Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade—demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.
Matt Hackett
Roving engineer
Matt Hackett
For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not — Heaven help us — all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to call, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one’s name) meaning by that, Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another. Hence, the astonishing changes we see in our friends. But it is not altogether plain sailing, either, for though one may say, as Orlando said (being out in the country and needing another self presumably) Orlando? still the Orlando she needs may not come; these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine — and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him — and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.
Yet I would go home. I would have supper in Arlington and my brother and sister would turn as I entered the room oh it’s you. I would throw myself down on the couch and I would sing along with my favorite songs. I would close my eyes. I would sing along. Maybe I would go to graduate school. I would get drunk this weekend, meet someone cute, probably make out. I loved to kiss. I loved to get lost in a drunk embrace. Somebody else, to feel I could turn into that, get lost in a moment of not caring. A woman would kiss me one day. I even felt it. Perhaps I would not always live in Boston. I would travel. My life would change. All the details of my life were in exact order and yet I was tumbling in them—out of order like a tremendous wave had hit me and I was thrown off the ship and I awoke or dreaming, or dead I knew not—no I couldn’t speak.
Inferno, Eileen Myles
Such a perfect rendering of that just-post-collegiate feeling.
She loved him. She was helpless before the whole emotional project of him. But it didn’t preclude hating him and everything around him, which included herself, the sound of her own voice—and the sound of his, which was worse. The portraits of hell never ceased and sometimes were done up in raucous, gilded frames to console. Romantic hope: From where did women get it? Certainly not from men, who were walking caveat emptors.
The wind blowing across the British Isles was odorous with fear of asylum seekers, infecting everybody with the panic of impending doom, and so articles were written and read, simply and stridently, as though the writers lived in a world in which the present was unconnected to the past, and they had never considered this to be the normal course of history: the influx into Britain of black and brown people from countries created by Britain. … It had to be comforting, this denial of history.
Some especially resonant James Baldwin word pairings in order of appearance
- sour buzzing
- wet complicity
- helpless judgement
- quicksilver tension
- relentless vacuity
- dripping limbo
- defensive bohemia
- boyish bed
- arrogant lust
I just finished a borrowed copy of Another Country. Resisting the urge to underline something on every third page in a book that wasn’t mine, I made this short list of especially crisp phrases.
And it’s more than a pair, but still:
- “the great livid scar of Forty-second Street”
Very excited to have my hands on the first installment of Matthew Allard (aka lifeserial)’s story subscription series, Pops and Clicks.
I’d been living in lovely, provincial San Francisco and had moved to Berlin because I’d felt I was missing out on something exciting, and now I was on the brink of leaving lively, provisional Berlin because I was afraid I was missing out on something serious.
What if novelists and poets were to get a salary, the wage of a skilled worker? … But who decides who qualifies as a writer? Does it take one sonnet? Of what quality? Ten novels? 50,000 readers? Ten, but the right readers? God knows we shouldn’t trust the state to make that kind of decision. So we should democratise that boisterous debate, as widely and vigorously as possible. … Mistakes will be made, sure, but will they really be worse than the philistine thuggery of the market?
China Miéville: the future of the novel | Books | guardian.co.uk
A messy argument of the “future of the book” genre, but worth the read.
(Source: Guardian)
Despite his extremely ill-proportioned physique, Swinburne dreamt from early youth, and particularly after reading newspaper accounts of the charge at Balaclava, of joining a cavalry regiment and losing his life as a beau sabreur in some equally senseless battle. Even when he was a student at Oxford, this vision outshone any other conception he might have of his own future; and only when all hope of dying a hero’s death was gone, thanks to his underdeveloped body, did he devote himself unreservedly to literature and thus, perhaps, to a no less radical form of self-destruction.
