Hefty reminders of corporeal nature. I’m always amazed by how successfully we do in fact banish all that from daily discourse. We all have our little dramas in the bathroom most days. Something’s not quite right. You can see the way a certain bit is going. And we’ve all got our back pains and our knee aches and so on, and yet people can spend the whole day together and it’s never mentioned—everyone’s got their little cargo of health anxieties, their little cargo of entropy.

Well, all the voices are mine. All the characters are just shards of the fractured me. That’s why I sympathize with them all, even the monsters.

At this moment I feel obliged to acknowledge a part of life that’s not subject to fantasies or projections and doesn’t care about how anyone sees it. I’m reading from a book of Simone Weil’s letters, Waiting for God. It was introduced by Leslie Fiedler, and he says something that I like very much:

This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the “imaginary,” our own dreams and self-deceits, the Utopias of the politicians, or the futile promises of future reward and consolation which the misled blasphemously call “religion.” The soul has a million dodges for protecting itself against the acceptance and love of the emptiness, that “maximum distance between God and God,” which is the universe; for the price of such acceptance and love is abysmal misery. And yet it is the only way.

[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.

[...] The novel ideally is not reducible to the political. It’s a journey toward meaning that transcends the frame of politics. Blood Meridian—just to think of a great novel that traverses the political—is not simply a book about the violent policies of the American government paying out for scalps on the Western frontier. It takes up subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds of systemic violence a work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justified or even really explained.

[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.

There’s a passage in The Ask where Milo likens himself to a figure in Hopper’s Nighthawks, and he mentions how, as a painter, he’d always described it in terms of “the stark play of shadow and light.” This is a perfectly appropriate way of looking at Hopper’s work, but then Milo says, “to be the fucker on the stool is another kind of stark entirely.” It’s a funny line, a throwaway almost, but it strikes me as an encapsulation of the burden of writers working today. Yeah, we’re concerned with form, with language, with allusiveness and scaffolding—the legacy of modernist and postmodernist writing—but a lot of us also want, to a degree maybe not countenanced by more playful antecedents, to get at the starkness of being “the fucker on the stool.” That seems like the project David Foster Wallace was working on for his entire career: getting at that, at how the methods of getting at it sometimes work at cross-purposes to the goal.

I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.

[...] You have to have that gift every now and again. And when the gift comes, you open yourself to it and the words just flow and you love it and that’s what the whole process is about. It’s really a way of going outside of myself. The sculpting and the chiseling and the work is more of a different discipline altogether. And I get tired of myself. I’m too aware of my limitations there and I’m always working against my limitations. So it’s claustrophobic for a while. And I wonder, is it ever going to get any better, because it’s me talking to me, what do I know? So you need that infusion from somewhere else, whether you call it the muse, or the unconscious, or whatever. It has to swing in, you have to be visited, I think. At least this writer does.