May 14, 2010
A wonderful image.
I dip myself in books like feet in the ocean, and when I emerge I am dripping with ideas as icy as the Atlantic.
-written by my friend Meera.
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April 07, 2010
Oh, I agree.
I would argue that if a book needs multiple typefaces, either the writer hasn’t done her job or the reader isn’t being trusted.
-Jessica Francis Kane, on Kingsolver's "Lacuna"
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January 12, 2010
Fiction: Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill
Our challenge book for August.
I liked it more than Dad did (he reports having to flog himself through it) but overall, as time has passed, it didn't leave that much of an impression. It felt like there was an awful lot of that male midlife meandering (the way Philip Roth and David Hodges novels are getting to be)... The modern stuff was a lot sharper, the drooling down memory lane stuff (moonings over mama and cricket) bored us both. Dude's wife was a totally infuriating character; that relationship was nearly inexplicable. We both liked Chuck but his role is weirdly peripheral and pivotal at the same time.
It was a decent enough book but we have no idea why it got the hype it did. I guess the 9/11 references were probably what brought it to people's attention. Eh.
This is what I've learned on the subject of women: never delay. The more quickly you act, the greater the chance of success.
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As one does.
"It's funny," said Daniel. "A few weeks ago, I'd never have expected to be wrapping a werewolf in a quilt and giving her a hot water bottle. Now it's almost second nature."
I am reading Lonely Werewolf Girl by Martin Millar and it is fantastic.
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January 04, 2010
Fiction: This Is Where I Leave You, by Jonathan Tropper
Have looked at it in the bookstore a few times so picked it up when I saw it at the library the other day.
Three brothers, sister, insane mother all in different stages of romantic mess-ups sit shiva for their dad for a week and contretemps ensue.
Occasionally a bit crass but entertaining. Both funny and sad in parts, I liked the main character and I really loved Penny.
At some point you lose sight of your actual parents; you just see a basketful of history and unresolved issues. ...
Penny's honesty has always been like nudity in an action movie: gratuitous but no less welcome for it. ...
You can't let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it's perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people's throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.
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July 17, 2009
Repeating myself.
Found myself flipping through a book before popping it in the mail to someone (it's on its way, AFM!) and was about to post this quote until I did a search and realized I already posted it two years ago, whoops. [From a book I ultimately didn't love but does have some nice writing.] Doesn't seem like it was two years ago I read this but there you go.
Instead, here's another:
Falling in love isn't something that you decide to do, anymore than you decide on the weather. It descends on you, like a hurricane.
--from "The Post-Birthday World" by Lionel Shriver.
What that reminds me of is the Oracle talking to Neo in The Matrix: ...being the one is just like being in love. Nobody can tell you you're in love, you just know it, through and through. Balls to bones.
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July 08, 2009
Meera on Metamorphosis.
I am not like the ferns. I have spent my thirty years on changes and modifications, constantly refashioning my own shapes, mechanisms, and systems in the hope that there is, after all, a better answer. I have been shy as often as I have been bold; I have worn the crown of ambition as often as the mask of nonchalance; I have copied friends and enemies, believing their shapes an improvement over my own. I have been myself a dozen different ways, and still never found the right one. I am trying out a new incarnation right now, in fact—fingers crossed that this time I know what I’m doing—if only you could see me shift.
-from On the Persistence of Ferns. [emphasis added by moi. WOW.]
This girl, she can write.
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June 25, 2009
I know the feelin'.
"It's funny," she said, narrowing her eyes. "There are things you're just positive will happen to you. Then there's that second when you realize, Jesus Christ. Maybe they won't."
-from "Passing the Hat" by Jennifer Egan (short story published in "Emerald City" collection).
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June 06, 2009
Compromise vs Development
"Compromise, eh? Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like my Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent."
"Maybe that's just developing as a person, Sarah."
I sighed and looked out at Little Bee.
"Well," I said. "Maybe this is a developing world."
