dear clusterflock
What portion of bodices in literature exist only to be torn, ripped, shredded, or otherwise rent asunder?
Sesame Street: Maurice Sendak “Bumble-Ardy” Animation
Inspired by Josh’s Maurice Sendak post (and by Casey’s link to the “Fresh Air” interview with Sendak).
from the comments
This kind of play always gets me excited. It’s easier for me to remember opening lines I like, though, because the ones I don’t like don’t stay with me. But there’s no denying that dislikes shape us too. Writing an opening sentence in a fiction is like walking up to a stranger on the street and saying excuse me…. In real encounters like this, all of human nature waits in that moment of turning to look at the person. We have secret lists of near-future possibilities waiting: panhandler? thief? long-lost friend? detective….? And we start considering the list before we actually even see the person. I like opening sentences that don’t let me feel comfortable about my list or my impulse to apply it. I like opening lines that say — something interesting is already happening. This power only comes when everything down to punctuation and single word choice is significantly managed.
Here’s a favorite opening sentence:
Hüzün in the ruins of defeat
«It is the failure to experience hüzün that leads him to feel it, he suffers because he has not suffered enough, and it is by following this logic to conclusion that Islamic culture has come to hold hüzün in high esteem.»—Orhan Pamuk
More on Istanbul reading Pamuk.
Flaubert in The Age of Twitter
After having set it aside years ago, I picked up Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet yesterday, and made the observation that Flaubert was the prefect narrator.
I have three favorites, who are very different: Flaubert, Eliot, and Proust.
I asked if he meant George Eliot, and mentioned not having read Proust.
Yeah, George Eliot in Middlemarch. She has all of Flaubert’s tools, but an infinitely greater capacity for sympathy.
I thought it would be easy to have a greater capacity for sympathy than Flaubert….
Tim said:
It’s hard if you can see, see through, & disintegrate like Flaubert & Eliot can.
Then:
Proust is… Well, nothing is like Proust. Imagine a blend of Flaubert, Kierkegaard, and Wilde.
A human being compelled to identify the nuances of small moments and big ideas in a withering yet charming style.
David Milch + HBO + William Faulkner = Television Heaven
David Milch is extending his relationship with HBO. Milch, whose latest series for the pay cable network, Luck, launches in January, has inked a new multi-year deal with HBO where he has been based for the past eight years. Under the new extension, in addition to executive producing Luck with Michael Mann, Milch will develop series and movies based on books by Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner William Falkner. Milch’s Redboard Prods has inked a deal with the literary estate of the iconic American writer who penned novels, short stories, a play and screenplays as well as poetry and essays. The pact covers all of the 19 novels and 125 short stories in the estate, as well as other works, with the exception of those currently optioned by other parties.
This is pretty much my sweet spot. Here’s a quick glimpse into Milch’s new HBO series, Luck:
Y ya no piensas, porque existen cosas más fuertes que la imaginación
Thomas Bernhard on Photography
«Every photograph—whoever took it, whoever is pictured in it—is a gross violation of human dignity, a monstrous falsification of nature, a base insult to humanity. [...] Photography is the greatest mockery in the world, the ultimate mockery of the world.»
More thoughts on photography & thinking, whilst reading Bernhard & Beckett in Dublin.
Elmore Leonard
has a sharp ear for dialogue and no mistake, but one of my favorite Leonard characters never utters a word.
The alligator, a ten-foot female weighing about five hundred pounds, opened her eyes and, after several minutes, moved her head from side to side, drowsy, disoriented, not knowing where she was, not catching the scent of anything familiar other than grass and dry soil. No water close by. She raised her head and hissed in the night, in the sound of insects. The wind rose and with it came a scent she recognized as something she liked that she had smelled before sometime in her life and had eaten. After several more minutes she began to move in a sluggish sort of way as though half asleep, not entirely upright on her legs, brushing the grass with her tail. The scent she liked became stronger as she moved and kept moving until her snout touched something she had never smelled before. She sniffed and air came through it into her nostrils, bringing a strong scent of the thing she liked. Now she pushed and whatever it was in front of her bent against her weight until it gave way and the alligator walked through it and felt the ground cold now, smooth and hard. The scent she liked was here, though not enough in one place that it would become the thing itself she could fasten her jaws on and tear or take into her mouth whole. She settled on the cool ground, feeling it become warm beneath her as she went to sleep.
Elmore Leonard. Maximum Bob. 1991.
quote out of (most of the) context
The real gem in an article about, mostly, virtual monkeys:
After a month the monkeys had produced five pages of the letter “S” and had broken the keyboard.
(thanks, Rich)
You can’t wish upon a star motherless with pubic hair stuck in your teeth.
