steaksdiane

[steaksdiane]

Goodbye, Columbus

…Would have shattered all the frail bones that come together to form what in a woman half her age we would call the hips. 

And so life from now one would not be a throwing off, as it was for aunt gladys, and not a gathering in, as it was for Brenda, but a bouncing off, a numbness. 

His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the corners of his mouth. 

There is touching, John said sententiously, “and there is touching.” 

He was very black and shiny, and the flesh of his lips did not so much appear to be a different colors as it looked to be unfinished and awaiting another coat. 

…all the bachhinalian paraphanelia, plentiful, orderly, and untouched, as it can only be in the bar of a wealthy man…

…of Jack Daniels, each with a little booklet tied to its collared neck informing patrons how patrician of the it was to drink the stuff.

She was wearing her Bermudas and her white polo shirt, which was unlike Brenda’s only in that it had a little dietary history of its own. 

And then she dragged herself back into the bed, where with a martyr’s heart and bleary eyes she had resisted the downward tug of sleep until she’d heard my key in the door. 

He headed up the long marble stairs that led to Tahiti.

Ron finally risked a journey into language. 

Nobody ever questioned their tastefulness as adornment, and after a few nights I didn’t even notice them. 

Rumbling down into that exhilarating, restorative, vitamin-packed sleep that I imagined athletes to enjoy. 

Things were sized and squared in no way I’d ever seen before, and I think it was that more than anything else that steered me into consciousness. 

Partially wooed and won on Patamkin fruit. 

I stayed behind, mesmerized almost by the dissection of the analysis, reconsideration, and, finally, embracing of the trivial. 

The grander greasier smell of auto body shops

I would have an ulcer in an hour. 

Illustrations of women so dreamy, so fantastically thighed and uttered, that one could not think of them as pornographic….they had been painting some third sex I had never seen. 

The deer were sad when their own excitement sent the young loping away toward the far end of the field where their tawny-skinned mothers stood regally watching the traffic curl up the mountain. 

….few I recognized as high school mates of mine, compared suntans, supermarkets, and vacations. They looked immortal standing there. 

I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it’s that we’re carnal, and acquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You? 

We slept together that night, and so nervous were we about our new toy that we performed like kindergarteners, or (in the language of that country) like a lousy double-play combination. 

Life calls us, and anxiously if not nervously we walk out into the world and away from the pleasures of these ivied walls. But not from its memories. They will be the concomitant, if not the fundament, of our lives. 

She’d martyred her feet…Molly’s husband, the butter and egg man, Harry in the days of Prohibition. 

[steaksdiane]

the elementary particles, michel houellebecq

“He found in mathematics a happiness both serene and intense. Moving through the half-light, he would suddenly find a way through— with some formula, some audacious factorization — and be transported to a place of luminous serenity. The first question in Amy proof was the most poignant, because the truth fluttering in the distance was still precarious; the last was the most thrilling, the most joyful. “

“Television gave lessons in dignity, especially TF1. As a teenager, Michel believed that suffering conferred dignity on a person. Now he had to admit he had been wrong. What conferred dignity on people was television.” 

“He wanted to live to the end, to be a part of life, to fight against physical deformity and petty everyday misfortunes. With his last breath he would plead for a postponement, to live a little longeer. In particular, he would continue his quest for ultimate pleasure to the end; one last indulgence.” 

“For society to function, for competition to continue, people have to want more and more, until desire fills their lives and finally devours them.” 

“He’d recently -for the first time - seen strict steak in the meat section of Monoprix.” 

“To obtain an exact replica, across an indefinite succession of cellular generations, it would probably be necessary for genetic information to be on a compact structure — for example, a Möbius strip, or a torus.” 

“It’s true the little beasts were farmer’s songs, and therefore closer to animals than most.”

“In fact I’d say men aren’t capable of love, the emotion is completely alien to them. The only emotions they know are desire -in the form of pure animalliust - and male rivalry.” 

“A lie is useful if it transforms reality, he thought, but if it fails, then all that’s left is the lie, the bitterness and the knowledge that it was a lie.” 

“After a couple years working, sexual desire wanes and people turn their attention to gourmet food and wine.” 

