Dog-eared 20

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Caine Mutiny

“What makes you think he’d be good for the Caine case?”

“Well, sir, Maryk is a dead pigeon, the way I see it, and Barney goes for that kind of case.” Challee paused. “I guess you’d call him odd in a way. Very odd. I’m used to him. He’s from Albuquerque. Barney is interested as hell in the Indians. You might say he’s nuts on the subject. He specialized in Indian cases after getting out of law school—won a lot of them, too. He was working up a pretty good general practice in Washington, before he joined up—”

“What was he, ROTC?”

“No. V7, then switched to air.”

Breakstone pulled at his nose with thumb and forefinger for several seconds. “Sounds like he might be pinko.”

Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny, pages 349–50.

Dog-eared 19

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Suttree

Suttree went on. A mute and shapeless derelict would stop him with a puffy hand run forth from a cavernous sleeve of an armycoat. Woadscrivened, a paling heart that holds a name half gone in grime. Suttree looked into the ruined eyes where they burned in their tunnels of disaster. The lower face hung in sagging wattles like a great scrotum. Some mumbled word of beggary. To make your heart more desolate.

Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, page 383.

Dog-eared 18

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress

Was it really some other person I was so anxious to discover, when I did all of that looking, or was it only my own solitude that I could not abide?

In either event people continually looking in and out of windows is doubtless not such a ridiculous subject for a book, after all.

Even though Emily Brontë once struck her dog so angrily that she knocked it out, simply because it had gotten onto her bed when she had told it not to get onto her bed, which is the one thing Emily Brontë did that one wishes she hadn’t.

Even if, as I have perhaps said, there are also things Emily Brontë did not do that one wishes she had.

Although which may well be none of one’s business either, it finally occurs to me.

And meantime I would appear to have completely forgotten my russet cat’s name.

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, page 134.

Practically every single day at Corinth, for instance, when I did remember to let the cat back in, I said good morning to it.

Good morning, Rembrandt, being exactly how I said it practically every single time.

Russet as a color that one automatically associates with Rembrandt having been the origin of this, naturally.

Even if russet is perhaps not a color.

In any case it is surely not a color that has anything to do with painting, although admittedly it may be a color that has something to do with bedspreads. Or with upholstery.

Although not being a painting a cat can be russet too.

And being russet is apt to be named Rembrandt.

Which in fact no less an authority than Willem de Kooning found to be a perfectly suitable name, on an afternoon when the identical cat happened to climb into his lap.

Perhaps I have not mentioned that my russet cat climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.

My russet cat once climbed into Willem de Kooning’s lap.

Page 135.

Dog-eared 17

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Morrissey

Morrissey was asked what he thought of t.A.T.u.’s cover of “How Soon is Now?” He said he thought it was magnificent but admitted that he didn’t know much about t.A.T.u.

The interviewer explained, “They’re teenage Russian Lesbians.” To which Morrissey replied, “Well, aren’t we all?”

I do not like t.A.T.u.’s cover.

Note: I cannot believe I didn't already have a "Morrissey" tag.

Dog-eared 16

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Need for Mountains

I climbed out of my father’s pickup at a train stop in Minidoka, Idaho, then I’m getting on a train bound for Chicago and I had never been east of the Rockies, for God’s sake. And when I got to Harvard, something wasn’t right. There was something gnawing at me. And it took me probably three or four weeks to figure out what it was—I couldn’t find the horizon.

Lou Dobbs, What I’ve Learned, Esquire Magazine, February 2010, page 94.

As someone from the west, I know exactly what he’s talking about. Those who were raised around mountains deeply feel their absence when there aren’t any around. At least I do. I’ve talked about this a great deal with many people when discussing some of the things about living in Chicago that are hard for me, and I don’t think anyone from the Midwest truly understands.

Note: Of course I imagine the same is true when easterners talk about how they miss living in a “real city” when they move out west.

Also note: Lou Dobbs is not one of my favorite people, but I liked the quotation so here it is.

