Power Quote: De La Soul
POS: Living in everyday is something
Something everyday like this is our livin’DOVE: Giving something sheer for the crowd is our major
Major to the crowd is to hear what we’re givin’POS: No time to rest we got work in the studio
Studio suppliers rest at no timeDOVE: Showtime is enough when the Soul is performing
Performing is the Soul y’all, and it’s showtimePOS: Coping with dates in clubs, can’t even lounge,
Lounge with the homeboys how we are copin’DOVE: Scoping new material for Paul to plug high-pitched,
High-pitched what Paul plugs in and still scopin’POS: Bearer of peaceful views to express peace,
Peaceful expressions why we are bearers—This Is a Recording for Living in a Full time Era
Oh, come on now. Not even De La writes like this anymore.
POWER QUOTE: James Guida
From his new book, Marbles, published by Turtle Point Press. (Second title down.)
There are sentences so triumphant we imagine we can make out the author in them, waving to us delightedly from a float within the paragraph.
A coworker found this book in our pile of galleys and reader’s copies. More of the pieces from the book here.
I’m curious about the aphorism as a form.
I recall working a temp job—test scoring, I think—where during the New Worker orientation, another contingent employee mentioned that she liked to write, and when asked what sorts of things she wrote, she said she enjoyed writing poetry, stories, and “quotes.” I assume she meant aphorisms, but you never can tell. Maybe she considered writing down things other people had said a kind of writing. Or maybe she thought she was very quotable. In fact, as I have just quoted her “quote” line, she is/was, in a way, kind of quotable.
Are there narrative possibilities in the aphorism, or just poetic ones?
James Hamilton-Paterson: Green opinions you can trust
Saltier than thou
“The oceans have long been, and will long be, subjected to ruthless exploitation and even, in places, to ruin. It is not really the sea which is in recession, though, but wildness itself. Wildness is everywhere but it can no longer be seen; and its apparent vanishing is a direct consequence of the new conservationism. ‘The Wild’ is nowadays a concept ringing with the overtones of patronage, of collections by schoolchildren on its behalf. The present generation is as much contaminated by its own reverential and placatory attitude as the older was by domination. There is something ignoble about it, compounded as it is of urban sentimentalism, virtuous concern and sheer panic at having irrevocably fouled the nest while so comfortably lining it…Virtue and the wild share no common universe.”—Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds.
Power Quote: Nonfiction is Translation
“Say I’m writing an essay about my buddy Nate. If I remain completely faithful to the source text, I’d interview Nate and transcribe his quotes exactly, even keeping his incomplete sentences and particular use of “dude,” “man,” “you know what I’m sayin’,” fillers. Documentary playwrights have used this technique to capture a character through the preservation of unique speech patterns. Nate would be left as he is, the reader would have an awkward experience, and the target text would be thus foreignized. If I want to completely domesticate Nate, I wouldn’t interview him; I’d compose all his statements so the reader would have a totally fluid, coherent, rhythmic, economical, etc. speaker on the page. That wouldn’t at all be the Nate that exists in the real world (because no one actually speaks like this) but the reader would glide down the page with no trouble. Memoir is likely to take this approach. If I want to do something in between, I can do what a journalist does: interview Nate to capture his words and the way he uses them, but complete his sentences and give him the veneer of eloquence.
“Or—and this is what more realistically happens both in the art of translation and the art of nonfiction—the decision to domesticate or foreignize the source text comes line-by-line, word-by-word.”
—Brian Goedde
From a short, sharp essay on, as the title says, creative nonfiction as a form of translation.
(I worked with Goedde a number of years ago and just happened to think about him. At the time, he published a short book/long essay about hip-hop that I liked quite a bit. Apparently, he really pissed off Michelle Malkin and some jackass Freepers in late 2007 with this NYT essay. Good for you, Brian.)
Power Quote: David Markson
I want to wash when I meet a poet.