-from "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave
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June 03, 2009
Truth.
“My gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
--Vida Winter, The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
[emphasis added]
found here.
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March 30, 2009
Snappy Is as Snappy Does.
I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won't dance to them, she can't expect her staff to. I don't float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don't close an issue in Pumas.
-from "Little Bee" by Chris Cleave, my new read that is totally sucking me in, in a dangerous "may not accomplish anything else this week" way.
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Heh (in more ways than one).
There was a joke he liked. Goes something like this. Two guys meet at the Pearly Gates and get talking. One says to the other: 'How did you die?'
'I froze to death,' he says.
'What did it feel like?' says the first one.
'Well, it's uncomfortable at first,' says the second. 'You shiver, you get the shakes, there's pain in your fingers and toes, it's cold as hell, but then it becomes relaxing and you just go numb and fall asleep and that's it. What about you? How did you die?'
'I had a heart attack. See, I knew my wife was cheating on me, so I came home early one day, found her in bed, reading. Middle of the afternoon. How suspicious is that? So I ran round the whole house looking for the guy she was fucking. Down to the basement. No one there. Up to the second floor. No one there. Then I ran fast as I could to the attic, I knew he had to be hiding somewhere. Just as I got there - boom. I had a heart attack, and here I am.'
The second man shakes his head.
'That's so ironic,' he says.
'What do you mean?'
'If only you'd stopped to look in the freezer, we'd both be alive.'
-from "Circle of the Dead," by Ingrid Black
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March 13, 2009
Wordplay
Pleased to meet you meat to please you
said the butcher's sign in the window in the village.
--from "Domestic Violence" (collected in Domestic Violence) by Eavan Boland.
Shyla Bruno was doing a review of Philip Roth's newest book, and Craig said, "You going with 'Goodbye, Portnoy' for the head?"
"No - listen to this - Allen came up with 'The Gripes of Roth.' "
Craig waited a moment and then issued one of his patented, arch, stagey chuckles. "Bingo," he said.
--from "City of Refuge" by Tom Piazza, which I bought after I read this (I myself am NOT much of a Lahiri fan) and am sooo enjoying. Enjoying in a tearful, maybe won't read in public because I might start bawlin', kind-of way.
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March 09, 2009
Both Ways.
If you're going to play what-if -- which, by the way, is a huge waste of time and energy, not to mention an act of supreme, center-of-the-universe narcissism -- you have to play it both ways. If you're going to imagine yourself as an accidental victim, you have to give yourself equal time as an unwitting hero.
-"Flesh and Bone" by Jefferson Bass.
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March 02, 2009
Heh.
I could have asked him what was wrong, pointed out the obvious, but why do that? That might lead to an open, frank discussion about our future, and who wants that with a man you're about to marry?
-Clare O'Donohue "The Lover's Knot.
Or with any man, really.
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December 28, 2008
Fiction: The Conversations at Curlow Creek, by David Malouf
I've read and enjoyed quite a bit of Malouf in the last several years and this book was no exception. An officer talking to a convict in the wilds of Australia, feeling a possible connection to something from his past, and reminiscing on the choices he's made, and his childhood loves, and how his life has taken him away from them, and opportunities to find them again. A quiet slim book that packs quite a punch.
...he had long since given up the belief that the forces that move us have anything to do either with nature or reason, or that the heart moves in anything but the most crooked way.
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July 08, 2008
Is this true?
Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When they were lying. This girl was glancing right so much she was in danger of getting whiplash.
-Lee Child "Nothing to Lose"
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Dads will always set you straight.
In a story, where an environmentally aware son (not young, but still a son) is "borrowing" his dad's welding equipment to weld shut the pipes of a company dumping into a waterway.
'They're pouring emission straight into the water down there, from two pipes hanging out over the bank.'
He tests the chisel, nodding slowly as he works out what I want his welding gear for. 'They're pouring human shit straight into the ocean, too,' he says, pinning me with a glance, 'but I haven't noticed you welding your arse shut.'