“Was it possible to think of Bruno as an individual? The decay of his organs was particular to him, and he would suffer his decline and death a s an individual. On the other hand, his hedonistic worldview and the forces that shaped his consciousness and desires were common to an entire generation. Just as determining the apparatus for an experiment and choosing one or more observables made it possible to assign a specific behavior to an atomic system - now particle, now wave — so could Bruno be seen as an individual, or, from another point of view, as passively caught up in the sweep of history.” 

“…frequently observed in situations of frustration or conflict, is known as displacement activity. “ 

“This radical change is preceded by many minor mutations — facilitators whose historic appearance often goes unnoticed st the time. I consider myself to have been one such mutation.” 

“Every civilization has to find some way to justify the sacrifices their parents make.” 

“Over the years he had developed a cynical, hard-bitten, typically masculine view of life. The universe was a battle zone, teeming and bestial, the whole thing enclosed within a hard, fixed landscape —  clearly perceptible, but inacesisblle: the landscape of the moral law. It was written, however, that love contains and perfects this law.” 

“Here, from the immense atrium situated on the prow, you can stare out to sea as though you were watching it on a gigantic screen.” 

“He was doing a lot of swimming and lovemaking. He recalculated, using these new parameters, and discovered that he would require 2700 calories a day.” 

“As he passed the old houses and canals on his way to the cemetery, he felt the sadness and confusion of anyone returning to his childhood home….sunlight briefly broke through the clouds.” 

“Once more, he had to force himself -p painfully, as one begins to focus on a nearby object — to shatter the feeling od identification with his reflection. The self is an intermittent neurosis, and this man was far from cured.” 

He could seee to a distant point, the root of time itself. 

She had lived a bit: taken cocaine, participated in orgies, stayed in luxury hotels. Her beauty had put her in the epicenter of the movement of moral liberation which was such a major part of her youth. As a result, she had suffered greatly - in the end, she would almost give her life for it. His indifferent had left him on the periphery booth of that movement, and of life, and of everything, so he barely had been touched by it.” 

In the distance the sea roared and heaved, a gray and silver flux. 

Both of them knew this would be their last human relationship, and this feeling lacerated every moment they spent together.they had a great respect and profound sympathy for each other, and there were days when, caught up in some sudden magic, they knew moments of fresh air and glorious, bracing sunshine. For the most part, however, they could feel a gray shadow moving over them, on the earth that supported them, and in everything they could glimpse at the end. 

In the liberal system they had joined, the sexual model proposed by the dominant culture (advertising, magazines, social and public health organizations) was governed by the principle of adventure: in such a system, pleasure and desire occur as a result of a process called seduction, which emphasizes novelty, passion, and individual creativity (all qualities also required of employees in their professional capacities.) 

Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned. 

The principal reason is that nothing — not even death — seems worse than the prospect of living in a broken body. 

Children suffer the world that adults create for them and try their best to adapt to it; in time, usually, they will replicate it. 

People came from as far as Chicago and Denver to contemplate the beauty of the hinterland of Nice. 

As soon as people stop believing in life after death, religion is impossible. 

If chirst didn’t rise from the dead, our faith will have been in vain. 

He could do nothing more now, as one could not battle against the empire of sickness and death. 

There’s more sexual freedom than there was a couple of years ago, there are more nightclubs, more antidepressants. 

We grow among our creations - human creations, which we can communicate to men — and Amon them we die. In the midst of space, human space, we make our measurements, and with these measurements we create space, the space between our instruments. 

[steaksdiane]

Star, Yukio Mishima

Once a mold has finished casting its share of copies, it cools and becomes deformed and useless. 

I became the force of time incarnate, following a steady rhythm, passing through the scripted motions one by one like they were floating weeds that curled around my body and slipped off me and drifted away. 

Those within his circle understood that even a mumbled OK could have a multitude of nuances. 

Kayo held out a metal thermos. Its polished surface was smeared with the faces of the crowd. 

No matter how serious the obligation, a star is more of a star if he never arrives. Absence is his forte. THe question of whether he’ll show up gives the event a ceaseless undercurrent of suspense. But a true star never arrives. 

But there’s something timeless about the mediocrity of the story, no mattter how many times I find myself inside it. 

Unreal time resumed its flow.

Her arrival made the town’s sense of reality complete. 

Kayo, who loves this sort of chaos, beat me there. 

