May 23rd, 2011 / 2:14 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
LOL re Dale Peck: “Literature cannot be saved, because literature saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer literature.”
lololol
rofl
‘lol’ is perfect
‘cool story, bro.’
i get subjected to the diane rehm show on NPR twice a week (three times during the school year) and half the time i end up having to listen to book talk and it makes me want to pull my esophagus out of my throat because it’s all middle aged women who read like 12 books a year saying shit like this
Fun social experiment: paste the quote as your Facebook status and see how people react.
Isn’t it art because it can’t save anyone?
Testifuckinmonial: it sure saved *me* (but the stuff that saved me *couldn’t* have been anything that Pale Dick would have approved of)
Fix: “Money cannot be saved, because money saves us. When it no longer saves us, it is no longer money.”
DO SO CAREFULLY!
Spun in place until I fell down. Quote then made sense.
dale peck stares at himself in a mirror in new york. the mirror envelops him in a gauze of shimmer. dale peck radiates sunshine. a peach-tinted orb appears in iowa city. the orb swaggers six feet above the ground. a crowd surrounds the orb. the crowd’s eyes are full of peach-tinted sweat. the orb begins to spin, twaddles, floats into the sky. a child cries, my balloon! her father slaps her. no one says anything. the blue sky tints peach for a moment, swirls of blue become the sky. a low moan descends upon the cornfields, crackling, rippling out in waves over the wheat, enters the ground. the crowd disperses. the earth gyrates.
Someday Dale Peck will realize, just as I did, that there is a difference between knowing you’re Dale Peck, and being Dale Peck.
LOL re David Shields: “Art saves no one.”
Who is Dale Peck?
so the unsaved no longer have literature? that suks
diane rehm is death.
“It’s funny: often it seems like the most asinine or quibbly threads
are the ones that get the most attention; certainly the most comment
heavy pieces are the ones that are often the most arbitrary or reductive.”
5-10 years ago this comment’d’ve read as:
“It seems like my shortest LJ posts get the most comments! It’s so annoying!”
Thanks for academicizing it up!
i think he’s that self help guy who didn’t know robert frost was joking.
Chris Toll:
The job of poets is not to explain the Mystery.
The job of poets is to make the Mystery greater.
Also Chris Toll:
I’m not a voice crying in the wilderness. I’m the wilderness.
Yeah, Peck seems like another John Gardner type–the kind who would argue that literature saves yet claim Stanley Elkin is a fraud because he doesn’t write the kind of “morally uplifting” fiction that meets Gardner’s Puritan tastes.
I don’t see anything wrong with the basic premise of art “saving” people.
I’ve read some of Hatchet Jobs, and would say his critical position is both more complex and also less intelligible than that.
whats literature
the copy of adam levin’s “the instructions” stashed in my jacket pocket worked as a buffer and retarded the the bullet’s velocity, thus making a superficial wound out of what could have easily been a fatal one. point: literature
don’t make me smack you again, “Mr.” Peck
–Stevens, The Creations of Sound
LOL?