-Cate Kennedy "Direct Action" (collected in "Dark Roots")
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May 22, 2008
Quote of the Day
There is a fine line between a coffee break and a crack house.
-Harlan Coben "One False Move"
In somewhat related news, if you normally order a "tall" but then one day by accident you order a "grand" because you can't remember what the stupid word they substitute for "small" is, well you may have a problem the next however many days later it is when you without realizing it order a "tall" again and then it comes and it's gone in two sips and you think what the hell happened to my drink, why was it so SMALL. You know what they say: once you go [...in this case "grand"]...
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February 27, 2008
Quoted / Slammed.
Awesome "put them in their place" quotes from Nick Marino's piece on "Thriller"/Michael Jackson in Paste #40:
Not long ago I caught a concert by teenaged R&B star Chris Brown, who is sort of a less charismatic verson of Usher, who is himself a less charismatic version fo Michael Jackson.
Today we're left with Chris Brown, Usher and Justin Timberlake, whose most famous stage move to date involved ripping the bodice of Michael Jackson's sister.
[Underlines = emphasis de moi]
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December 10, 2007
(Fictional?) Memoir: "The Life of Hunger" by Amelie Nothomb
An somewhat philosophical memoir of hunger, being hungry, (at some points, actually anorexic), but also of being sated, in all of their various meanings: not just physically, but also emotionally, intellectually, etc. Also a book about "home", going there, leaving, about living places that aren't that. A book about feeling lost and alone even within the midst of your own family, let alone a strange city, school, country etc.
Very good. A very slim, quick read. But weighty in thought.
I thought I knew the meaning of the word 'big'. You have to have driven across the United States before you can have any idea of what that means: whole days of straight road without seeing a single human being.
My parents were forty, the age at which you pull up your sleeves and put your responsibility to the test of work. [Really? Uh oh! Danger ahead!]
Is it not enough to have some very good chocolate in your mouth, not only to believe in God, but also to feel that one is in his presence? God isn't chocolate, he's the encounter between chocolate and a palate capable of appreciating it.
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December 04, 2007
Self-fulfilling prophecies.
"I used to write really shitty, gloomy songs about how everything sucked," he says, "but I realized that everything sucked because I wrote those songs. My music controlled me much more than I controlled my music."
--Jens Lekman, as interviewed by Austin L. Ray, in Paste #37.
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No present without the past.
I'd like to say that I've lived from this moment on without regret, but what makes a life worth living are the small calamities and the train wrecks we live through; a scar becomes a story of endurance.
--Tod Goldberg, from the story "Myths of Our Time" in the collection "Simplify"
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November 06, 2007
What gets lost.
A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't. The stories don't fit back together, and it's the end of stories, those devices we carry like shells and shields and blinkers and occasionally maps and compasses. The people close to you become mirrors and journals in which you record your history, the instruments that help you know yourself and remember yourself, and you do the same for them. When they vanish so does the use, the appreciation, the understanding of those small anecdotes, catchphrases, jokes: they become a book slammed shut or burnt.
-Rebecca Solnit "A Field Guide to Getting Lost"
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Risk Taking.
The young live absolutely in the present, but a present of drama and recklessness, of acting on urges and running with the pack. They bring the fearlessness of children to acts with adult consequences, and when something goes wrong they experience the shame or the pain as an eternal present too. Adulthood is made up of a prudent anticipation and a philosophical memory that make you navigate more slowly and steadily. But fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.
-Rebecca Solnit "A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
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September 26, 2007
Caught ya!
She thought about that word "capture," how it put a writer on par with a fur trapper or big-game hunter, and how it implied that stories were whole and roaming around loose in the world, and a writer's job was to catch them. Except of course that a writer didn't kill what she caught, didn't stuff it and hang it on a wall; the point was to keep the stories alive. She felt skeptical about this way of thinking of writing, she decided, but was glad to have considered it.