Dog-eared 15

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Words that Have to Do with Poop

. . . [A] tip for scatologically minded word-lovers: many of the most weirdly cognate and thoroughly obscene, cloacal, and stercoraceous words in the English language appear in unabridged dictionaries between coppice and copse.

From Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3^rd edition, page 204 (the last paragraph in the entry “copse; coppice”).

Yes, I haven’t posted anything in quite some time. I don’t really know why.

Dog-eared 14

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Garry Shandling, Sagittarian

Romance has always been a challenge for Garry. Despite his expansiveness on most other topics, he’s evasive about love. “I have spent a lot of time studying the issue of relationships, how I grew up, my parents’ influence on me,” he says when I ask him why he’s single. “I’ve talked to a therapist, I’ve looked inward spiritually at myself, and what it seems to come down to is—” the slightest pause—“that I’m a Sagitarius. Please don’t make me reveal more than that. It’s tough enough as it is.”

From “The Comedian’s Comedian’s Comedian” by Amy Wallace, August 2010 issue of GQ.

And I’ll add: I had no idea how interesting, and how just plain cool, Garry Shandling is.

Dog-eared 13

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666: Pheasants

He talks about the friendship of Courbet (the artist) with Proudhon (the Politician) and likens the sensible opinions of the latter with those of a pheasant. On the subject of art, a politician with power is like a colossal pheasant, able to crush mountains with little hops, whereas a politician without power is only like a village priest, an ordinary-sized pheasant.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (page 730).

Dog-eared 12

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

It’s Family

“I have been supportive of my wife since the beginning of time, and she has been supportive of me. It's not sacrifice; it’s family.”

Martin D. Ginsburg, husband of Justice Ginsburg, as quoted here.

Dog-eared 11

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666 (again)

Every life, Epifanio said that night to Lalo Cura, no matter how happy it is, ends in pain and suffering. That depends, said Lalo Cura. Depends on what, champ? On lots of things, said Lalo Cura. Say you’re shot in the back of the head, for example, and you don’t hear the motherfucker come up behind you, then you’re off to the next world, no pain, no suffering. Goddamn kid, said Epifanio. Have you ever been shot in the back of the head?

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666 (page 511).

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (three times)

“On purpose,” J.D. says, balancing his cigar on his heavy lower lip. “You don’t go to the client. You make the client come to you. That way the cap’s in his hand. Client comes a complex series of long ways to see you, has a tough journey, encounters bad roads and no maps and detours: client’s convinced already, en route, that your services have value, for him to be wandering all over hell’s half acre like this just to find you.” J.D. beams grimly. Mark notes that DeHaven can silently lip-sync his father’s whole speech. Plus his summation:

“A-very-wise-guru-at-the-top-of-a-tough-to-climb-mountain strategem,” J.D. says. “It’s no coincidence it’s the gurus on mountains who’re wise. You get to the top: you’re already theirs.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 307).

It makes Nechtr feel special, true. But from special it’s not very far to Alone.

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 308).

[In making an absurd argument that Hawaii Five-O is pure entertainment free of politics] “Especially in reruns, syndication, that you’ve seen before,” Sternberg says, into it, feeling, feeling disembodied, other, flaccid. “Incredibly comforting. You know just how the universe is going to be for the next hour. Totally secure. Detached but connected. A womb with a view.”

From David Foster Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” in Girl With Curious Hair (page 317).

Lost in the Funhouse (two more times)

[Fat May is the large, grotesque mechanical lady at the entrance to the funhouse who projects recorded “laughs” through a loudspeaker]

Money spent, the three paused at Peter’s insistence beside Fat May to watch the girls get their skirts blown up. The object was to tease Magda, who said: “I swear, Peter M—, you’ve got a one-track mind! Amby and me aren’t interested in such things.” In the tumbling-barrel, too, just inside the Devil’s mouth entrance to the funhouse, the girls were upended and their boyfriends and others could see up their dresses if they cared to. Which was the whole point, Ambrose realized. Of the entire funhouse! If you looked around, you noticed that almost all the people on the boardwalk were paired off into Couples except the small children; in a way, that was the whole point of Ocean City! If you had X-ray eyes and could see everything going on at that instant under the boardwalk and in all the hotel rooms and cars and alleyways, you’d realize that all that normally showed, like restaurants and dance halls and clothing and test-your-strength machines, was merely preparation and intermission. Fat May screamed.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

