In Madness & Civilization, Michel Foucault says:

The novel constitutes the milieu of perversion, par excellence, of all sensibility; it detaches the soul from all that is immediate and natural in feeling and leads it into an imaginary world of sentiments violent in proportion to their unreality, and less controlled by the gentle laws of nature. (219)

If Foucault says this about readers of novels, just think about what it means for writers of novels.

How soon one discovers that, however much one is in the ordinary sense ‘interested in other people,’ this interest has left one far short of possessing the knowledge required to create a character who is not oneself.   — Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)

As evasive her “one” pronoun dance is, Murdoch rings clear a concern and problem for many writers (concern for the cognizant, problem for the oblivious), that the writer, at the height of their creation, is not creating, but merely transcribing their experience veiled as character.

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If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.

Don Delillo, The Names

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“A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.”

—Franz Liszt

(Though, really, I too enjoy being introduced to new writers through lists of writers.)

“Judge in a state of disinterest as to the effects of the judging.” John Cage, Lecture on Something

“The real story, which we have grown unaccustomed to, is chemically free of explanation. . . . The story is always about something unexplainable. The art of narration declines as explanations are added.” -Cesar Aira

The youth at night would have himself driven around the scream. It lay in the middle of the city gazing back at him with its heat and rosepools of flesh. Terrific lava shone on his soul. He would ride and stare.

-Anne Carson, “On the Youth at Night,” in her book Plainwater

Oscar Wilde's tomb, Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

“A kiss may ruin a human life.” — Oscar Wilde

Not sure if his mourners caught the quote, the irony I guess, and how above the tomb is a relief sculpture of some modernist flying angel whose male genitalia has since been vandalized, i.e. castrated, its whereabouts unknown. (Gender bending aside, someone’s gonna make a killing on eBay.) Like forever gumdrops on the pavement, these stone kisses are the graffiti of mouths, signifying that warm wet landing spot we all aim towards with eyes closed, as if seeing past the person.

My mother’s output, starred and pseudonymous, appeared regularly in one of those little, irregular periodicals so limited in readership that they might be called incestuous. Subscription was by invitation only, and contributors would go into a rage over a misplaced comma and brood for days if their poems were understood. All this called for constant and voluminous correspondence between my mother and the editor, about what I never knew, because the whole system was built along the lines of a secret society whose secrets were kept from everybody, including the membership.

- Millard Kaufman, Bowl of Cherries

I used to think this was bold. Now I wonder if it isn’t bitter? Maybe it’s both? Question mark?

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“Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.”

– Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

I’ve been accused of finding photos which incriminate authors, which I’ll gladly admit to, but the above photo/quote mash-up illustrates my skepticism towards philosophy, especially ontological mathy ones. Dude needs to relax and have some weisse bohnensuppe (German bean soup). It’s awesome ripping apart the palpable world on page, but Heidegger needs time just like everyone else — when his appointment with his proctologist is, never mind that they’ll only find beans and thyme.

“We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists.”

– Thomas Jefferson

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

– Thomas Jefferson

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In 1983-1984, while writing Cigarettes, Harry Mathews followed Stendhal’s dictum of writing “twenty lines a day, genius or not.” In 1988, Dalkey Archive published the notebook of all of Mathew’s daily 20 lines. Lots is genius. Here are 20 bits (though I will note that the real pleasure is in the accrual of the bits in daily sections and in the whole project, so if you like the bits then just think!):

No matter how much one loves sunshine, its assault here on the eyes and skin makes shade delectable. One knows one’s tan will have more fuel than it can use.

…even if the air was cluttered with social smells and substances.

Or should one aim at portraying objects that are perpetually in flux or, better, that are transformed by our very description of them, like this page?

…but even if the basis of simile is continuity, to compare wobbly daffodils to invisibly moving stars is like comparing white bunny tails to snowy mountain peaks. So let’s do that.

…how to manage disagreeable emotions by scheduling them…

‘Nothing will ever be the same,’ except oneself, and who wants to rely on that pathetic little monster?

Do I now run errands to make the outdoors safe? Why does buying things, especially ones that are relatively expensive, calm me so extraordinarily?

But watch out: ‘fragmented, exciting’ mustn’t become an excuse for getting less done.

Every morning–early every morning–I’ll set aside ten minutes and concentrate exclusively on feeling anxious about sitting down to write. The most rudimentary sense of absurdity should get me going by minute number three.

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This is how the great Patrik Ourednik kills a character. Let it be a lesson to one and all:

Naiman died as stupidly as he lived. One day he decided to get a new washing machine for the cottage. But what to do with the old one? He loaded it into his car, drove into the forest, and rolled the machine to the top of the hill, intending to push it into a gorge; one garbage dump more or less, the Czech woods had survived worse. But no matter how hard he leaned into the thing, it wouldn’t budge, so, taking a few steps back, he sprinted forward, spinning around and throwing his haunches into it; the washer sailed into the gorge and Naiman along with it. Some nosy hiker discovered the body five days later, and the South Bohemian Tribune ran a brief obituary headlined “Expert Meets Tragic Death.”

Dyk gave a creaky laugh. Memories are the balm of old age.

Here’s something to read:

“The young ones called each other out from their cells. Set to set, block to block, nation to nation. They called each other soldier. Six pop, five drop, nines and gats and gauges. Greetings and threats indistinguishable in the voices of monster children.”

—Firework, Eugene Marten, Tyrant Books

So, this is from the galley, which arrived on my desk at work today. I read the first 20 or so pages in a doctor’s waiting room. The first pages take place in a jail.

When you get a galley, it reminds you—the reader—that it is an uncorrected proof, and that some small changes may be made, and that you should check with the publicity department or the finished book before quoting from it somewhere.

I didn’t do that. I’m not going to do that. Read that paragraph—what would you change?

Seriously, Gian. If you change anything in that paragraph, I’m coming for your ass.

The new issue of Gulf Coast features a roundtable between Matthew Rohrer, Heather Christle, Matthew Zapruder, & Zachary Schomburg on what “surrealism” means today in American poetry.

Most interesting is what Matthew Rohrer says about surrealism and optimism.

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Now that even professional athletes are wearing mohawks, I’m pretty sure the only transgressive hairstyle is the comb over.

—My buddy Jordan

Maybe we should all start writing melodrama. Should we? Would that be the most transgressive choice we could make?

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Wait, are we transgressive? Are we trying to transgress now? I can’t remember.

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Bob Ross, Avant-garde Artist.

“Art is manipulation without intervention.”

“I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.”

“Surrealism is anathema for me. Because the surrealists made a joke of everything. And I consider life a tragedy.”

“I like Francis Bacon best, because Francis Bacon has terrific problems, and he knows that he is not going to solve them, but he knows also that he can escape from day to day and stay alive, and he does that because his work gives him a kick.”

“Once I was beset by anxiety but I pushed the fear away by studying the sky, determining when the moon would come out and where the sun would appear in the morning.”

“Art is not about art.”

“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

—John Berryman, October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972