“As Søren Kierkegaard said in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, I shall certainly attend your party, but I must make an exception for the contingency that a roof tile happens to blow down and kill me; for in that case, I cannot attend.”

Sometimes I see a picture of someone looking at someone else in a certain way — the tilt of the head, the position of the eyes relative to the face, the width of the pupils, the relationship of the head to the body, the proximity of one head to another head, the attention implied by the position of the eyes — and I think: I wish someone would right now be looking at me in the way that the person in the picture is looking at the other person in the picture, and that it made me feel the way I imagine it makes the object of the looking feel, and that the person doing the looking meant the looking in the way I imagine the looker in the picture means the looking, and that both of us were as attractive and therefore societally vetted as worthy of giving and receiving looks like the looks that are being given and received in the picture, and that the confidence implied in the giving and receiving of the looks was a confidence that corresponded to my ability to give and receive the looks rather than the confidence that corresponds to my ability to talk about thinking about looking at the people doing the looking.

1. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time thinking about how big it is instead of making it big.

2. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time trying to make it big instead of attending to the smallnesses from which big rises.

3. You want to make a thing, but the thing you want to make is too big, so you spend your time reading other big things searching for pathways to bigness instead of working on your big thing.

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I wish I could stick a USB jack into certain heads and simulate the experience of reading certain books through the filter of the host head’s consciousness/aesthetic inclination/interior life/knowledge/etc. I would like a simulation of the experience of being David Foster Wallace and reading Tom Clancy. Here are some other dream scenarios I’d like to inhabit: Susan Sontag reading Barry Hannah, Philip Roth reading Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer reading Erica Jong, James Wood reading Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Davis reading Marcel Proust, Brian Evenson reading Robert Coover, Diane Williams reading Christine Schutt, Rick Moody reading Dale Peck, Alice Hoffman reading Richard Ford, Stephen Dixon reading Thomas Bernhard, Thomas Bernhard reading Thomas Mann, Slavoj Zizek reading Deleuze and Guattari, William Gay reading William Faulkner, Jennifer Egan reading Edward P. Jones, Edwidge Danticat reading Lyonel Trouillot, Pauline Kael reading Walter Murch, Lawrence Weschler reading Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter reading Eudora Welty, Margaret Atwood reading Dan Brown, Borges reading Kafka, Kafka reading Nathan Englander, Nathan Englander reading Zadie Smith, Zadie Smith reading Edward Said, Edward Said reading Snooki, Snooki reading Milan Kundera, or Ursula LeGuin reading Roberto Bolano. READ MORE >

The Devil All The Time, Donald Ray Pollock‘s debut novel. Here’s the cover:

(from the Foreword to Lolita: A Screenplay):

By nature I am no dramatist; I am not even a hack scenarist; but if I had given as much of myself to the stage or the screen as I have to the kind of writing which serves a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book, I would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the big part of guest, or ghost, prompting them, and, in a word, pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual–for there is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.

Letter from Vladimir Dixon to James Joyce, February 9, 1929

Dear Mister Germ’s Choice,

In gutter dispear I am taking my pen toilet you know that, being Leyde up in bad with the prewailent distemper (I opened the window and in flew Enza), I have been reeding one half ter one other the numboars of ‘transition’ in witch are printed the severeall instorments of your ‘Work in Progress’.

You must not stink I am attempting to ridicul (de sac!) you or READ MORE >

I make a portion of my living helping other people write, rewrite, fix, or otherwise fiddle with their memoirs. Generally speaking, these people are not interested in the Single-I point of view, or the “dispatch from the moment,” or a memoir proceeding entirely in a progression of chronologically linear scenes from the point of view of the person they were at the time of the events they’re offering the reader. The reason is usually a lack of desire for discipline — there are very few tasks more difficult than the task of writing a chronologically linear book in a progression of scenes which are not hijacked by a latter-day narrator who regularly swoops in to essay, explain, make meaning, apologize, or otherwise interrupt the experience the reader is having with the person the narrator used to be. The primary benefit of the Single-I is that it is the closest thing we have in memoir to the simulation of someone else’s experience of life, since life is lived in the moment to moment and offers little in the way of summary, dispatches from the future, and so on. All that comes later, when we impose narrative on past events. Narrative is one of my favorite things, but it is, let’s remember, a fundamentally artificial thing, different in almost every way from the actual experience of living life. All the boring stuff is cut out, all the everyday stuff is cut out, all the sleeping, most of the eating and pissing and pooping, most of the banalities of conversation, etc. (I should note here that the exception that points back to this rule is the craftsmanly recent fiction of Tao Lin, whose last two novels are very interested in restoring these banalities alongside the discipline of the Single-I, and toward interesting ends including reproduction of a kind of self-centered Americanized young person’s Buddhist-ish consciousness — but that’s not what I want to talk about here.)

What I want to talk about is a brief passage from  Deb Olin Unferth’s new memoir Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, a book that decidedly rejects the Single-I point of view in favor of the much more popular alternative, the Double-I. (This terminology is not standard, by the way. I borrow it from my old teacher Lee K. Abbott. I have found it very useful for descriptive reasons, so I’m going to keep using it.) READ MORE >

This is from Chapter Two, Part 4, of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The protagonist, immigrant professor Timofey Pnin, has just had all his teeth pulled:

A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.

The first thing I notice is that the description isn’t static. It is wedded to narration in the forward motion of time. READ MORE >