View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Grown-ups buy line-caught salmon, they don’t read Dialectic of Enlightenment. History has stopped and we live, don’t we, in the best of all possible worlds? In that best of all possible worlds, at the end of history, wrote Fredric Jameson in Late Marxism (1990), ‘the question about poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the pool’. [...]
referencing a scene from Franzen's The Corrections
[...] Probably her husband had his own dull map of roads not traveled. You grow conventional in middle life. Choices made over time present themselves as branches running off the solid oaks that line the overground route to Kensal Rise. You grow gray, and thick in the hips. Yet, on happier days, she saw the same small, high breasts, the same powerful long legs, the familiar and delicious brown animal looking back at her, almost never ill and very strong. How much of this was reality? How much delusion? This was the question of the age, as far as she could tell. And the difference between now and being twenty was she was never sure, not from one moment to the next. Next step Canonbury. Next stop menopause and no more denim. Or was it? Blind worms churning mud through their bodies is a better metaphor for what happens than road not taken or branches unsprouted. But no metaphor will cover it really. It's hopeless.
"We live in love."
But it was ridiculous that they were in love! They were nineteen! What were they gong to do: just stay in love all through college and perhaps even beyond, two people who had grown up practically right next door to each other? Just stick it out all the way to the end, a la some pre-Freudian Victorian novel? Thus missing a myriad of sexual and psychological experiences along the way? That was literally crazy!
"It's not literally crazy. Mum's been with Dad since they were fifteen. She had me when she was seventeen!"
"Darryl, your mum stacks shelves at Iceland."
But how had she let that come out of her mouth!
From above came the noise of the workers laboring, hammering and nailing, creating surplus value for bloated plutocrats, while down below two anarchists [...]
[thought: joke about searching for something with better exchange value, not use value, after someone has finally read marx]
"Only guy I know who still owns a beeper."
McRae looked up over his half-moons with a wide-open, undimmed enthusiasm that made even his gentlest son fear for him.
"Really? A lot of the guys at work have 'em."
"[...] You wanna know the secret? You do it for the feeling you get in the last minute. That's what you're looking for. Look, our lives are easy, right? We switch a button, the light comes on. Press another button, food gets cooked. But you gotta dig deeper than that when you run - into some deeper part of you. That part exists in everyone. Just a matter of finding it again. [...]"
on running marathons
[...] Yet if he could only wipe those American years, that woman ... the wrong path, the years wasted. But what was the kind of pain you just had to live with. He'd give everything on this earth to be twenty-one again, to step into the river of time with Olivia, but have them both be the same age, and have eerything else exactly as it was now, except with those lost years rolled tight in his fist, not yet, unraveled.
[...] When you're young you try to prove you can do it all, anything - you throw everything and the kitchen sink in there! You're profligate! You've got this sense of unlimited potential. You think you contain multitudes, and in my experience you kind of do, at that age, because you're still sufficiently flexible to contain multitudes, you haven't drawn lines around your shit yet and there is still something ineffable about you, something that can make space for whatever is not you. But that crowd inside thins out. Lord, does it thin out. [...]
Granta 100
by
Granta
by
Granta
Granta 100
by
Granta
by
Granta
Granta 100
by
Granta
by
Granta
I cite this as evidence of the longevity of my connection with the magazine, but in fact the link goes back even further, pre-dating the acquisition of the missing Granta 1. In 1979 I was living in Oxford trying to finish a doctoral thesis and teaching in various Oxford colleges as a jobbing lecturer. I had just had my first novel accepted by a London publisher, but I was going to have to wait until January 1981 to see it published. I was reviewing books, writing short stories, and was seized with a sense of being engaged with literary life in a way that I haven’t fully replicated since. I read everything. I bought all the little magazines. Nothing stirred in the undergrowth of the literary world that didn’t attract my beady-eyed attention. At the same time, Susan, my wife, was working at Oxford University Press, running the publicity and marketing for the English Literature and Oxford Poetry lists. One night she came home from work with news of a new literary magazine that was starting up: she had met the editor, some American guy, who was looking for advertising, and she had decided to take a page in support.
<3
ne day I discovered that my uncle also had a library. Or at least there was a room called ‘the library’, which contained a wall of books, and a long table and several chairs. The room was musty but clean. No one ever used it, like front parlours in the suburbs.
I took in the books, which were hardbacks. Poetry, literature, a lot of left-wing politics, many published by Victor Gollancz. They’d been bought in London by one of my uncles and shipped to Pakistan. The uncle, who lived in Yasir’s house but now ‘roamed around all day’, had developed schizophrenia. In his early twenties he’d been a brilliant student, but his mind had deteriorated.
I sat at the library table and opened the first book, the contents crumbling and falling on the floor, as though I had opened a packet of flour upside down. I tried other volumes. In the end my reading schedule was determined by the digestion of the local worms. As it happened, there was one book less fancied by the worms than others. It was the Hogarth edition of Civilization and Its Discontents, which I had never read before. It occurred to me, as I went at it, that it was more relevant to the society in which I was presently situated than to Britain. Whatever: I was gripped from the first sentence, which referred to ‘what is truly valuable in life…’
What was truly valuable in life? Who wouldn’t have wanted to know that? I could have ripped at those pages with my fingernails in order to get all of the material inside me. Of course, I was maddened by the fact that whole sentences had been devoured by the local wildlife. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to return to London was that I wanted to read it properly. In the end, the only way to satisfy my habit—if I didn’t want to ask my father for books, which I didn’t—was to read the same pages over and over.
<3<3