– Reader’s Block, p. 45
Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect
There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect, at least not in Petersburg; for there it is everything. What does this street – the beauty of our capital – not shine with! I know that not one of its pale and clerical inhabitants would trade Nevsky Prospect for anything in the world. Not only the one who is twenty-five years old, has an excellent mustache and a frock coat of an amazing cut, but even the one who has white hair sprouting on his chin and a head as smooth as a silver dish, he, too, is enchanted with Nevsky Prospect. And the ladies! Oh, the ladies find Nevsky Prospect still more pleasing. And who does not find it pleasing? The moment you enter Nevsky Prospect, it already smells of nothing but festivity. Though you may have some sort of necessary, indispensible business, once you enter it, you are sure to forget all business. Here is the only place where people do not go out of necessity, where they are not driven by the need and mercantile interest that envelop the whole of Petersburg. A man met on Nevksy Prospect seems less of an egoist than on Morskaya, Gorokhovaya, Liteiny, Meshchanskaya, and other streets, where greed, self-interest, and necessity show on those walking or flying by in carriages and droshkies. Nevsky Prospect is the universal communication of Petersburg. Here the inhabitant of the Petersburg or Vyborg side who has not visited his friend in Peski or the Moscow Gate for several years can be absolutely certain of meeting him. No directory or inquiry office will provide such reliable information as Nevsky Prospect. All-powerful Nevsky Prospect! The only entertainment for a poor man at the Petersburg feast! How clean-swept are its sidewalks, and, God, how many feet have left their traces on it! The clumsy, dirty boot of the retired soldier, under the weight of which the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature shoe, light as smoke, of a young lady, who turns her head to the glittering shop windows as a sunflower turns toward the sun, and the clanking sword of a hope-filled sub-lieutenant that leaves a sharp scratch on it – everything wreaks upon it the power of strength or the power of weakness. What a quick phantasmagoria is performed on it in the course of a single day! How many changes it undergoes in the course of a single day and night!
–The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, “Nevsky Prospect” (trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky)
Pimp Faulkner
William Faulkner was a pretty serious guy, and his answers to an interview with The Paris Review in 1956 reflects a severe staunchness and didacticism that, as an enormous fan, I can only afford him. He brought cerebral European modernism to America and rolled it around in dirt. Here’s my favorite reply of his:
PARIS REVIEW: Then what would be the best environment for a writer?
WILLIAM FAULKNER: […] If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel. In my opinion it’s the perfect milieu for an artist to work in. It gives him perfect economic freedom; he’s free of fear and hunger; he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police. The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work. There’s enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored; it gives him a certain standing in his society; he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books; all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him “sir.” All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him “sir.” And he could call the police by their first names.
It’s so perfectly hilarious it seems sarcastic, or even a satire, but in the context of the entire hyper-rational interview, he’s simply following his logic. I love the way he says “social life in the evening” unabashedly with a straight face. It’s official, ‘Faulkner as pimp’ edges out ‘Kafka as clerk’ as my all-time-high mental image/ideal of a writer. The next time I orgasm I’m gonna cough out Yoknapatawpha! and have a flashback to a previous chapter. Bill, my man, slap that ass.
The Onion has still got it
Although the sole film made from Salinger’s work, My Foolish Heart, based on his short story “Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut,” was considered by Salinger to be such a bastardization of his prose that he never agreed to another adaptation, he now states that “if McG wants to do any of my stuff—’A Perfect Day For Bananafish’; Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters; hell, all of Nine Stories—he has my complete permission. Anything. Anything he wants.”
Read it all here, and deal with how comparatively unfunny we truly are.
Pudding Pops!
This is a speech worthy of Father Mapple, given at a college by television actor Bill Cosby in Percival Everett’s new novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier—one of the funniest books I have read in quite a while. I’ll never sell Pudding Pops for the white man. Check this book out. It’s genius.
You men think I’m going to take it easy on you. You think because you’re in college and sitting here in khakis and loafers that I’m all right with you. You think that because you’re not bopping your heads to rap music while sitting here that I’m going to embrace you. You’re wrong. You’re all pathetic. You’re pathetic until you’re not pathetic, until you do something strong and good and not until you do that. You think because you probably won’t be clad in an orange jumpsuit for stealing a piece of pound cake that I feel all warm and fuzzy about you. I sell Pudding Pops for the white man. I don’t know why I’m saying that, but I am. I make myself sick, but the white man is not to blame. He didn’t put the gun in the hands of the black kid down in juvenile hall. No, his missing father put it there. Pound cake. I’m on television. Black girls have babies by three or four fathers and why? Pudding Pops! That’s what I’m saying. Some of you are probably wondering how I can stand up here, call me high and mighty, talking about how I can stand here when I’m being sued for having babies with a woman other than my wife. Well, hell, I can afford to have babies. Pudding Pops! If you don’t know who your children’s friends are, then you’re not doing your job…I kissed a Japanese woman on screen in nineteen sixty-six and managed not to have a baby with her. I want to thank you for having me here today, and I want you to know that I will be more than happy to sign copies of my book, Fatherhood, which is on sale just outside at an attractive discount. Believe me, you need to read it. Thank you.