All eyes were on Yuri! Her expression was shameless, every inch of her exposed. 

Her laughter spattered at my chest like oil roaring in pain. 

Habitually deferring to efficiency and economy can make life start to seem less consequential. 

A start and a shoplifter is each a rare encounter, but seeing us together cracked the superstructure of reality. 

They were dressed in rookie outfits that gave them away as country girls too far from home. 

Takahama’s displeasure could sometimes verge on the majestic. 

[steaksdiane]

A Good Day to Die, Jim Harrison

How they stand in the narrow prow without falling off and it must be genetic 

I began to try and remember her last name but drew a blank. Ansel. Atkins. Aberdeen. Angus. Cow. 

Now her eyes were truly fearful. No gift for the surreal, a dull stenographers brain. 

Back broken when flipped. How I mourned for puppies. “You looked like a puppy I owned once.” 

Was it all worth it? No. 

I was pleased with the way that beer made me feel like an ordinary sot. 

Not my own alcohol and geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn’t have loved her at gun point. 

Sweating with the air apparently the same temperature as my blood’s. 

I was tired of going to the bathroom every 15 minutes to get rid of the beer. 

I felt safe in three minimal areas of Michigan, Montana, and Key West. 

I’m sort of homely but have given up thinking about it. I had a disturbing vision of taking a thousand fat girls to my kindly breast. 

I admired people who didn’t cooperate with the economy. 

Still asleep and the trees leafy. Did general Sherman get this far? We have very few magnolia in the north but I like their odor. The sun was orange over the cornices. 

[on pizza] the crust gone and the red sauce and solidified cheese looking like the leftovers of a major surgery. 

The whiskey’s slow flushed rise up the spinal column. 

No self pity here but modulated statement of fact. 

She looked at me with a dairy product’s mustache. 

She reminded me of a girl who sang “candy kisses” in a slightly nasal though I thought beautiful voice. Beauty all around us. 

What it is is a measureless and ignorant grace that owes nothing at all to girlishness. 

And Tim, all that consciousless vigor would soon fail him, as it does most between the mid- or late twenties or early thirties when one first realizes one is alive and that like all other living creatures one has a beginning, a middle, and a certain end. 

A kind of tawdry prettiness 

Douglas is a town of more than average ugliness. 

The fan drifts concentrically with insufficient power to make any difference. 

She had brought me coffee. Good girl. Now marry me. 

There was little fire left except for the anti-mechanics of inertia —

I began to find the clarity of her intelligence offensive. 

W all seemed to find a childish renewal out of driving up to Bisbee to get the dynamite. 

We were easier to admire than love. 

If we could cry like that we would truly clean out our heads almost at will. 

She was very dextrous at it and would make the maps crisp and virginal again. 

Both maudlin, corrupt, causing an eerie wave of sentiment. 

I lacked the native coordination to be a truly good dancer but Sylvia was marvelous. 

I could live for a week now on what I had once saved and then spent on a cote Basque lunch for myself and some pretentious cunt. 

But then I had become so generally strung out on urban life that I felt I must retune to the “land” which proves even now to be a rather literary urging. 

The two trunks of dynamite had all the attractiveness of two giant cysts. 

[steaksdiane]

a child

“complimented a little girl’s shoes in Park Slope and she turned to me and said, conspiratorially, “But the pebbles are murder!”

[steaksdiane]

The Luzhin Defense, Nabokov

“I have made it a rule to address a few words of encouragement to the viennese delegation.” 

“…a mosquito fastening onto his skinned knee and blissfully raising its rubescent abdomen. A ten-year-old boy knows his knees well, in detail — the itchy swelling that had been scrabbled till it bled, the white traces of fingernails on the suntanned skin, and all those scratches which are the apenneded signatures of sand grains…”

“Arithmetic went better; there was mysterious sweetness in the fact that a long number, arrived at with difficulty, would, at the decisive moment, after many adventures, be divided by nineteen without any remainder.” 

“…wrapped in a dark woolen tweed cloak, wearing a sailor cap which was set askew but which no one on earth would have dared to straighten now, and looked aside at the thick birch trunks spinning past along a ditch that was full of their leaves.”

“His mother with a mewing sound was about to reach out and arrange his cloak, but noticing the look in his eye she swiftly snatched her hand back and merely indicated with a twiddle of her fingers in mid-air: close it up, close it tighter.” 