--Maria de los Santos, "Love Walked In"
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September 25, 2007
Unbelievable yet, sad to say, actually believable.
A 2006 poll showed that atheists are the group most feared by the public as a threat to the American way of life ("below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians," according to the study's press release.
--Paste Magazine, issue #34, in the article on Greg Graffin of Bad Religion.
The people who voted that way in that poll? They're the ones that scare me!!!!!!!!!!!
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July 08, 2007
Fantasy/Mysery: "Blood Bound" by Patricia Briggs
Second in the series (#1 here).
Still involved with the werewolves but the mystery here centers around the local vampires and their seethe. Very spooky stuff!
Some neat religious imagery with Mercy insisting on wearing a lamb necklace instead of a cross: "I don't wear a cross. As a child, I'd had a bad experience with one. Besides, a crucifix was the instrument of Our Lord's death -- I don't know why people think a torture device should be a symbol of Christ. Christ was a willing sacrifice, a lamb, not a cross for us to hang ourselves on; or at least that's my interpretation."
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June 05, 2007
Definition #3 really does it for me.
Brocha holds the braided candle, and Isaac says the prayer marking the end of Shabbat. After he says the last words, Hamavdil ben kodesh lihol, Nina asks, "What do you think is the best translation for that?"
"Blessed be he who separates the holy from the profane," Isaac says.
"The sacred from the secular," puts in Elizabeth.
"The transcendent moment from the workaday world," suggests old Rabbi Sobel in his quaverying voice.
"Mm." they pause around the smoking candle.
--from "Kaaterskill Falls" by Allegra Goodman
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June 02, 2007
Ponder your responses well.
..."I'm not like her, am I?"
This question is like the cowboy in Mulholland Drive, who you see again one time if you do good and two times if you do bad. Answer the question wisely, and you won't have to hear it again for another year. Try to give a clever answer, and you have bigger immediate problems than the humidity index.
--from "Love Is a Mix Tape" by Rob Sheffield.
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No pain, no gain?
It's the same with people who say, "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn't kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn't kill you makes you incredibly annoying.
--from "Love Is a Mix Tape" by Rob Sheffield
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May 14, 2007
Boiling it all down.
He gets up. "I'm sorry for barging in here. This isn't the right place for me."
He's right. I fuck old men and become obsessed with curses and rare books. He needs someone more sensible than me to talk to.
--from "The End of Mr. Y" by Scarlett Thomas
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A testimony for doubt...
by one who is proven wrong in other aspects in the end. So is he wrong about this?
Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breathe life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded, not of thinking, rational men.
--"Chainfire" by Terry Goodkind
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Boys will be boys.
Wright kept talking. "For me [Stephen] King is Emily Dickinson with balls, Emily Dickinson if she got the hell out of her house and lived in the real world."
Horowitz leaned toward Adi. "I think the philosophers of old got it wrong. The big question in life is not how much pain and suffering can we endure, but how much happiness can we bear. That's the real existential question for post-industrial, agnostic man. Things are going to get better for us. How many cruises can you take in retirement? How many all-you-can-eat buffets can you visit? These are the real issues facing us!"
--both from "Death of a Writer" by Michael Collins.
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April 10, 2007
It's a thin line.
Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they'd get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result.
--from "Winter's Bone" by Daniel Woodrell. Best book I've read so far this year.
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When your body leads and your heart follows, and your mind thinks "WTF??"
Since she had always considered herself a woman with broad interests, concern for world affairs, deep affections for a range of friends, and a driving ambition to pursue her own career, the discovery that apparently all she'd really wanted all along was to get laid by a particular snooker player was a little bit grim.
--from "The Post-Birthday World" by Lionel Shriver.
Posted by Duff at 10:27 AM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes
March 12, 2007
Keys Without Doors.
The seat had been moulded to the contours of another body and it felt strange underneath him. The key was in the ignition with a metal loop hanging from it from which depended in turn three other keys to doors he would never go through.