The word fuck suggests suction and/or and/or flatulence. Mother and father; grandmothers and grandfathers on both sides; great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers on four sides, et cetera. Count a generation as thirty years: in approximately the year when Lord Baltimore was granted charter to the province of Maryland by Charles I, five hundred twelve women—English, Welsh, Barvarian, Swiss—of every class and character, received into themselves the penises the intromittent organs of five hundred twelve men, ditto, in every circumstance and posture, to conceive the five hundred twelve ancestors and the two hundred fifty-six ancestors of the et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera et cetera of the author, of the narrator, of this story, Lost in the Funhouse. In alleyways, ditches, canopy beds, pinewoods, bridal suites, ship’s cabins, coach-and-fours, coaches-and-four, sultry toolsheds; on the cold sand under boardwalks, littered with El Producto cigar butts, treasured with Lucky Strike cigarette stubs, Coca-Cola caps, gritty turds, cardboard lollipop sticks, matchbook covers warning that A Slip of the Lip Can Sink a Ship. The shluppish whisper, continuous as seawash round the globe, tidelike falls and rises with the circuit of dawn and dusk.

From John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” from Lost in the Funhouse.

Dog-eared 10

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Lost in the Funhouse

The ticket-woman, witchlike, mortifying him when inadvertently he gave her his name-coin instead of the half-dollar, then unkindly calling Magda’s attention to the birthmark on his temple: “Watch out for him, girlie, he’s a marked man!” She wasn’t even cruel, he understood, only vulgar and insensitive. Somewhere in the world there was a young woman with such splendid understanding that she’d see him entire, like a poem or story, and find his words so valuable after all that when he confessed his apprehensions she would explain why they were in fact the very things that made him precious to her . . . and to Western Civilization! There was no such girl, the simple truth being.

From Lost in the Funhouse, by John Barth, 1968.

Dog-eared 9

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

A Cult of Cool

[David Foster Wallace has] twice failed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the first step toward entering the Catholic Church. (Wallace apparently referred to “the cult of personality surrounding Jesus Christ,” which did not sit well with the priest.)

From A Cult of Cool, by Elizabeth Weil, in the March 18, 1996, Los Angeles Times.

Dog-eared 8

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666 (#2)

There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

I don’t think this is true. But it’s funny.

Dog-eared 7

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

2666

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape, whereas Amalfitano could only be considered a castaway, a carelessly dressed man, a nonexistent professor at a nonexistent university, the unknown soldier in a doomed battle against barbarism, or, less melodramatically, as what he ultimately was, a melancholy literature professor put out to pasture in his own field, on the back of a capricious and childish beast that would have swallowed Heidegger in a single gulp if Heidegger had had the bad luck to be born on the Mexican-U.S. border.

From Roberto Bolano’s 2666.

Yes, that was one sentence. My favorite part is “…more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape….”

Dog-eared 6

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Dem Professors Don’t Write So Good

“The truth is that most of U.S. academic prose is appalling—pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipedalian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargonridden, empty: resplendently dead.”

David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2005), 81.

Dog-eared 5

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

David Foster Wallace on Fiction

From a March 8, 1996, interview in Salon, responding to the question: “What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?”

Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you’re thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what It’s like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that’s just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that’s set up through art by the writer. There’s another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There’s a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that’s very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I’m sitting in a chair. There’s real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn’t make me feel less lonely.

There’s a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn’t happen all the time. It’s these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I’m in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don’t with other art.

Dog-eared 4

I’ve decided to copy my wife's “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

The Reality of Magnetic Fields

(They’re real. I’m really, really serial.)