“To the left…whence in a few minutes would appear the train’s harbinger — a puff of white smoke.”

“….when the house was full of drafts and you envied so much the gardener who was not going anywhere…”

“…his milk in a silver cup, giving it such a precious taste…”

“He had quite a time crushing it beneath a stone as he tried to repeat the initial, juicy scrunch.” 

“…came the coachman, the watchman, for some reason the milkmaid Akulina, and finally a peasant.” 

“The barely perceptible peculiarity that distinguished his son from all those children, who, in his opinion, were destined to become completely unremarkable people…he interpreted the secret stir of talent.” 

“(On soccer)…instinctively continuing that enchanting tradition…”

“His eyes had automatically filled with a burning mist, and everything he looked at — out of the accursed necessity of looking at something - was subject to intricate, optical metamorphoses.” 

“He tried to look at his face, but that special snow of oblivion, abundant and soundless snow, covered his recollection with an opaque white mist.” 

“(A whim, perhaps, some future biographer might appreciate.”) 

“…there were also coquettish little envelopes containing powders for tinting water blue, red, and green.” 

….and there he goes again biting his fingernails in a handsome sweater, sitting in cafe, one glass in his eyeglasses, the other totally absent and its home frame askew like a pried paperclip” 

“The secret for which he strove was simplicity, harmonious simplicity, which can amaze one far more than the most intricate magic.” 

“…near the palace arch an enormous red-blue-white flag swelled elastically, the sky showing through it in three different tints: mauve, indigo, and pale blue.” 

“Cheeseboard swells of a shade of brown tint 

Chessboard smells of a shade of brown milk 

“It was one of those wonderful blue dusty days at the very end of April when the end of the school term is already imminent and such indolence overcomes one.”

“Crowned with a harp-shaped vignette.” 

“She had no aptitude for chess. Her pieces would conglomerate in an unseemly jumble, out of which there would suddenly dash an exposed, helpless king.”

“Let’s go see if there are any red mushrooms under the fir trees.”

“Yes, they were there, those edible red boletes.” 

“She continued to reclined as if having made up her mind that this was to be her lot, that this was precisely her destiny in life.”

“On one such oppressive and voluptuous day, early in the morning before the gadflies tormented…”

“Wrathfully he began to tear out the leaves and flowers.”

“He immediately ordered tea and a pony of brandy. The room was clean and brightly lit, and with a still life on the wall representing plump peaches around a watermelon minus one wedge. A clean tablecloth ballooned gently and settled over he connected tables.” 

“The most vivid thing standing before his eyes was the following recollection (slightly retouched by a writers imagination): a bright hall, two rows of tables…”

“…a prodigy, the result being both sickly and angelic.” 

“A man of undoubted talent, as he was characterized by those who were about to say something nasty about him”

“…and beyond that was a marvelous mist…”

“In her small regular features, as if the last decisive jog that would have made her beautiful — leaving her features the same but endowing them with ineffable significance — had not been given them by nature.” 

“One did not have to deal with the visible, audible, palpable pieces whose quaint shape and wooden materiality always disturbed him and always seemed to him but the crude, mortal shell of exquisite, invisible chess forces.”

“Retribution for the stress and raptures involved in the game itself, which he conducted in a celestial dimension, where his tools were incorporeal qualities.” 

“Somewhat deformed but enchanting, like a dachshunds crooked legs”

 “Finding fresh amusement in the movie business, that mysterious astrological business where they read scripts and look for stars.”

“…connected with the sexual urge….that with his chesss represented a special deflection of this urge, and fearing lest Luzhin should squander his precious power in releasing by natural means the beneficial inner tension.”

“Cities, which, for him, were all identical: hotel, taxi, a hall in a cafe of club.” 

“Unnecessary integument” 

“Feeding haphazardly and plainly.”

“In general life was so opaque and demanded so little effort from him” 

“Luzhin’s present plight was that of a writer or composer who, having assimilated the latest things in art at the beginning of his active career and and caused a temporary sensation with the originality of his devices, all at once notices that a change has imperceptibly taken place around him, that others, sprung from goodness knows where, have left him behind in the very devices where he recently led the way, and the he feels himself robbed, sees only ungrateful imitators in the bold artists who have overtaken him, and seldom understands that he himself is to blame, he who has petrified in his art which was once new but has not advanced since then.” 