--from "The Quarry" by Damon Galgut.
I really like the image of keys that open doors that he will never go through; keys that will never again be used. Do keys with no doors (a.k.a. "purpose") cease to be "keys" and become something else?
Posted by Duff at 07:21 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes
March 11, 2007
Proust on...
...the Weapon of Silence:
It has been said that silence is a powerful weapon; in a quite different sense it has a terrible power when wielded by those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart, and what greater barrier is there than silence? It has been said too that silence is torture, capable of driving the man condemned to it in a prison cell to madness. But what even greater torture it is, greater than having to keep silent, to endure the silence of the person one loves!
...Physical Illness:
It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with 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 manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.
--from "The Guermantes Way" as translated by Mark Treharne in the new Penguin edition
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December 26, 2006
KCRW's Bookworm: Zadie Smith 11/9
Zadie Smith's become sort of the young female version of Phillip Roth: for a while there it was really (REALLY) popular to hate her and her books, or to talk about how you just didn't get the hype.
That was during her first two books ("White Teeth" and "The Autograph Man"), BOTH of which I LOVED. Then her third book "On Beauty" came out and suddenly all the Zadie haters faded away and she became the critics' darling. Sadly, I did not like that book very much. It was not nearly in the same league as the first two, in my opinion, and I certainly didn't understand the hype this time around.
So if you're like me, put aside the fact that On Beauty is one of the primary topics of this podcast, because once you get past that, it was a really great conversation. Much deeper/more insightful than many author chats I've read/listened to.
Smith said this book was intended to be a traditional English novel / a tribute to her idols/elders, that she hadn't done before. She commented that she's always told by people "your books are about the search for identity" and she always wants to say "yes, the realization that it's a POINTLESS search for identity."
They talked about David Foster Wallace and how you have to get beneath the surface. That it's very easy for critics/readers to dismiss him due to his smart-aleck, wise-ass exterior, but that what's he's really trying to figure out is what truth is.
She talked about how the new modern model of a reader is that of a film watcher "here I am, entertain me" whereas the classical model of a reader (which is mostly lost at this point) was that of an amateur musician, sitting down in front of a piece of music you don't know, that may have elements your skills will not let you comprehend, yet putting forth the effort, using all your skills to try and learn it and get to know it and the more you give, the more you will get back. I agree, and that evolution into stupidity is a real loss we've suffered (and continue to) as this world has evolved.
As Silverblatt replied: "This was once known: the reading of novels and poetry was instruction in how to be human."
She also talked about how to be a good writer is more than just craft; you must educate your consciousness. When you write a bad book, it's not just that the book was bad, but that you were a bad author of it, that you failed in your writing.
She disputes the (in her words) "currently very popular" idea that the whole point of life is to "find out who you are." And said that the idea behind On Beauty was that it was full of people terrified of becoming less of who they are by pursuing what's most meaningful to them.
Posted by Duff at 06:50 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes, Podcasts
November 27, 2006
Memphis Liner Notes.
This came wrapped around my copy of "A Good Day Sailing" and I love it:
This record is a five-track EP by a group called Memphis. But they aren't really a group, more of an idea or a thought you might have when you're at work watching the rain fall and wondering what you might have been. No forget that. That's not Memphis; Memphis is a place, a kind of haze, a southern place maybe but not the city itself, somewhere further south where you are a stranger and the evenings are endless. No, that's romance. That's a lie. Memphis is music to fall asleep to and to wake up to and to break up to. Memphis is music for the masses though you're one of the few who will ever read this. Memphis is me and my friend Chris who I love and it's an attempt to reflect beauty back into the world, and it's a pop song. Memphis is a pop song...or two.
Posted by Duff at 08:31 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Lit Quotes, Tunes
November 17, 2006
I've got to get Jess Walter's latest onto my reading pile.
Even if not for all the fabulous reviews it (The Zero) is getting, for the fact that he posted this hilarious quote on the Powell's guest author blog:
To me, golf is like karaoke: the only thing more pathetic than being bad at it is being good at it.
