  It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease.  But my happiness should justify existence itself!’

“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my reason?  Does it long for knowledge as the lion for its food?  It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’

“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my virtue?  It has not yet driven me mad!  How tired I am of my good and my evil!  It is all poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’

“The hour when you say: ‘What good is my justice?  I do not see that I am fire and hot coals.  But the just man is fire and hot coals!’” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (trans. Hollingdale)

Come with meCome with me

“All writing is a journey. You take the reader by the hand and you lead him somewhere. And you want to make sure he never lets go of your hand.” – Roger Ebert (quoted in “Roger Ebert: A film critic with the soul of a poet,” by Rick Kogan)

Dance the blight awayDance the blight away

“I ask myself what my body really wants from music generally.  I believe it wants to have relief: so that all animal functions should be accelerated by means of light, bold, unfettered, self-assured rhythms; so that brazen, leaden life should be gilded by means of golden, good, tender harmonies.  My melancholy would fain rest its head in the hiding-places and abysses of perfection: for this reason I need music.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Common)

How do you plead?How do you plead?

“Although the most intelligent judges of the witches, and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchcraft, the guilt, nevertheless, was not there.  So it is with all guilt.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Common)

Lesser is whatLesser is what

“Of what account is a book that never carries us away beyond all books?”– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (trans. Common)