“She caught herself shaking her head, and then accused herself of introducing a slightly false note.” 

“An extremely well-aimed pebble.”

“Trumpeted into his handkerchief, once, once more, loudly and juicily.”

“She wondered how she could show him….how could he be visualized in their drawing room, a man of different dimension, with a particular form and coloring that was compatible with nothing and no-one.” 

“Sincerely loved the daubed, artificial Russia she had rigged up.” 

“Her father liked her independence, and her particular way of lowering her eyes when she smiled.” 

“Whenever she came across something being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse.” 

“Her mother’s amazed, gleaming eyes.” 

“She tried to stop, to grasp at all his failings and peculiarities” 

“That dark, criminal - perhaps Masonic activity”

“Heroically mastering the difficulty of an alien sibilant”

“An unusual expression of martyred tenderness”

“But the mood emerged from behind the angular black twigs, a round, full bodied moon - a vivid confirmation of victory - and when finally Luzon let the balcony and stepped back into his room, there on the floor lay an enormous square of moonlight, and in that light — his own shadow.”

“He went all limp with pleasure….the waistcoat quivered touchingly with laughter.”

“The same expression was on his face — the expression of a person blowing a tiny feather from the face of an infant.” 

“Chocolate and cream squares.”

“Which ran over the tongue like granular faire and gummed the teeth with fragrant sugar, took immediate effect” 

“They proceeded with their separate games, as if mounting the sides of an icoselces triangle and destined at the decisive moment to meet at the apex.” 

“The luzhin who was wearily scattered around the rooom slumbered, but the luzhin who visualized a chessboard stayed awake and was unable to merge with his happy double.” 

“A slight movement was taking place perceptible to him alone, an evil differentiation of shadows.” 

“Obliterating a certain grouping that was already quite distinct.”

“The fabulous, harmful exertions”

“The head was a precious apparatus with a complex, mysterious mechanism.” 

“Suddenly, with the absurd and blissful suddenness usual in dreams”

“It diverted him especially as the witty repetition of a particular combination, which occurs, for example, when a strictly problem idea, long since discovered in theory, is repeated in a striking guise on the board in live play.” 

“The pawn was in such a dynamic position that it had acquired an absolutely monstrous force and had continued to grow and swell, balefully for his opponent.” 

“At first it went softly, softly, like muted violins.” 

“Then, without the last warning, a chord sang out tenderly.” 

“…he found a bewitching, brittle, crystalline combination - with which a gentle tinkle disintegrated at Turati’s first reply.”

“Threat and defense, threat and defense.” 

“What else exists? Fog, the unknown, non-being…”

“And the glass radiance, taking hold of him, threw him out into the cool dusk.”

“Distributed among the mirror in sections”

“A virgin-smooth pyramid of Paschal cottage cheese.”

“Filling the white bathtub, steaming tenderly and changing the tone of its murmur as the level rose.” 

“The drop of Ceylon falling from India’s nose.” 

“He found something acrobatic in their association.”

“It would be a silky shimmer, like moonlight on the sea.” 

“A minute-by-minute effort to arouse Luzhin’s curiosity about things in order to keep his head above the dark water, so that he could breathe easily.”

“In Spain, a country of sunshine, the gloomiest master of all had been born.”

“ There was a crush near the cloakrooms.” 

“You have an odd way of living here. The world is open on all four sides and here they are pounding out Charlestons on an extremely restricted fragment of floor.” 

“Several enormous seconds of confusion.” 

“Disporting themselves cautiously…”

“Fortunate, with heroic central heating.”

“The dampness of watercolors made the paper buckle unpleasantly.” 

“He drew his mother in law, and she was offended; he drew his wife in profile, and she said that if she looked like that there was no reason to marry her; on the other hand his father’s collar came out very well.” 

“…and that physiological sensation of harmony which is known so well to artists.” 

“Silently and concentratedly fed him chocolates, and Ivan silently and concentratedly ate them.” 

“He was thinking how to occupy the flabby child.” 

“He had not understood how exactly the reparation of a familiar theme would come out in practice.” 

