“When they picked me up in Newark, my father’s eyes were inward and methodical. He did not show the love he’d talk about on the phone. I didn’t, either. All the emotion was in Daphne’s eyes, big and shimmering, with so much hope in them, I wanted to punch her. Sara looked at me and the looked away quickly. She was getting fat. She was disappearing in plain sight. Her look made sure I was okay, then went back to concentrating on whatever she was hiding. When she turned in profile, I saw her nose had been broken. “How’d that happen?” I whispered to Daphne. “I don’t know. I don’t know when it happened. I just noticed it one day, and she yelled, “I don’t wanna talk about it!’” Daphne made Sara’s voice like a monster’s, like a stupid, crazy monster.
We drove home through a whooshing tunnel of traffic. It was dark, with bright signs and lights flying by. Daphne sat up front and talked light and fast, turning her head to scatter her words in the backseat and out the window, into the whooshing tunnel. Quarters, halves, whole squares of light flew through the back window and ran over her soft hair. Even when she talked to me and Sara, I felt a strand of her attention stay on our dad, like she was holding his hand. Sara sat deep inside herself, her hands together in her lap, holding the secret of her broken nose. Her calm animal warmth filled the backseat.”
— Mary Gaitskill, Veronica [2005]
• 30 May 2012
“A long time ago, John loved me. I never loved him, but I used his friendship, and the using became so comfortable for both of us that we started really being friends. When I lost my looks and had to go on disability, John pitied me and then looked down on me, but that just got fit into the friendship, too. What can’t get fit in is that sometimes even now John looks at me and sees a beautiful girl in a ruined face. It’s broken, with age and pain coming through the cracks, but it’s there, and it pisses him off. It pisses me off, too. When we have these fights and he hears crying and hurt in my voice, it’s a different version of that ruined beauty, except it’s not something he can see, so he can’t think ruined or beauty. He just feels it, like sex when it’s disgusting but you want it anyway. Like his baby plays with the flabby arms, not knowing they’re ugly. I can’t have a baby and we’re not going to fuck, but it’s still in my voice—sex and warm arms mixed with hurt and ugliness, so he can’t separate them. When that happens, it doesn’t matter that I’m not beautiful or even pretty, and he is confused and unhappy.”
— Mary Gaitskill, Veronica [2005]
• 29 May 2012
“Photos describe the life of the diminished tribe. Life together alters my parents slowly beyond recognition. They dissolve into parental roles, gradually become those outside interveners in science fairs, paper routes, music lessons, white glue, and home bread molds. Once or twice, every few years, they stumble into an aha, the evidence of older, untouched civilizations. Their parents die; the world shifts alliances. They learn by reading, decades later, just what upheaval they have lived through. Through a series of partial differentials—infinitesimal, incremental, and interlocked decisions—they become the two people I knew.”
— Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma [1988]
• 28 May 2012
“To people from the Coasts, rural IL’s topography’s a nightmare, something to hunker down and speed through—the sky opaque, the dull crop-green constant, the land flat and dull and endless, a monotone for the eyes. For natives it’s different. For me, at least, it got creepy. By the time I left for college the area no longer seemed dull so much as empty, lonely. Middle-of-the-ocean lonely. You can go weeks without seeing a neighbor. It gets to you.”
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again [ Getting Away from Already Being Pretty Much Away from It All ] [1997]
• 27 May 2012
“Irony in postwar art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive—a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease. The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom.
So then how have irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominant mode of hip expression. It’s not a rhetorical mode that wears well. As Hyde (whom I pretty obviously like) puts it, “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300 page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.”
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again [E Unibus Pluram] [1997]
• 26 May 2012
“In one of the graduate workshops I went through, a certain gray eminence kept trying to convince us that a literary story or novel should always eschew “any feature which serves to date it” because “serious fiction must be Timeless.” When we protested that, in his own well-known work, characters moved about electrically lit rooms, drove cars, spoke not Anglo-Saxon but postwar English, and inhabited a North America already separated from Africa by continental drift, he impatiently amended his proscription to those explicit references that would date a story in the “frivolous Now.” When pressed for just what stuff evoked this F.N., he said of course he meant the “trendy mass-popular-media” reference. And here, at just this point, transgenerational discourse broke down. We looked at him blankly. We scratched our little heads. We didn’t get it. This guy and his students simply did not conceive the “serious” world the same way. His atuomobiled Timelessness and our MTV’d own were different.”
