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[...] the stories that captivated and unsettled me were those that remained irreducible. In these, there were no codes to be cracked, no definitive meaning to be exposed—just the faintest sense that the surface of the text was undergirded by a vast system of roots that must remain forever invisible.
I worry, once again, that my oblique approach has managed only to muddle things. I suppose I’ve been trying to suggest that subtlety is always a sign of mystery, and that our attitude toward the former is roughly commensurate with our tolerance for the latter. I have come to regard it as something of a dark art, a force of nature that can be summoned but never fully harnessed, and can backfire at the slightest misstep. Anyone can pick up a bullhorn and make her intent clear to all, but to attempt something subtle is to step blindfolded into the unknown. You are always teetering on the brink of insanity. You are always working on a wire strung across an abyss, hoping to make it from one end to the other without losing your balance, or your mind.
Perhaps this is another way of saying that subtlety is a transaction of faith. The artist must have faith that her effects will be perceived in the way she intends; the reader must trust that what he detects, beneath the surface of the text, is not merely a figment of his imagination. The disciple must come to believe that the whispers he hears in the wilderness are not the wind, or the devil, but the voice of his Creator. All religion, all forms of love, depend on this leap.
In the guest bathroom, I’d first pile the four rugs outside the door to be cleaned later. I would clean the toilet first, which sat across from a large, double-headed standing shower lined with river rock. Henry said he’d clean that himself. After refolding the towels, I’d wipe down the corner Jacuzzi tub, which, as far as I could tell, they never used. They used the hot tub on the porch, Henry explained, gesturing to the swimsuits hanging on the door. After the tub, I would clean their mirror, big enough that I had to kneel on the counter to reach the top, and dust the lights, double sinks, and cluttered counter. The wife’s side had several clear plastic drawers and stands with various shaped holes to hold brushes and other beauty tools I didn’t recognize. Henry’s side of the sink had multiple medication holders—the compartmental kind with the first letter of the day of the week on top. He had several toothbrushes, and there was splattered toothpaste everywhere.
since Henry is home when she cleans
When I’d moved into the homeless shelter, I had called Melissa, one of my oldest friends, and she listened as I went through my plans for rebuilding my life. Nearly all of those plans involved the help of some form of government assistance: food stamps, WIC checks for milk, gas vouchers, low-income housing, energy grants, and childcare.
“For what?” I asked, peeping through the shelter’s worn blue curtain at a deer walking through the backyard. Mia napped in the next room.
“My tax money’s paying for all of that,” she said, then repeated, “so you’re welcome.”
i've said this before but i really do think that the idea of "post-tax" income is incredibly misleading and awful. taxation is destruction! not redistribution! all labour markets are artificial!
“Oh, really?” I asked, feigning interest. Donna enjoyed Mary Kay oils, which left a film that stuck to the side of the bathtub like Velcro, collecting every hair, every dead skin cell that came off her. It was hard to have conversations with her without seeing flashes of it. I never knew if she expected me to stop and talk or continue cleaning while having a conversation with the person whose pubic hairs and leg hair stubble I’d have to scrub from the ring of her jetted tub.
[...] In a post from February 2017 with the heading "Building Global Community," Mark Zuckerberg was ostensibly reacting to the trauma caused by Donald Trump's presidency. [...] "Are we all building the world we all want?" The sentence's rhetorical test lies not in its content but rather inits form, which subtly extends the reach of its pronoun. Though the speaker of the sentence's first "we all" seems to refer only to Facebook (the previous sentence is about the company's tireless work on products and updates), the second "we all" consolidates the business and its customers indiscriminately in a single group. The merger complete, the users are suddenly shifted into an active mode: global businesses and users build the world side by side, united beyond all questions of power. And isn't it true that "we" are actively involved? We all maintain our profiles and press our like buttons, don't we?
love this
The emergence of modern management theory coincides with the birth of business consulting, an indication of their shared genesis in the new culture of efficiency. [...] Harrington Emerson (1906), Gilbreth Inc. (1912), and Booz Allen HAmilton (1914), were founded. The nearly parallel development of management theory and consulting can be convincingly explained by the fact that the latter was presented as a special form of expertise with which the newcomers promised to provide orientation to executives bewildered by social and technological upheavals. [...]
[...] The emergence of the novel in the sixteenth century and its development since the eighteenth century are inconceivable without the incorporation of economic and media-related conditions. In particular, the realistic novel owes its existence to the upheavals in economics and media in connection with the formation of the bourgeois class. The same goes for literature today: its relevance owes entirely to its dependence on the social and economic contexts in which writing takes place. Since the eighteenth century, literature has classically stood for a lofty realm above economics, an idealized conception that literature itself requires. But this realm apart is tainted from the outset since it attempts to reject the economic conditions attached to its genesis. As the warrantor of a liberated subjectivity and society, literature is credible only if it exposes itself to the very thing that this emancipation simultaneously impedes and annihilates. This is particularly true of contemporary capitalism, which destroys precisely that which modern literature and art traditionally seek to preserve or even to call forth in the first place: the reconcilation of the past and the future, subject and nature, society and language, work and love.
hell yeah
Steve Clayton: "If Microsoft was a children's story, it would be about a collection of wizards who live inside a castle. They'd invent amazing things that would be the source of progress to many people, but nobody would know where these magical inventions came from."
It would be useless to unmask this story or object to it as an unacceptable simplification that amounts to infantilization. The if-then formulation calls on the imagination and the willing suspension of disbelief familiar from literature. It's also unclear whether the narrator in this example is a wizard himself or just a messenger bringing tidings into the world from the programmers and engineers, the real wizards in the enchanted Microsoft castle. You can reject this communication strategy and refuse to allow yourself to be placed in the position of a child. But that neither negates its claim to validity, nor is its power in any way diminished. It simply requires others who are willing to be enchanted - or even just our belief that these others exist.
idk why but i like this
In the more recent fiction of a pacified Europe, a smooth EU-niversality prevails in place of the old strife within and between countries. Handke, such a late modernist that the party appears to have ended, is an Austrian who lives in Paris; but can you regularly identify the city or country his peripatetic characters are passing through, metafictional preoccupations in train? Much of the postwar European fiction, some of it very good, that we might read as World Literature — Perec, Bernhard, Nádas, Nooteboom, Jelinek, Marías, Sebald, now Knausgård — is extremely psychological in character and only vestigially social and geographical. Typically the narrator is a monologist, resembling the author, who tells of personal turmoil amid social stasis. He recognizes himself, with snobbish self-approbation, as a part of a stable polyglot pan-European elite; most other inhabitants of his country, as of the neighboring ones, are unthreatening idiots who turn on the TV after returning from work. The younger ones take drugs and dance to club music on weekends; the older ones go on package tours before dying of cancer. Nietzschean last men (and women), they can be roused neither to the self-promotion nor to the gun violence that lend spice to American life. Their tribune is Michel Houellebecq. Other big-name European novelists write books about personal relationships and international culture, and not much in between. Resigned to terminal minorness, this is a European novel written by, about, and for literary people who attain a critical mass only at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and then without taking the opportunity to riot against the European Central Bank. Many suicides occur in its pages. The wonder is there aren’t more.
dont fully get this but i enjoyed it