“It is difficult to hide a thing: the other things are jealous and inhospitable, holding on firmly to their places and not allowing a homeless object, escaping pursuit, into a single cranny.” 

“Resort to the balsam of travel, that decisive factor used by romantic millionaires to cure their spleen.”

“A fog of words and metaphors, suppositions and arguments, were used to obscure the clear truth, which she always felt but was never able to express.” 

“She began to extract from various chambers of her memory.” 

“Spoke very fast and always as if he were obliged to express a torturous idea with all its riders and slippery appendages in the shortest possible period of time. “

“Unable to look at her without emotion, for in her he found a resemblance..”

“Accomplishing during that one minute, as sometimes happen, a long, leisurely journey.” 

“A conversation that had been interrupted at a comma and now gathered speed in time with the accelerating auto.” 

“A chair that was tenacious and quaggy.” 

“….recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to the recollections of love, a thousand games he had played in the past.” 

“The young man — you know the type, burst with sap but absolutely chaste—“

“His thirst was not yet slaked” 

“He crunched the key in the lock.”

“…she asked tenderly, and thought simultaneously that she had to powder her face, the guests would be here any minute.” 

“He dropped something. Then, far below, something tinkled tenderly and disintegrated.”

[steaksdiane]

I’m Your Man, Leonard Cohen

“beautiful world of certainty of action stood in exotic contrast to his own sense that the human condition is defeat and failure.”

[steaksdiane]

Sabbath’s Theater, Philip Roth

“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” 

“I’ve seen him churning out the dinners, grilling those kebabs in his sopping T-shirt. All agleam with grease, he turns me on.” 

“The terms of the deal were negoitated while they manipulated each other manually on the tarpaulin up at the Grotto.” 

“Once Sabbath had sanctioned for her the force that wants omore and more -- a force to whose wurging she was never wholly averse even ebfore Sabbath had come along -- men began to understand....she was powered by a carnality much like their own. Inside this woman was someone who thought like a man. And the man she thought like was Sabbath.” 

“The theatre of marragie...now she cherished those deadly routines for the counterweight they provided her recklessness. ...she had never been more appreciative of Matija’s stolidity.” 

“How her memory, her meaning expanded in Sabbath when he recalled the alacrity with which she had prepared each spring for Passover, all the work...”

“Hard to determine from the way she tackled her tasks whether it was she who was serving necessity or or necessity that was serving her.” 

“...twittering a series of notes as liquidly bright as a cardinal’s song, a tune she exuded no less naturally...”

“...while panting and gulping as though to drain Drenka dry.” 

[steaksdiane]

Among Women Only, Cesare Pavese

“His wife recalled him to propriety.”

“It struck me that she laughed in dialect, as counter-girls laugh, as I sometimes do myself.”

“By here mere act she concretized an abstract artistic situation into warm life. I don’t care where the personal fact has its origin...but if would be really too good if she did it from the suggestion in the play itself...”

“She made me talk about her in front of her daughter: about how the old lady ran things and gave advice to other peoples’ daughters. This sort of thing happens all the time....the old lady had made Gisella into her own image--and now, she, Gisella, was working on her daughters.” 

“Since the chairs and the crockery were also a part of the show, one was a bit uneasy, one felt exhibited in a show window.”

“She watched me avidly, open-mouthed, almost as if I were a handsome young man.”

“Imagine all the men nice and dignified and respectable. There’d never be any more flashes of truth.” 

“When people work they give themselves away. It’s difficult to fool someone about work. ‘What work?’ she said.”

“Other times when I thought these things I always consoled myself by saying that it wasn’t the things I had obtained or the place I had carved out for myself but the act of carving it out and obtaining them that made my life worthwhile. This, too, is a destiny.” 

[steaksdiane]

"The Value of Frustration": An Interview with Adam Phillips

“What psychoanalysis adds to the conversation that complicates it is the pleasure of unbearability, or the pleasure one gets from being unhappy. And so I suppose that’s the thing that has to be added in here, which is the quest for unhappiness.”

“I think it is that we’re bewitched by the idea of gratification and we’re bewitched by the idea that gratification is what we want and is the thing that will make us happy, as though there’s simply a sliding set of equations here.”

