The more things change the more they stay the same
“Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: “Socialism!” Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway, where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.” – Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
(Thanks to Jeremy Schmall, who is presently reading Marx so that the rest of us don’t have to.)
Foucault, on Novels
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.
Critics on Criticism: Don Delillo
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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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Liszt on Lists
“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.)
Cage on Judgment
“Judge in a state of disinterest as to the effects of the judging.” John Cage, Lecture on Something
chemically free but not in a straight edge kind of way
“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
“On the Youth at Night”
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
Girls gone Wilde
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.
Millard & Magoo & You Maybe & Yates & Me I Guess
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?