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[...] Someone has to defend the murderers, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them. And my firm defended them all, and the giant absolved them and charged them a fair price. That’s democracy, you fools, I told them, it’s time you understood. For better or for worse. And instead of buying a yacht with the money I made, I started a literary magazine. And although I knew that the money troubled the consciences of some of the young poets of Barcelona and Madrid, when I had a free moment I would come up silently behind them and touch their backs with the tips of my fingers, which were perfectly manicured (no longer, since even my nails are ragged now), and I would whisper in their ears: non olet. It doesn’t smell. The coins earned in the urinals of Barcelona and Madrid don’t smell. The coins earned in the toilets of Zaragoza don’t smell. The coins earned in the sewers of Bilbao don’t smell. Or if they smell, they smell of money. They smell of what the giant dreams of doing with his money. Then the young poets would understand and nod, even if they didn’t entirely follow what I was saying, even if they didn’t comprehend every jot and tittle of the terrible, timeless lesson I’d meant to drum into their silly little heads. And if any of them failed to understand, which I doubt, they understood when they saw their pieces published, when they smelled the freshly printed pages, when they saw their names on the cover or in the table of contents. It was then that they got a whiff of what money really smells like: like power, like the gracious gesture of a giant. And then there were no more jokes and they all grew up and followed me.
By then I think I could recite Don Pío’s story by heart, periturae parcere chartae, and still I understood nothing. My life seemed to be progressing through the same realms of mediocrity as usual, but I knew that I was walking in the land of destruction.
[...] Do you have relatives in Sonora? I said. No, I don’t think so, she said. So what will you do then? I said. Look for a job and a place to live, said Cesárea. And is that all? I said. Is that all fate has in store for you, Cesárea, my love? I said, although I probably didn’t say my love, I may just have thought it. And Cesárea gave me a look, a brief little sideways glance, and said that the search for a place to live and a place to work was the common fate of all mankind. Deep down you’re a reactionary, Amadeo, she said (but she said it fondly). And we carried on like that for a while. As if we were arguing, but not arguing. As if we were blaming each other for something, but not blaming each other. [...]
[...] I met dealers who were interested in my work. But I wasn’t very interested in my work. Around that time I painted three fake Picabias. They were perfect. I sold two and kept one. Painting the fakes, I saw a faint light, but it was a light, which is the important thing. With the money I made I bought a Kandinsky print and a batch of arte povera, possibly also forgeries. [...]
lol
Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand [...] walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you'll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him ...
epigraph, on writing a novel
[...] It employs none of the fictive habits, the prompts and crutches and connective tissue of narrative. Time slips around like an eel. Place is bulldozed. Characters have no identity save for the words they speak and they speak the speakable with tireless abandon. There is no communion, no closure. There are rants. Mad soliloquies. Offended ripostes, offensive parries. Almost everyone accounted for is indignant, baffled, enraged, duplicitous, misunderstood, or misunderstanding. [...]
[...] They are both so miserable and distracted in their marriage that they harbor a flatulent drifter in their home, both thinking he is the other's father. [...]
i didnt even notice this lmao but it's so funny (dicephalis couple)
We are ... swept along. Mr. Gaddis confessed that he wanted us to be, in this flow of unremitting talk -- "might miss a lot but that's what life is, after all? Missing something that's right before you?" His characters can't or won't communicate in any meaningful way. [...]
During all the years he worked on J R, he was dutifully laboring for a paycheck from the corporate machine -- Kodak, Ford, IBM, Pfizer ("an operation of international piracy") -- writing ad copy and position papers [...] He knew the cant of marketing well and was ever alert to systems of speech, of persuasion, of obfuscation, seeing and portraying the American way of waste -- the waste of nature, talent, energy, the waste that markets, systems, management demand for gtowth.
—My book! My book! That’s all we ever hear from you my book, well let me just tell you something that’s to don’t be surprised if somebody else has a book, that’s all. Just don’t be surprised! And she fixed unflinching on the passing gantlet of apartment house existences dismantled and laid out side by side on aprons of grass affording the embattled privacy of city stoops, sheltered by awnings of rippling yellow plastic blazoning heraldic initials in old world black letter, mounting names discreetly hidden a bare year since in the Brooklyn telephone directory on sentry carriage lamps, ships’ lanterns in authentic replica, a livid pastel wagon wheel swooning at a rustic angle, a demented wheelbarrow choked with stalked memories of flowers, a family of metal flamingoes, of ducks, of playful elves, till with a narrow miss for the cast iron potbellied stove painted pink and sporting a naked geranium stem from its lid the car left the pavement.—Just don’t act too surprised.