inspo/characterisation
Lucia Berlin,
Helen Garner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Michael Ondaatje,
Rachel Kushner,
Francesco Pacifico,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Elizabeth Hardwick
nice character descriptions (fiction, memoir, journalism)
An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.
im shocked i didnt save this from telex from cuba? i think it's in there? it's so good
Marcel bequeathed his aunt Leonie’s couch to a bordello, and whenever he visited the place, to tease Rachel of my Lord (but never buy her services), it unnerved him to see tarts flopped on its pink crushed velvet cushions, even if there was maybe nothing more perfect and appropriate than pink velvet plush flattening under a whore’s ass. De la Mazière was different. It didn’t matter to him whether he reclined on plush furniture in the lobby of the Ritz or in a squalid St. Denis cathouse. Ate his steak at Maxim’s or at a colonial outpost in Djibouti, a backwater of salt factories and scorching temperatures on the bacterial mouth of the Red Sea. Properly seared steak is everywhere the same. A traitor satisfies his tastes, gets his high- and his low-grade pleasures wherever he can. In Havana, de la Mazière found occupied Paris all over again. Amidst its nude and adorned girls, morphine slushees and luxury hotel suites, he sensed a vague but unshakeable dread darkening the reverie and lawlessness. Despite the city’s obvious, surreal wealth, he sniffed wretched poverty. Tall and neon-pulsing casinos staking the heart of a metropolis ringed in desperation: miles and miles of neighborhoods with no electricity, no running water, and smokily typhoid trash fires. It was occupied Paris, with Americans in Cadillacs instead of Germans in Mercedes. A sultrier climate and starrier nights, purple-mouthed girls, a cinema palace with a retractable roof. They even had Obelisk and Olympia books on Calle Belga, and obsolete French pornography—not sequestered in L’Enfer, on the top floor of the Bibliothèque Nationale, but displayed at the bookstalls, their pages riffling in the damp ocean breeze.
his characterisation is so good
He used outworn idiom: "Lombard Street to a china orange," "All round China to get to Charing Cross"; "The Old Lady"even"of Threadneedle Street": phrases outdated before his time, which he cultivated and kept going if not alive. Still spoke of Turkey as "the sick man of Europe," though the entire Continent was a casualty ward long since. His sympathies were with the manageable distances of the past rather than the extravagant reach of the future. The future had been something to talk about, one foot safely on the fender.
It was easy for youth to scent this out and condemn. Less easy to feel for what was human in it, let alone pitiful.
god
It was now that Ted Tice's life began to alter aspect and direction. He was used to thinking of his life--I have done this, how could I have done that--like everybody. Barely twenty, he would have imagined he had overcome a fair amount. There was Father, loudly angered; Mother, all untidy woe. Then there was his aptitude: a teacher coming round after school, "The boy has unusual aptitude." The boy, out of all the others. His name had been printed on a list, and the award covered everything, even the books except, that is, for a coat; and the university was near the North Sea.
Due to the unearthly flatness where a city had been famously incinerated, the events he already called his life were growing inconsiderable before he had practised making them important. This derived from a sense not of proportion but of profound chaos, a welter in which his own lucky little order appeared miraculous but inconsequential; and from a revelation, nearly religious, that the colossal scale of evil could only be matched or countered by some solitary flicker of intense and private humanity.
neil
"I don't tell her a thing of that sort. It seems to recoil." Caroline Bell having discovered in childhood that achievements can be transformed to hostile weapons. ("Everything falls in your lap, why should you care about a life like mine?") A childish struggle between the wish to show, or tell, and the need to hoard silent strength had long since been resolved. She said, "I'm not sure I can explain that."
Caro would have known what to say: not the right thing, but the truth. Caro would have spoken truly or kept a true silence. In accepting to be the sweet one of the sisters, tame and tractable, Grace had by no means intended to cast herself away. She had enjoyed being sweet, and being thought sweet, but had believed she held in reserve an untapped bounty of more difficult humanity; which was not now forthcoming. Ted's suffering was not obscure to her--indeed, her imagination occasionally played out such matters in some Austro-Hungarian empire of the heart. But she could rouse no true instinct with which to feel his pain or comfort him. And was suddenly afraid that sweet people might have little imagination.
On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation from habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.
that line is funny but the overall sentiment is very moving
Passing through decreed phases, Margaret Tice was first a bride, next a young housewife, and then an expectant mother. Later, would be constrained to talk of schools, join a tennis club and a committee. Would hear herself say, as if it were some other woman, "I never use cornstarch" or "I clean up as I go along." She felt this happening to her like symptoms of mild illness, and did not resist. But, with unintelligible nostalgia for a life she had never lived, knew that all would have been subtly and profoundly different had her husband greatly loved her.
:(
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs, it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex, ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced, delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook - I see her rocking, weeding, writing, laughing - I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate, freckled arm - I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.
That must be what the great artists see and paint. [...]
What are you reading at the moment? he asked me. Vanity of Duluoz by Jack Kerouac, I said (I fluffed it). Bullshit, he said. Don’t tell me, he said. Charles Bukowski. William fucking Burroughs. Patti fucking Smith. Jim fucking Thompson. Hermann fucking Hesse (Bullshit von fucking Bullshit). Try this on for size, he said (and he pulled out a copy of Diary of a Madman by Gogol from his rucksack). Read the Russians, he said. And forget satire, he said. And forget metaphor, the Russians have no truck with metaphor. And forget time, they have no truck with time, either. When you read Gogol it’s neither yesterday, today or tomorrow. You ever heard John Coltrane? he asked me. I have Kind of Blue, I said (he’s on there). Bullshit, he said. You need to listen to Ascension. You need to listen to Meditations. You need to listen to Interstellar Space. You need to wake up to now, my friend. He stubbed out another cigarette. I need to get to sleep, he said. You have no idea the weight of my brain right now. I told Samantha. We have a visitor upstairs (I said).
cute
Let's be Beage. Age forty. White. Brown hair. Six feet tall, maybe two-hundred pounds. Married twelve years to the girl we got set up with after college, who teaches history to middle school kids. Let's live in a townhome in a suburb of Washington, population 71,000, with our two sons, Oscar, nine, and Jack, four, and our dog, Melvin, and drive thirty minutes to work at an engineering firm, where we and the team we lead help rezone properties for developers to build what they're dreaming of. Let's drink beers at our work lunches, wear sideburns that border on muttonchops, and buy a leather iPhone case that looks like an old prayer book. Let's believe in God, but skip church. After the kids are in bed, let's record songs on our iPad in our basement, where our kids keep all their toys and we do the same, our guitars and amps and accordion and pedal organs and our bottles of Scotch tucked away in closets and cabinets. Let's mow our own lawn. Let's have a car payment. Let's have a mortgage and a habit of railing against home ownership, which we call a crock. Let's have, overall, a softness that makes us attractive in a spatial sense, makes it easy for people to want to get close to us. Let our talents glean to music, and let's develop those talents to where we can pick up any instrument handed to us and play "I"m a Believer" or "In My Life" well enough for everyone in the room to sing along. But mostly, let's play those songs alone, in our basement, our friend since fourth grade living 2,800 miles away, where his guitar case sits behind his bedroom floor, coated in dust.
:(
and yet - is the alternative better?