That paragraph also started with this hilarity: I once broke my collarbone in a golf tournament. Technically, I suppose, the injury was more of a gin-drinking accident than a golf accident, but it still says a lot about my relationship to the game that it's my fondest golf memory.
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October 13, 2006
Like Synesthesia, but Tactile-Based Rather than Color.
"What could be more dry than a statistic? More indifferent than a number? To be treated like a number, in common parlance, is to become an entirely replaceable part -- an object lesson in depersonalization."
Two is solid and tingly, like the Liberty Bell....Eight is rough and hard like a stone, and 10 is smooth like a pebble on the beach. Nine...seems ready not only to ring but to shatter and burst like a fruit. [quoting Richard Friedberg]
--"Mind Over Matter, Conversations with the Cosmos", by K.C. Cole.
Posted by Duff at 08:13 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes
So Beautiful It Hurts.
But you know what really broke my heart? When you described yourself to me to make sure. Because of how you somehow diminished yourself into one single sentence, in parentheses on top of that ("Quite tall, long curly messy hair, glasses..."). If you really feel yourself to be in parentheses -- at least let me squeeze into them as well and let the whole world remain outside. Let the world only be the element outside the parentheses that will multiply us on the inside.
--from "Be My Knife" by David Grossman.
Yearning, and bittersweet, and oh so very, very sexy. It's almost hard to read it in public.
Posted by Duff at 09:05 AM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes
October 11, 2006
Jenny Davidson on Cormac McCarthy.
My dad and I didn't like him either. But I can guarantee you neither one of us is going to give him another read.
Posted by Duff at 05:54 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Books, Lit Quotes
September 13, 2006
Alcohol. Yum.
Thomas knew he was drinking too much but could see no good reason to quit or slow down. Alcohol was an old and valued friend, most reliable, always ready to jog your elbow, recollecting hidden memories, specifically the pitch and swing of actual language, language as it was spoken...
Florette was sympathetic toward the bored or the lonely or the melancholic, but not toward drinking as a solution. He tried to explain to her that drinking usually increased loneliness or melancholy but was a specific against boredom because alcohol cast a cockeyed light on your surroundings. That which was dull became vivid. That which was static became a whirlwind. Grief became hilarity because the world was skewed.
--from Forgetfulness, by Ward Just.
Posted by Duff at 09:36 AM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Lit Quotes
September 07, 2006
He's thinking about Antarctica, and Texas. I'm thinking about Life.
...we drive for fifteen minutes and see nothing but rock and brush. The brush looks dead; Ms. Ngyuen informs me that it comes alive in the spring. Like Baffin Island, I imagine, the living things live their whole lives in that narrow time when conditions are favorable, and all the rest of the time they wait.
--as thought by the title character of China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh.
Posted by Duff at 07:46 AM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under Lit Quotes
July 31, 2006
"Reminder" of the Day.
Revolution gives ordinary people the false belief that they can remake not just themselves, their country, and the whole wide world but human nature itself. That such grand designs always fail, that human nature is immutable, that everyone's idea of perfection is different -- these truths are all for a time forgotten.
--Mark Bowden "Guests of the Ayatollah"
Posted by Duff at 01:28 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under " " of the XXX., Books, Lit Quotes
May 15, 2006
A quote for this dreary Monday.
Some measure of generality must be present in any high-class theorem, but too much tends inevitably to inspidity. 'Everything is what it is, and not another thing', and the differences between things are quite as interesting as their resemblances. We do not choose our friends because they embody all the pleasant qualities of humanity, but because they are the people they are. And so in mathematics; a property common to too many objects can hardly be very exciting, and mathematical ideas also become dim unless they have lenty of individuality.
--GH Hardy "A Mathematician's Apology"
Posted by Duff at 03:02 PM | E-Mail | Comments (0) | Permalink | filed under " " of the XXX., Books, Lit Quotes
