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Tiresome Novel Synopsis

Friday, August 22, 2014

The other day I had the experience of talking to a young man of the same age as the girls I find I can’t talk to. He was a little older perhaps, 23, just out of Harvard, and wanting to write. I had never heard of him but he called me up and asked if he could come down from Atlanta and spend the afternoon and after I had said, yes, he adds, “and I’ll bring a manuscript.” Well he came and spent the afternoon and it was not a question of my having to say anything; all i had to do was listen. He was writing a deeply philosophical novel (thought he) about a lad horribly like himself who was going to commit suicide in the last chapter. All the chapters leading up were devoted to his reasons for this action, full of stuff about the “sense of time.” He explained that while there were long philosophical passages, he was cutting these up with scenes. I was treated to the reading of one scene which he announced was the “love” section. At that point I was too tired to laugh so I didn’t disgrace myself. I discreetly tried to suggest that fiction was about people and not about the sense of time but I am sure made no impression.

—Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to Cecil Dawkins, 17 November 57. Collected in The Habit of Being

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Please Take the Other Pen

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

The reason I’m disappointed by almost every conversation is because I have such a high view of the revolutionary power it can have—and such a belief, probably childlike, in the magic of words. In some sense, I’m always putting too much pressure on it to deliver. But at the same time, I strongly believe that while speaking we are trying things out. You told me you’re teaching a class on the essay. Why do I probably love the essay more than any other form? Why are Emerson and Thoreau and Nietzsche and Montaigne so important to me? Montaigne writes something like, “Dear reader, I’m trying this out.” Conversation is something like that, something like the essay; they’re places where you are trying out ideas.

I’m sure I spoke about my father last time we spoke. He’s now 96. Still to this day, if I am to get his respect, I better argue well. I better have a reason why I believe in this rather than that. Even if it’s wrongheaded, make it interesting.

[Tyler Malone asks:] Because words are not the world, they’re either too specific or too vague, do we mar our thoughts by forcing them into language? Would it be better to be silent?

What is the last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? “Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent.”

I think silence would be very difficult—at least for me. I will admit though that in conversations, I love moments of repose. I love the uncomfortable silences. I relish them. The other day we had Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd here. He had this moment when Jeffrey Eugenides was speaking to him, where he was silent for a good thirty seconds. So uncomfortable, so great. Everybody refers to that moment. So I love those moments in conversation when there is silence, but do I think that we should be joining a religious order and taking a vow of silence? I can see why it could be tempting, especially in this day and age where I worry there may be too much chatter. I fear I contribute to that. But I think it isn’t in my future to be quiet.

I do find your question fascinating though: the intersection of language, approximation, disappointment. A rose is not a rose—we know this. It is an approximation. The word flirts with the possibility of arriving at the thing itself. But in phenomenological terms, we can’t arrive at the thing itself. It’s not there.

I was educated in the Belgian system, and also in France, and nearly everything was an oral exam. I was mainly educated by Jesuits. A nice Jewish boy educated by Jesuits is interesting. I remember we were studying the Platonic ideal. This Jesuit professor who was maybe all of five feet tall was terrifying and intimidating to us because he knew so much, was so encyclopedic in his knowledge. Jesuits, as you may know, study for fourteen years. He came in and placed a pen on the table, and said, “For Plato, how many pens are there there?” My friend got up, put the pen in his jacket, and said, “Please take the other one.” Which was so brilliant. The professor said, “This man will go far. We don’t even need to have the rest of the exam. You’ve understood the philosophical gesture.”

—Paul Holdengräber, interviewed by Tyler Malone

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Snipped and Shaped and Built On

Saturday, August 9, 2014

The temptation is to give what you overhear great credence, as if people would only say what they really think about you behind your back. But behind your back is also where people are most free to vent, to be peevish, unfair, sniping, and slanted; behind your back is where they are most apt to try out imprecations and outlandish opinions and, in general, to be far less generous or compassionate or accurate than they probably are.

—Michelle Huneven, You’ve Been Fictionalized!

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Zazen Flight

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that when I am in the cockpit of my plane, aiming the nose at the hull of an American battleship, every single one will be clear and pure and discernible. At the moment of my death, I look forward at last to being fully aware and alive.

Dōgen also wrote that a single moment is all we need to establish our human will and attain truth. I never understood this before, because my understanding of time was murky and imprecise, but now that my death is imminent, I can appreciate his meaning. Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.

—Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being: A Novel

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Reflections on Brian’s Potential as He Sinks into a Beanbag

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

There are certain people in whom you can detect the seeds of madness—seeds that have remained dormant only because the people in question have lived relatively comfortable, middleclass lives. They function perfectly well in the world, but you can imagine, given a nasty parent, or a prolonged bout of unemployment, how their potential for craziness might have been realized—how their seeds might have sprouted little green shoots of weirdness, or even, with the right sort of antinurture, blossomed into full-blown lunacy.

—Zoë Heller, What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal

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All That Has Dark Sounds

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks, or strips Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer stark naked in the cold of the Pyrenees, or sends Jorge Manrique to wait for death in the wastes of Ocaña, or clothes Rimbaud’s delicate body in a saltimbanque’s costume, or gives the Comte de Lautréamont the eyes of a dead fish, at dawn, on the boulevard.

…

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have raised three arches and with clumsy hands placed within them the Muse, the angel and the duende.

The Muse remains motionless: she can have a finely pleated tunic or cow eyes like those which gaze out in Pompeii, at the four-sided nose her great friend Picasso has painted her with. The angel can disturb Antonello da Messina’s heads of hair, Lippi’s tunics, or the violins of Masolino or Rousseau.

The duende… Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child’s saliva, crushed grass, and medusa’s veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.

—Federico García Lorca, Theory and Play Of The Duende

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Linking Ourselves Threefold

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Why does the world appear to us in this threefold manner? A simple example can make it clear. Suppose I walk through a field where wildflowers are blooming. The flowers reveal their colors to me through my eyes—that is the fact I accept as given. When I then take pleasure in the wonderful display of colors, I am turning the fact into something that concerns me personally—that is, by means of my feelings, I relate the flowers to my own existence. A year later, when I go back to the same field, new flowers are there and they arouse new joy in me. The previous year’s enjoyment rises up as a memory; it is present in me although the object that prompted it in the first place is gone. And yet the flowers I am now seeing are of the same species as last year’s and have grown in accordance with the same laws. If I am familiar with this species and these laws, I will recognize them again in this year’s flowers, just as I did in last year’s. On reflection, I may realize that since last year’s flowers are gone, my enjoyment of them remains only in my memory; it is bound up with my personal existence alone. But what I recognized in the flowers both last year and this year will remain as long as such flowers grow; it is something that is revealed to me but is not dependent on my existence in the same way that my enjoyment is. My feelings of pleasure remain within me, while the laws, the essence of the flowers, exist in the world outside of me.

Thus, as human beings, we are constantly linking ourselves to the things of the world in a threefold way.

—Theodore Steiner, Theosophy

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No End To This

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

I hope the novel proves to be retrievable. I enjoy retrieving mine better than I do writing them. Perhaps you finished it under a strain. Try rearranging it backwards and see what you see. I thought this stunt up from my art classes, where we always turn the picture upside down, on its two sides, to see what lines need to be added. A lot of excess stuff will drop off this way.

—Flannery O’Connor, from a letter to Elizabeth Fenwick dated 2/12/54, collected in The Habit of Being

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About Writing — Linkdump

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Mostly sf writing.

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Characters in Tailspin

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Jacqueline and Jemima are instructing Zeno, who has returned the purloined GRE documents and is thus restored to dull respectability, in Postmodernism. Postmodernism, they tell him, has turned its back on the world, is not about the world but about its own processes, is masturbatory, certainly chilly, excludes readers by design, speaks only to the already tenured, or does not speak at all, but instead—

Zeno, to demonstrate that he too knows a thing or two, quotes the critic Perry Meisel on semiotics. “Semiotics,” he says, “is in a position to claim that no phenomenon has any ontological status outside its place in the particular information system from which it draws its meaning”–he takes a large gulp of his Gibson–“and therefore, all language is finally groundless.” I am eavesdropping and I am much reassured. This insight is one I can use. Gaston, the critic who is a guard at the Whitney Museum, is in love with an IRS agent named Madelaine, the very IRS agent, in fact, who is auditing my return for the year 1982. “Madelaine,” I say kindly to her over lunch, “semiotics is in a position to claim that no phenomenon has any ontological status outside its place in the particular information system from which it draws its meaning, and therefore, all language is finally groundless, including that of those funny little notices you’ve been sending me.” “Yes,” says Madelaine kindly, pulling from her pocket a large gold pocket watch that Alphonse has sold Gaston for twenty dollars, her lovely violet eyes atwitter, “but some information systems are more enforceable than others.” Alas, she’s right.

—Donald Barthelme, Not-Knowing

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