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again [E Unibus Pluram] [1997]
• 25 May 2012
“The apotheosis of the pop in postwar art marked a whole new marriage between High and Low culture. For the artistic viability of postmodernism was a direct consequence, again, not of any new facts about art, but of facts about the new importance of mass commercial culture. Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to. Nobody sees this as a good change. In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we’re all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.”
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again [E Unibus Pluram] [1997]
• 24 May 2012
“College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates.”
— David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again [Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley] [1997]
• 23 May 2012
“Then, occupying an entire wall, a huge space opened like a bright horizon; it consisted of three panels whose two lateral surfaces, on jointed hinges, allowed the young woman to see herself simultaneously in full face, in profile, and from behind, to enclose herself within her own image.”
— Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts, [trans. Richard Howard] [1890]
• 22 May 2012
“Men who like old-fashioned women, women with a soul, with a heart, with sensibility—you know, the women in old novels—can’t stand her, they get to loathe her so much they end up saying terrible things about her. Those of us who like something modern—well, we have to admit she’s wonderful, provided you don’t get involved. And that’s precisely what you do. Oh, nobody dies of it, you don’t even suffer too much; but it’s maddening that she can’t change. You’ll be one of us, if she wants you to, besides she’s already started…”
— Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts, [trans. Richard Howard] [1890]
• 21 May 2012
“Each of the regulars had attempted to seduce her; none, it was said, had succeeded. They admitted as much, confessed their failure with some surprise, for no man is willing, perhaps with some reason, to acknowledge the virtue of an unattached woman. The story went that early in their conjugal relations her husband had behaved with such disgusting brutality and made such unheard-of demands that she had been permanently “cured” of the love of men. There was a good deal of discussion about this likelihood among the inner circle, and the preponderant opinion was that a girl raised in the fantasy of future tenderness, in the expectation of a wondrous mystery imagined as indecent and faintly impure but distinguished for all that, must remain permanently scarred by a boorish disclosure of marital demands.
[…]
a psychologist specializing in the study of high society from which he drew portraits as ironic as they were recognizable, he claimed to know women and to analyze them with a unique and infallible penetration. Madame de Burne he classified among contemporary neurotics whose type he had anatomized in his interesting novel One of the Brood. He had been the first to describe this new race of women tormented by a sort of rational hysteria, solicited by a thousand contradictory longings which never manage to reach the level of real desires, disillusioned by everything without having attempted anything because of frustrations of the period—fashionable dilemmas, problems of the modern novel—and who, without ardor, without appetites, seem to combine the whims of a spoiled child with the dismissiveness of an old cynic.
He had failed, like the others, in his attempts at seduction.”
— Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts, [trans. Richard Howard] [1890]
• 17 May 2012
“You must tell me how to care for the man, instruct me in that stupid, repetitive checking. A care indifferent to the consequences. Compassion, unconcerned with whether it is effective or correct, a routine, like laundry or trash. You must give me your trick, or I will steal it.”
— Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma [1988]
• 5 May 2012
“I hoped each protest march would succeed and be the last. How did your fight against so obviously evil an enemy turn into ours, born in the best of intentions, one sunny day deciding it had no power to stop the next escalation short of resorting to the virtuous letter bomb?”
— Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma [1988]
• 4 May 2012
“Was it so impossible, these days, to experience anything, to look out the window and feel? […] Because the only things left outside the window were unknowably huge and removed, in which the old animal legs of progress, long out of control, lopped off by the scythe, still kicked as if galvanized in the harvested, empty fields.”
— Richard Powers, Prisoner’s Dilemma [1988]
• 3 May 2012
“Maybe God’s a dead bird now, a black bird’s yellow eye; they say He can occupy anything the way my aunt did when she and her mother—my mum’s mum—came for a visit and stayed and stayed, wearing out years like mats in an entry, until finally there were only the three of them (because I left too, for college and the war); there were just the two women to fight over their duties, over who would serve the arthritis my father served—Lord Knuckle-Under—my aunt not consciously perceiving she was angling for a husband who would leave her happily virgo intacta, angling for a household she’d not be obliged for, slowly pushing her sister out the door while not being blamed for it, occupying the house like an invading army, occupying the closets and the drawers and the bins; and my mother became odd mother out as a consequence, lost the war if not every battle, lost tray and teapot and pillowcases, until everything had gone over but her bottle, her gin to grin with, gin to bear it, a rent-free room, her own kitchen, and, along with that, wrapping papers to press flat, and hollow boxes to fill with hollow boxes, as she used to say, because come next Christmas you’ll be glad I saved this one back, saved that… But she never gave up any, gave up anything, but put you off if you asked her. For anything.”
— William H. Gass, The Tunnel [1995]
• 23 April 2012