JE: One of things I’ve been thinking about is that although there is so much of a drive for happiness, obviously, in popular discourse—that we should always be wanting the next thing—there does seem to be at the moment some kind of counter-discourse that’s about somehow attenuating or getting away from one’s desire. I’m thinking of the Oprah culture, things like meditation, and yoga. As if happiness is sort of inversely proportionate to desire. It’s maybe a bastardized understanding of Buddhism, in a way. It’s as if we can somehow stop looking for the object, then we can be happy. It’s almost as if getting out of the time of desire, where you are constantly looking to the future, is going to solve things, because you can just “be in the moment.” So I was wondering what you think of this counter-discourse. Does it seem to be doing any useful work, or is it just another way of saying the same thing?

AP: It seems to me a good thing that people want to have conversations about the problems attached to desiring. I think what can’t work is being a sort of Buddhism tourist. I don’t think one is going to be able to simply appropriate, in a sort of supermarket-y way, other world religions as a solution to these problems. But I do think—and presumably the credit crunch has something to do with this—that it’s been very weird living as though there’s no such thing as scarcity, when in fact, in a way you could think there’s only scarcity. I think that people being able to have an ironic relationship to their own desire and also be aware of the fact (or what seems to me to be a fact anyway) that we don’t want what we want, in one sense, and also that we’re always going to want something else, and that satisfaction is not the answer to life, so to speak. Partly because there isn’t an answer to life, but partly because satisfaction isn’t always the point. So I think what people should be talking about is…people should be trying to produce more eloquent, persuasive accounts about the value of frustration, not the value of satisfaction. And I think that the equation of happiness with forms of satisfaction is the problem.

“There’s a very interesting idea that has unsurprisingly fallen out of circulation that Ernest Jones had, which was the idea of aphanisis, which is loss of desire. His idea was—and it seems to me a good one, and it’s one that psychoanalysis for some reason has dropped—is the idea that the individual’s terror is the absence of desire, and that desire might be something like the thing that Miles Davis said—that he woke up for years and years with music in his head and then one day he didn’t. Desire might be something that we wake up every day with, but one day we might not. The question would be then whether there are desireless states that aren’t depression, or that don’t need to be pathologized as a way of managing them. Because it would seem to me that it’s as though the fundamental terror that capitalism exploits is that we might not want anything. That’s the thing that we’ve all got to talk each other out of. That we really want things; in fact we want loads of things. I think, in that—the fervor of that—happiness gets recruited.”

[steaksdiane]

on the virgin suicides

yeah i know 

“We knew the girls were really women in disguise,.....that they understood love and even death,.....and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”

“A room dim at noon.”

And Ebert on it: [Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key," he notes.

[steaksdiane]

Sweet Days of Discipline, Fleur Jaeggy

“…I always felt, despite a certain inferiority on my part in comparison with her, that before becoming close we would have to go through certain phrases. Like in a battle. …. With us there was a kind of fanaticism the prevented any physical expression.”

“He folded his clothes exactly the way we used to fold them in our cupboards. With the same discipline and a sort of submission toward the different materials.”

“I made that gesture of submission in exemplarily automatic fashion….A sort of repugnance at our shared carnality crept over me.”

“…eyes were as blue as alpine lakes at dawn, childish and venomous.”

“She attached a value to her poverty, the way others might to their extravagance. She was truly possessed by her indigent state, all she had was herself, but it was more than enough, since the aromas of servitude bubbled up from her constantly, a natural predisposition. How small and slippery her feet were she she went quick as quick up and down the corridor, and how well she knew how to disappear when the reverend mother called her, barely whispering her name. Reverend mothers always speak very softly. And how she would genuflect sideways in the chapel! Her big eyes were well-suited to contemplating the crucifix. If she hadn’t been an informer, we would have believed, generously, in her magnanimous devotion and obedience.”

“There is a mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls. A double image, anatomical and antique.”

“Order was like ideas, something you possessed, something that possessed you.”

“Her smile, fragile, idiotic and affectionate, suggested vulnerability in the face of scholastic duties. She was sensual in a docile way.”

“There was also a protracted childishness about her, not the monstrous, poetic kind of childishness, but something sham and lazy.”

“How gracefully she could exaggerate.”