One of my top-five-of-all-time bands, The Magnetic Fields, released a new album this week. It’s called Realism. On Tuesday, which apparently has been forever ordained by God or someone else powerful as new-record-release-day, I stopped by Best Buy to pick up the new record and they did not have it. Actually, they didn’t have anything by the Magnetic Fields, nothing, not even a little place card. I spent a good five minutes looking at all of the other crap in the “M” section and silently rampaged about how can they have all this crap and no Magnetic Fields. So I stopped at the next Best Buy (strangely only a mile away) and they didn’t have any Magnetic Fields either. Screw Best Buy. Their music buyer should be flogged. [n.1]

Anyhow. Here’s a bit from track 9, Seduced and Abandoned:

Seduced with a grin,

I was taken all in;

taken in sin

and in shame.

Seduced by a smile,

I walked down the aisle

then waited awhile.

No one came.

Seduced and abandoned

and baby makes two.

Baby abandoned by you.

Seduced and abandoned

and what can I do?

I think I might drink a few.

Abandoned to weep

I collapsed in a heap,

dutifully sleeping all day.

Abandoned to die

I did nothing but cry

in my one-ply négligée.

Seduced and abandoned

and baby makes two.

Baby abandoned by you.

Seduced and abandoned

and what can I do?

I think I might drink a few.

Yes, I think I might drink a few

and maybe the baby will too.

Note 1: You might wonder why I’m buying records at Best Buy anyway. Well, because they are cheap. Also, I was driving and Best Buys always have nice giant parking lots or garages. But it also probably has something to do with the fact that I can go in a Best Buy and be ignored and not care what anyone in there thinks. If I go to one of the many independent record shops in my neighborhood, which is something I’d like to do for many reasons, I inevitably feel like I’m not cool enough to be in there and that the obnoxious hipsters I’m surrounded by are judging me. There are all sorts of problems with that, but it’s the truth.

Dog-eared 3

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Infinite Jest (again)

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (note the unusual italicization toward the end):

Then, just as in AA, the NA meeting closed with everybody shouting to the air in front of them to Keep Coming Back because It Works.

But then, kind of horrifically, everyone in the room started milling around wildly and hugging each other. It was like somebody’d thrown a switch. There wasn’t even very much conversation. It was just hugging, as far as Erdedy could see. Rampant, indiscriminate hugging, where the point seemed to be to hug as many people as possible regardless of whether you’d ever seen them before in your life. People went from person to person, arms out and leaning in. Big people stooped and short people got up on tiptoe. Jowls ground into other jowls. Both genders hugged both genders. And the male‐to‐male hugs were straight embraces, hugs minus the vigorous little thumps on the back that Erdedy’d always seen as somehow requisite for male‐to‐male hugs. Johnette Foltz was almost a blur. She went from person to person. She was racking up serious numbers of hugs. Kate Gompert had her usual lipless expression of morose distaste, but even she gave and got some hugs. But Erdedy — who’d never particularly liked hugging — moved way back from the throng, over up next to the NA‐Conference‐Approved‐Literature table, and stood there by himself with his hands in his pockets, pretending to study the coffee urn with great interest.

But then a tall heavy Afro‐American fellow with a gold incisor and perfect vertical cylinder of Afro‐American hairstyle peeled away from a sort of group‐hug nearby, he’d spotted Erdedy, and the fellow came over and established himself right in front of Erdedy, spreading the arms of his fatigue jacket for a hug, stooping slightly and leaning in toward Erdedy’s personal trunk‐region.

Erdedy raised his hands in a benign No Thanks and backed up further so that his bottom was squashed up against the edge of the Conference‐Approved‐Literature table.

‘Thanks, but I don’t particularly like to hug,’ he said.

The fellow had to sort of pull up out of his pre‐hug lean, and stood there awkwardly frozen, with his big arms still out, which Erdedy could see must have been awkward and embarrassing for the fellow. Erdedy found himself trying to calculate just what remote sub‐Asian locale would be the maximum possible number of km. away from this exact spot and moment as the fellow just stood there, his arms out and the smile draining from his face.

‘Say what?’ the fellow said.

