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INTERVIEWER
Do you try to push through a first draft as quick as possible, or do you take your time with it?
PARKS
These days, to stay organized, I outline. Images or actions, actions or dialogue, it’s all the same. In the first draft, it doesn’t need to be written right, it just needs to be written down. I’m listening, I’m watching. And I’m saying, okay, sure, yes to everything, and then at a certain point there’s writing. In the first draft I remind myself, Anything goes. Everything grows. I’m in the garden. Later, in the second draft, I take out my “sword of discrimination” and I put on my favorite music and I cut everything that doesn’t fit.
[...] It wasn’t just Handler’s politics that repelled her, it was the entire ideology these life-hacking white boys espoused. Unable to explain their privilege by any other means, they had convinced themselves and others that everything that had landed in their laps had landed there not through basic structural imbalance but through some sort of philosophy. Tech-bros weren’t overpaid and over-lauded because they’d had everything handed to them on a plate, went the accepted wisdom, but because they’d focused, or lived their vision, or actualised. Because they’d done it, anyone could do it. Because anyone could do it, anyone who didn’t do it had only themselves to blame.
i mean i dont disagree with this obviously but the style feels heavy-handed?
this also glosses over the potential contradiction in "because they’d done it, anyone could do it" - surely they dont actually think anyone could do it; they think they are one of a lucky few with the natural talent. but they also know that feels unfair so they cloak it in pretensions of universality despite not actually believing in it. idk. should be investigated more.
‘Let’s just bear in mind,’ said Hugo, ‘that much as you might like to throw your weight around with regards to offering or withdrawing your support for my campaign, which I assume is what you’re implying with all this vague talk of interests, your project is going to take a hell of a lot longer to complete than mine, and while you’re completing it you’re going to want someone who’s sympathetic to your cause in a position where they might actually be able to help you, so let’s stop pretending that my getting elected is solely of benefit to me.’
‘Of course,’ said Jones. ‘But let’s also not pretend that you’re the only one who can help.’
Hugo thought about this for as long as he could manage without giving the impression he’d been thrown by it.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘How many people are you backing?’
‘Like I said, Mr Bennington. We’re very much results driven.’
it's small but i kinda like it
[...] She found herself wondering how they had got here. There had been, she remembered, once, an intimacy – one that had existed in the very space they now used as a forum of harm. She remembered how they used to text each other at parties, even when they were standing side by side, maintaining a closeness right under the gaze of the people they were speaking to; how, for a long time, they’d sustained a cautious flirtation over Twitter, each of them thrilling a little at what was both concealed and suggested in that tentative public affection. When, she wondered, had a channel of affinity become a vector of hostility? Text messages and tweets had become open-ended, all-night conversations in bed. Then the bed had become a place for sleeping, and the dinner table a place for talking about what happened online, until finally the internet was a place to work out what happened at the dinner table, in bed, between minds that now couldn’t reach each other. Now, here they were, yards apart in a public place, dealing each other deeply private, deeply personal wounds.
‘OK,’ said Hugo as the car eased up to the kerb and he took in the scene, ‘I’m seeing an ambulance.’
Teddy didn’t look at the ambulance but instead checked his tablet for news of it.
‘I’m not seeing anything that would suggest an ambulance,’ he said.
‘I’m literally looking at the ambulance, Teddy.’
Teddy tapped around. ‘Looking at it doesn’t tell us anything,’ he said.
‘It tells us it fucking exists,’ said Hugo.
‘Right. An ambulance exists. I could have told you that without seeing one, no? It’s irrelevant. That ambulance could just be there as a matter of protocol. Visual confirmation of its presence is, like, literally useless at this point.’
‘Maybe we should briefly speculate,’ said Hugo.
i think this would be funnier if the fact that Teddy didn't look at the ambulance were conveyed more obliquely & w/o the all-seeing eye. like instead of that second line, something a little more basic/perfunctory: "Teddy pulled out his tablet and tapped at it for a few scconds."
[...] I was already aware of a great Somethingness that was at work in the world. The signs were everywhere: the way I saw symphonies of color when I closed my eyes to think; the way ocean tides felt sentient, like a creature to whose moods I submitted my body; the discovery that air looks invisible but a bright light beamed in a dark room reveals millions of particles swirling.
I finally picked up Fear and Trembling when I was maybe twenty-five and living in New York. I had a lot of free hours to read at the time, and I was in the mood for existentialism - I'd lately experienced one of the radical life upheavals that tend to happen when you're twenty-five. Instead of getting engaged, my boyfriends of five years and I had broken up and moved out, and my future, my home life, my social circle, my reading, my time were up for reinvention. I quit my job and moved uptown and started going to classes with people who worked for hours on a single sentence and talked about devoting themselves to catching inspiration and channeling it into book form. I'd been working a corporate job; now I had a friend who put on a three-piece suit before sitting down at his desk to write, out of respect for the Muse. In a span of eighteen months, my life had grown unrecognizable.
I was happy and I was also burning up with questions, walking around New York, looking for a sign. [...] I waited for the real moment when I'd know what to build a life on and how to be. It didn't come. I looked around: most people seemed to be waiting, too, though they rarely used terms like "epiphany" or "conviction". I waited some more.
indeed
This is an entire subgenus of subway passenger, the one who uses the purgatory of platforms and crowded cars to explain how they were saved p..]
[...] I appreciate the acknowledgement that on the average Tuesday morning most people are waiting in more than one way: waiting to get to their stop, but also waiting for news, for inspiration, for intervention, for a promotion, for a diagnosis, for breakfast. THe pamphleteers understand that all suspended desire, in some sense, feels the same.
[...] The people at this church were lit from behind their eyes. They seemed to be moved by the joy of a single certainty, like a cedar tent pole planted in a field, stillness at the center of swaying silk. As much as I insisted that I was no longer one of them, there was an echo of myself I was remembering by sitting in church, and I needed to stay close it. [...]
People often use the word "ecstasy" when talking about being in the presence of divinity, a word whose root, ekstasis, means to stand outside oneself, to be beside oneself, beyond oneself. Lying there, contemplating my knobbly ceiling, I was comically inside myself. I thought something might come from outside me and penetrate to my deepest bones, to shoot wisdom into me or wrench a doubt out of me. Swoop in here, I told the ceiling knob, give me something to work with. Please, please call.
No one called. Nothing happened. It was just me, obediently talking to the ceiling.