Vagueness and procrastination are ever a comfort to the frail in spirit.
– John Updike, IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES
Category Archives: books
untitled post
“I don’t fuck around with titles. I come up with them immediately and then don’t ever think about changing them.”
don’t forget to bring a towel
“In his senior year of high school, he began carrying a towel around with him to wipe away the perspiration from anxiety attacks, and a tennis racquet, so that no one commented on the towel.”
– D.T. Max on David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker (via Evan)
too much to be known
“Certum est,” I murmured, “quia impossibile est.”
“What’s that?” the young man asked. He did not know Latin. But, then, he might say, those who know Latin do not know the language of computers. We all know, relatively, less and less, in this world where there is too much to be known, and too little hope of its adding up to anything.
” ‘It is certain,’ I translated, ” ‘because it is impossible.’ Tertullian.”‘
– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION. I haven’t been able to get myself to return this book to the library. It’s too good.
the exact opposite
“One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me — and especially if they are warning me — “Don’t go there,” “Don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there” and “do that.” It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.”
– Haruki Murakami’s speech on accepting the Jerusalem Prize. Salon, via AJ.
“It was the New York Times that broke his heart.”
“The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite – those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.”
-Timothy Egan, “Stegner’s Complaint,” in his Outposts blog. No, there’s no class on Stegner at Stanford.
into the pit
“…there are so few things, which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.”
– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION
impulse: updike
“I could not in good faith blame her: our emotions change, and the chemistry of our impulses with them.”
– John Updike, ROGER’S VERSION
a mere expression of something
“You and I,” said Ames – “what are we? We don’t know where we came from nor where we are going to. Tomorrow you might die and dissolve and I could search high and low in all the winds and waters and not find you. Here you are a mere expression of something – you know not what. It so happens that you have the power to act. That is no credit to you. You might not have had it. It isn’t an excuse for either pride or self-glorification. You paid nothing to get it. But now that you have it, you must do something with it.”
He paused again.
“What must I do?” said Carrie.”
“Every person according to his light,” said Ames. “You must help the world express itself. Use will make your powers endure.”
– Theodore Dreiser, SISTER CARRIE
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral
I have often thought but never written on this blog that dating, relationships, and sex are the feminine-thematic literary equivalent of war and fighting.
I was reminded of this in December, while watching FOUR CHRISTMASES with Eileen. Watching Vince Vaughn get beat up by his brothers was juxtaposed with watching Reese Witherspoon get female-relationship-attacked by her sisters. Punching someone in the gut was the same as asking “When are you getting married?” Stereotypes, yes, but more than that. Models. Themes. Some truth.
Sometimes this thought train leads me to think that PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is the feminine version of, I don’t know, THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK. As you moved forward in the history of the novel, you could set up things like THE RADETSKY MARCH alongside THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. You could contrast, historically, the depiction of sex to the depiction of violence. Someone’s probably already done this. What would you put up against THE NAKED AND THE DEAD?
Sometimes the idea leads me to think that there ought to be sex choreographers as well as fight choreographers, for the New Theater.
Mostly I use it to remind myself that I am, as a writer, more of a woman than I sometimes want to admit. I have never written about a fight. I’ve never even been in a fight. I have written, a lot, about relationships, and as I write more, that subject matter keeps coming to the forefront. There may be no avoiding it.
Dara Weinberg 