Erdedy proffered a hand. ‘Ken E., Ennet House, Enfield. How do you do. You are?’

The fellow slowly let his arms down but just looked at Erdedy’s proffered hand. A single styptic blink. ‘Roy Tony,’ he said.

‘Roy, how do you do.’

‘What it is,’ Roy said. The big fellow now had his handshake‐hand behind his neck and was pretending to feel the back of his neck, which Erdedy didn’t know was a blatant dis.

‘Well Roy, if I may call you Roy, or Mr. Tony, if you prefer, unless it’s a compound first name, hyphenated, "Roy‐Tony" and then a last name, but well with respect to this hugging thing, Roy, it’s nothing personal, rest assured.’

‘Assured?’

Erdedy’s best helpless smile and an apologetic shrug of the GoreTex anorak. ‘I’m afraid I just don’t particularly like to hug. Just not a hugger. Never have been. It was something of a joke among my fam—’

Now the ominous finger‐pointing of street‐aggression, this Roy fellow pointing first at Erdedy’s chest and then at his own: ‘So man what you say you saying I’m a hugger? You saying you think I go around like to hug?’

Both Erdedy’s hands were now up palms‐out and waggling in a like bon‐hommic gesture of heading off all possible misunderstanding: ‘No but see the whole point is that I wouldn’t presume to call you either a hugger or a nonhugger because I don’t know you. I only meant to say it’s nothing personal having to do with you as an individual, and I’d be more than happy to shake hands, even one of those intricate multiple‐handed ethnic handshakes if you’ll bear with my inexperience with that sort of handshake, but I’m simply uncomfortable with the whole idea of hugging.’

By the time Johnette Foltz could break away and get over to them, the fellow had Erdedy by his anorak’s insulated lapels and was leaning him way back over the edge of the Literature table so that Erdedy’s waterproof lodge boots were off the ground, and the fellow’s face was right up in Erdedy’s face in a show of naked aggression:

‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James‐River‐Traders‐wearing‐Calvin‐ Klein‐aftershave‐smelling‐goofy‐ass motherfucking ass.’

Erdedy observed one of the Afro‐American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’

‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’

Johnette Foltz was sort of pawing at the back of Roy Tony’s fatigue jacket, shuddering mentally at how the report of an Ennet House resident assaulted at an NA meeting she’d personally brought him to would look written up in the Staff Log.

‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

Johnette Foltz had hold of the Roy fellow’s coat now with both hands and was trying to pull the fellow off, Keds scrabbling for purchase on the smooth parquet, saying ‘Yo Roy T. man, easy there Dude, Man, Esse, Bro, Posse, Crew, Homes, Jim, Brother, he’s just new is all’; but by this time Erdedy had both arms around the guy’s neck and was hugging him with such vigor Kate Gompert later told Joelle van Dyne it looked like Erdedy was trying to climb him.

Dog-eared 2

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature. These posts will contain quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Infinite Jest

From David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest:

“One of the troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there’s pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.”

(A little extra, if you’re interested):

“It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip—and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded engagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always like about J.O. Incandenza’s The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïveté is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.”

Dog-eared

I’ve decided to copy my wife’s “dog-eared” feature (though I don't actually "dog-ear" my books—I'm kind of anal about keeping my books in nice shape). These posts will contain brief quotations from books, music, movies, and whatever else I feel like sharing.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

From Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

“But in college Ralph’s goals were hazy. He thought he wanted to be a doctor and he thought he wanted to be a lawyer, and he took pre-medical courses and courses in the history of jurisprudence and business law before he decided he had neither the emotional detachment necessary for medicine nor the ability for sustained reading required in law, especially as such reading might concern property and inheritance.”

Yes. I find his view of the requirements for being, and tolerating being, a doctor and a lawyer to be very accurate. He should be thankful he figured it out early.

“They had held hands the night before their wedding and pledged to preserve forever the excitement and mystery of marriage.”

When there’s a sentence like that in a Raymond Carver story, it’s a sure sign that something bad is going to happen.