“Uncreative Writing”
Kenneth Goldsmith in The Chronicle Review:
For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
Franz Kafka – Rock Opera
From one of the greatest animated series of all time.
from Dead Souls
This is what many readers will say, and they will reproach the author for the absurdities, or will call the poor officials fools, because a man is generous enough with the word ‘fool’ and is prepared to dish it out to his neighbour twenty times a day. It’s enough for you to have one stupid side to your character out of nine other good ones for you to be regarded as a fool. It’s easy for readers to pass judgment as, from their peaceful nook on high, from which the whole horizon lies open before them, they gaze upon everything that is going on below, where only objects close by are visible to a person living there. And recorded in the universal chronicle of mankind are many entire centuries which, it would seem, man has deleted and annulled as unnecessary.
More musing on Gogol in Sussex.
“They are tearing out part of the heart of Buenos Aires”
The interior of the historic Cafe Richmond was gutted a couple of weeks ago; a spot once frequented by Jorge Luis Borges and Graham Greene may be replaced by a Nike Store.
The plight of the Richmond has dominated local media since the cafe’s insides were gutted last Monday morning. Apparently to ensure it could not be returned to its former splendour even if the local government rules against the Nike shop, the Richmond was emptied of its historical interior, right down to its grandiosely comfortable Chesterfield wingback leather armchairs, in a 3am raid. The movers took the precaution of pulling down the security camera on the front of the building first.
“It’s against the law,” said Monica Capano of the city’s Heritage Preservation Commission. “The Richmond is one of the city’s emblematic landmarks.”
For a personal view: Oh, no: La Richmond by my friend Charlie.
DIVORCER by Gary Lutz & A MORTAL AFFECT by Vincent Standley
Gary Lutz’s new collection of “seven harrowing and hyperprecise short stories about ruinous relationships and their aftershocks,” Divorcer, is available now.
Deron has the honor of being the first one to order one.
And I forgot to mention here, but Vincent Standley (of 3rd bed fame) also has a new book I just recently published, called A Mortal Affect.
on reading The Atrocity Exhibition in Brighton
«There are one or two other bits and pieces, but together the inventory is an adequate picture of a woman, who could easily be reconstituted from it. In fact, such a list may well be more stimulating than the real thing. Now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.»—JG Ballard
More musings on Brighton, Ballard, Quadrophenia, Joy Division, presidential pubic hair, Beachy Head, mods, rockers, cars, crashes, 911, partying, sex & suicide.
The Decemberists – Calamity Song
The unembeddable music video (/grumble) recreates a section of DFW’s Infinite Jest. The NYT describes the scene:
Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.
All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”
That Inspired Extra Seventh
Scholars at the Hebrew University have spent the last 53 years studying variations on the ancient text in order to publish an authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible. Along the way, they made some interesting discoveries about the evolution of the holy book:
The Book of Jeremiah is now one-seventh longer than the one that appears in some of the 2,000-year-old manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some verses, including ones containing a prophecy about the seizure and return of Temple implements by Babylonian soldiers, appear to have been added after the events happened.
Interesting to see that the predictions of biblical scholars are now being verified – though, I imagine for many, these sorts of things won’t matter. Fun fact: the last member of the original team of scholars, who started with the project in 1958, died last year at age 90.
Sleepingfish X
I’ve started Sleepingfish back up (online) & posted some work by Vincent Standley (an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, A Mortal Affect, which is coming soon from Calamari Press) & a collage of sorts called Heartscald by Gary Lutz (whose new book, Divorcer, is also forthcoming from Calamari). Stay tuned.
My Favorite Katherine Anne Porter Story
when your love for goats goes too far…
more from Naples reading Raymond Queneau…
A fine book by Robert Coles
I just finished The Call of Stories:Teaching and the Moral Imagination, and I recommend it.
I love this passage:
At one point he (William Carlos Williams) reminded us that an important part of our lives would be spent “listening to people tell you their stories”; and in return, “they will want to hear your story of what their story means.”
tweet of the day
human pedigree
Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading through The Federalist Papers, which, as way leads to way, led him to this thought:
When you are a young intellectual black kid, you often find yourself in this desperate search for some sort of anti-Western tradition. That Saul Bellow quote–”Who is the Tolstoy of the Zululs”–really captures a lot of the dilemma for those of us looking for a “native” tradition. That search ends all kinds of ways for different people. But for us, I think it ended in the rejection of the premise, in the great Ralph Wiley riposte that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”
That line was sorcery for me. It found me a black pathologist, and set me free by revealing that my own search for something “native” was an implicit acceptance of the very racism that I sought to counter. The way out was not to find my own, but to reject the notion of anyone’s “own.” If you reject the very premise of racism–the idea skin color directly contributes to genius or sloth–then all of humanity becomes “native” to you. And so empowered, I could–out of my own individual identity–create my own intellectual and artistic pedigree, and I was free to have it extend from Biggie to to Wharton to Melville to Hayden.
(Thanks, Noah.)
