When you can’t even crawlWhen you can’t even crawl
“When you are no good at what you do, it does you no good to triumph at whatever you might come home to, either.” – Gary Lutz, “I Was in Kilter with Him, a Little”
Kick it, it’ll wiggleKick it, it’ll wiggle
“It is no wonder that criticism is a more conservative, more academically elite, more racially exclusive club than fiction writing itself. To be a critic in the manner of Virginia Woolf—the default position of the Anglo-American critic, from F.R. Leavis to Lionel Trilling to John Updike to Helen Vendler—requires more than a simple lack of humility; it requires a self-assurance that one is speaking from the center of things, that one is qualified to pass judgment on any aesthetic object that comes along. This kind of criticism isn’t interested in discussion or debate, except in a very circumscribed sense; what it seeks, above all, is a universal validation of the writer’s own subjectivity.” – Jess Row, “The Novel Is Not Dead”
Put it back where you found itPut it back where you found it
“Just because there is a place for something doesn’t automatically mean it belongs there.” – Gary Lutz, “Onesome”
The Congress is in sessionThe Congress is in session
“Most legislators have been men of limited abilities who have become leaders by chance, and have taken scarcely anything into account except their own whims and prejudices. They seem not even to have been aware of the grandeur and dignity of their task: they have passed the time making puerile regulations, which, it is true, have satisfied those without much intelligence, but have discredited them with men of sense.” — Montesquieu, “Letter 125,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
Plugging inPlugging in
“A story is a serving of palpated verbal material with feelings surging through it, and not just some caboodle of data about fabricated people and their antics. If a reader is asked again and again to travel the distance between a capital letter and a period, every sentence ought to have been routed through the writer’s nervous system and acquired charged particles of language along the way. A sentence ought to be offering a vista of the infinite.” – Gary Lutz (from Dylan Nice interview in Wag’s Revue)
Arms and the manArms and the man
“As far as arms go, I think they’re the one part of the body that tends to get short shrift in fiction, even though they’re the place where the trouble between people usually gets its start.” – Gary Lutz (from Justin Taylor interview in Bookslut)
Filling the drawersFilling the drawers
“A job does things to a person, deducts a person pretty brutally from life. Desks are terrible places, no matter how many wheels a chair might have. You can’t do much about how drawers fill up.” – Gary Lutz (from Justin Taylor interview in Bookslut)
The dance of the inchwordsThe dance of the inchwords
“Writing is rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off.” – Gary Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”
Out of plasmids are paragraphs madeOut of plasmids are paragraphs made
“Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.” – Gary Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”
Inhabitated is what the man saidInhabitated is what the man said
“The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language.” – Gary Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”
We call it fictionWe call it fiction
“A lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth.” – Gary Lutz, “This Is Nice of You”
You may rather be in PhiladelphiaYou may rather be in Philadelphia
“I have read descriptions of Paradise which would make any sensible person stop wanting to go there: according to some, the spirits of the blessed spend all their time playing the flute; others sentence them to walk about for ever; others again claim that while up there they dream about their mistresses down here, considering that a hundred million years is not too long for them to lose their taste for being love-sick.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 125,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
The unreasoned reasonThe unreasoned reason
“The urge to greet every answer with another question is one we find in children not because it’s childish but because it’s natural. Once you begin the search for knowledge, there is no obvious place to stop. The fact that the desire for omniscience cannot be met does not make it either foolish or pathological. Indeed, it is embodied in the principle of sufficient reason itself. The principle of sufficient reason expresses the belief that we can find a reason for everything the world presents. It is not an idea that we derive from the world, but one that we bring to it.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Ain’t no cure for heavenAin’t no cure for heaven
“Is the desire for transcendence a matter of psychology—in which case it’s advisable to seek a good cure? Or is the existence of that desire fundamental to any experience we could recognize as human?” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Or you could become a political activistOr you could become a political activist
“The wish to undo an evil that was done to you in the past is the very model of senseless obsession. If you cannot abandon it, you will be trapped in the sterile self-defeat of rage without revenge, pain without relief.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
The justification of consolationThe justification of consolation
“The difference between invoking collective good as a way of consoling us for individual suffering and invoking it as a way of justifying individual suffering is so fine that it is routinely ignored in political practice.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought (emphasis in original)
Dig deep enough, you might find itDig deep enough, you might find it
“To think that suffering can be redeemed by the demonstration that it’s necessary for future good is not only to be instrumentalist; it shows you know nothing about pain. Time itself does not heal; it only buries.” — Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Among other thingsAmong other things
“If our life were without end and free from pain, it would possibly not occur to anyone to ask why the world exists.” – Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (trans. Payne)
Careful, you’re gonna wear that thing outCareful, you’re gonna wear that thing out
“Does experience really show that pleasure becomes insipid if it lasts long—or is this just the sort of thing we say for comfort because it usually doesn’t?” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Is that the rock or the hard place?Is that the rock or the hard place?
“Being human means to strive to realize a world so perfect that its realization would undo us.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Hit ’em again! Hit ’em again! Harder! Harder!Hit ’em again! Hit ’em again! Harder! Harder!
“As an educational tool, pain has value nothing else can replace.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Put that in your pipe and smoke itPut that in your pipe and smoke it
“Freedom, if it’s universal freedom, must allow for the failure of others.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
What if I plug this into that…?What if I plug this into that…?
“Recognizing one’s limits seems a form of fair trade: if we withdraw some of our claims on the world, surely those remaining will be met. Yet the wish to determine the world can’t be coherently limited, for you cannot know which event will turn out to be not just another event, but one that will change your life.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Cosmic psychopathy is probably not the solutionCosmic psychopathy is probably not the solution
“To imagine a God who judges many of the forms of life He created to be sinful, then tortures us eternally for our brief participation in them, is hardly to imagine a solution to the problem of evil.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
Objects of a studyObjects of a study
“What if the world were created by a Being whose whole purpose was to cause us torment and illusion? God knows it sometimes looks that way.” – Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
You gotta scream without raising your voiceYou gotta scream without raising your voice
Rarely do I get personal on this website. Maybe a little in responding to the comments (which are almost exclusively from Averil Dean), but not out here on the main floor. The past few months have been a time of significant transition for me, which I don’t expect to mean jack to anyone else, but which I will use as an excuse to acknowledge by posting this:
E pluribus unum, peopleE pluribus unum, people
“If Americans seriously want the United States to continue to exist in something like its current form, they had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court of the United States, or if party loyalists try to win elections by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over with their ideas. The union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use House and Senate rules to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny. Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.” – Colin Woodard, American Nations
Pulling into NazarethPulling into Nazareth
No, he’s not talking about FacebookNo, he’s not talking about Facebook
“Everywhere I see people who talk continually about themselves. Their conversation is a mirror which always shows their own conceited faces. They will talk to you about the tiniest events in their lives, which they expect to be magnified in your eyes by the interest that they themselves take in them.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 50,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)
Busy little bees we beBusy little bees we be
“Those who enjoy learning are never idle.” – Montesquieu, “Letter 48,” Persian Letters (trans. Betts)