View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
I have a theory of the first novel now, that it is something that makes the writer, even as the writer makes the novel. That it must be something you care about enough to see through to the end. I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit - an excuse in finding out what you really care about. Many student writers become obsessed with aesthetics, but I find that is usually a way to avoid whatever it is they have to say. [...]
We are not what we think we are. The stories we tell of ourselves are like thin trails across something that is more like the ocean. A mask afloat on the open sea.
There were moments before the memory's return when I experienced what I now understand as its absence as not a gap but a whole other self, a whole other me. [...]
[...] He had called the station from inside the first tower to describe what was happening. The host quickly thanked him for calling in and then said, in a bit of a panic, Why are you on the phone with me? Why aren't you on your way down?
You don't understand, the man said. The whole center of the building is gone. I can't go down. That's why I'm calling.
I don't know how to describe the feeling I had in the silence that followed, except that it was approximately the length it would take you to read this sentence aloud.
[...] The point of it is in the possibility of being read by someone who could read it. Who could be changed, out past your imagination's limits. Hannah Arendt has a definition of freedom as being the freedom to imagine that which you cannot yet imagine. The freedom to imagine that as yet unimaginable work in front of others, moving them to still more action you can't imagine, that is the point of writing, to me. You may think it is humility to imagine your work doesn't matter. It isn't. Much the way you don't know what a writer will go on to write, you don't know what a reader, having read you, will do.
I wanted to lead my students to another world, one where people value writing and art more than war, and yet I knew then and I know now that the only thing that matters is to make that world here. There is no other world. This is the only world we are in. This revisable country, so difficult to change, so easily changed.
He must have twenty years on me, I decided, coasting on his calm and fine lines both.
A trauma surgeon. What does it take to push someone that way? You don’t avoid the most unexpected tragedies; you invite them. What is there to fear. You know you will see the worst. You have control. Resurrecting lives. Setting up stories. Dealing with pain.
I thought about how my father once told me that he found coolness as an old man. The story I’d always heard was that he’d lost it. No, he said, cool came to him when he decided to no longer go after things. He set it up so that everyone would have to find him. And they did. He went full detachment. I think my mother caused this desire of his to withhold. He gave her more effort than he’d ever given anything, but that didn’t make her stay.
He changed himself when it was already too late to become what he thought the person who abandoned him wanted. So much character development happens this way. Self-cancellation. Don’t love me. You’ll get no results.
Graves told me there is a thing, like the cinéma du corps, called the cinema of attractions. A term coined by a guy named Tom Gunning. Something like you present a series of images to tell a story, without worrying too much about the words. “Exhibitionist confrontation rather than diegetic absorption.” He brought up a short movie on YouTube with his phone: “How It Feels to Be Run Over,” shot in 1900 by the Hepworth Manufacturing Company. A motorcar crawling towards imminent collision with the screen.
Graves’s ad hoc curriculum worked with what was at hand. We had 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman, Anna Karenina, Bandits in Milan, Charlie Bubbles, The Red and the White. They were all dated 1968. There was a graphic printed on the faded pieces of paper that lined the bottom of the box. It had the digits “2” and “1” in red and orange arranged like a sun, 21212121212121212121. Below, “21e Festival International du Film: Le Rendez-vous Mondial du Cinéma. Cannes 1968. Du 10 au 24 Mai.” And then, taped below that: “Interrompu par solidarité avec les étudiants et les travailleurs, le Festival de Cannes est annulé.”
honestly jealous
“Oh,” she notices and says to Paul, “you found his old Pentax box camera.” She approves. “He loved that camera and took so many pictures with it.” Then she notices a book resting in the satin. “What’s this?” she asks.
“Favorite book, you said,” Paul mutters quietly.
“Capital?” she whispers. Even Auntie knows Karl Marx.
“Ah yeah, it was the book he was reading these days.”
“Favorite?”
“He always said the book he was reading was his favorite.”
Auntie’s exasperated, but she smiles and looks around. She slips the book out and hugs the cover to her bosom. “Do you want to get us in trouble?” she squeaks, bowing three times.
“But—”
“Bow three times,” she interjects. “Customary to do so,” she instructs, and moves away with Marx under cover. Outside, she shoves the un-American book at Paul and hisses, “Get rid of this.”
;lol