“The rule was that members of her family left the world because they had reached the natural conclusion of their lives. Her father and mother would grow old, very old, and then the inevitable. She got between the sheets and assumed her nightly poe and it was only natural that her guten nacht would be followed by the morning’s guten tag.”

“I had fun…but you can enjoy a fatuous cheerfulness despite the boredom, a funereal fervor.”

“I persevered in the pleasure of taking my sadness to the limit, the way one does with some practical joke. The pleasure of disappointment. It wasn’t new to me. I had been relishing it ever since I was eight years old, a boarder in my first, religious, school. And perhaps they were the best years, I thought. Those years of discipline. There was a kind of elation, faint but constant throughout all those days of discipline, the sweet days of discipline.”

[steaksdiane]

Cari Romm at the Atlantic

“Vyse: ... But science is this powerful force that can produce unpredictable results. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and back in that black-and-white horror film era, the great fear came from atomic energy. And Godzilla and all these sort of giant caterpillars and other things were supposed to have happened because of atomic energy. There was this fear, because of the bomb, of the power of science to create fearful creatures or to harm us in some way. That’s the equivalent of the typical villains, Halloween movie villains’ superhuman strength or unusual power. Science has that too. And so I think that’s part of the reason why scientists are sometimes placed in that fearful role.

Romm: Is there an equivalent modern fear? Something that’s taken the place of the giant radiation-infused monsters?

Vyse: I think that at the moment, the main fear is that science has an unholy alliance with profit motives—that with pharmaceutical companies and vaccines and GMOs, that science is being used in that way. There are a number of contemporary science-fiction films in which corporate interests [play a role]—for example, the first Alien movie, in which the corporation wants to keep the creature alive in order to see if there’s some commercial benefit to it. That’s the kind of thing that’s going on now.”

[steaksdiane]

Nabokov

(of king, queen, knave; quick new favorite)

“The first chapters of a journey are always detailed and slow. It’s middle hours are drowsy, and the last ones swift.”

“…whom she had long-since grown tired of dazzling.”

“’Fine animal,” he observed with revulsion.”

“…an unexpected and most fortunate gift: he could imagine with diagrammatic clarity his movements and those of Martha and coordinate them in advance with those concepts of time, space, and matter.”

“Blinded him with a blended smile, mistaking him for somebody.”

[steaksdiane]

Chris Bachelder

“In his garage where he did not kill himself he had constructed a prototype of a self-washing house window.” 

“George put in a terrible CD of his brother’s jam band, and Wesley replaced it immediately.”

“God help me, he thought, this is going to be a story about an animal in the house. He had already heard six or seven stories about animals in houses, identical in dramatic contour….for every man, he is part of a long and narrative tradition, and yet for each particular man in each particular house, the event is not allegory. It is an urgent and singular encounter, exceptional and not repeatable.” 

“They read the caption, ‘Live from Washington, DC,’ and saw that the periods were squares. The font, quaint and earnest, elicited a warm and formless memory of safety.” 

“His belt jingled like a sleigh on the eaves.” 

“Robert’s neighbor had sliced himself wickedly with a hedge trimmer. There had been blood on the roof.” 

“They had both lived in the paradise of a painless body for years without even realizing it.” 

“It was a partial and genteel confession of his depravity, and it trailed off into silence and obscene ideation.” 

“Pitching a remote onto a large bed was a satisfying hotel activity, and Gil retrieved it so that he could do it once more.” 

“Seriously, George said, “Feels like I’m standing on a coil of rope, man.”

“By night it looked ceremonial, festive, as if it had once stood for something holy but now just stood prettily for itself.” 

“Wesley emerged like a man presumed dead through the parking lot to the flickering brightness of the convenience store.”

“He carted around an oxygen tank, but he still had the power to humiliate Robert.” 

[steaksdiane]

Judee Sill

“Um, this song I just wrote a little while ago, and someone told me they heard it on the radio today-- it just came out two days ago, and um... I wanted to write a song about this principle: the lower down you go to gain your momentum from, the higher up it will propel ya, but I couldn't think of a way to say that poetically... and I happened to stumble across this real obscure theological fact, and that is that Jesus was a cross maker. That really got in my head.”

[steaksdiane]

Phil Elverum

Been telling everyone that I am but a blindfolded passenger in the lord’s buick.

“With a brilliance you would have deepened.” 

“I am sobbing into my eggs again.”