by
Zadie Smith
inspo/interiority
Sally Rooney,
Don DeLillo,
Frank Conroy,
David Foster Wallace,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Jonathan Franzen,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Mary Karr,
Rachel Kushner
not descriptions of the physical world but of whatever is going on in the writer's mind
[...] 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.
Wondering whether she ought to stop and scoop up the wrapper, Alice glances at Min, only to find her bunching up her chewing gum in a paper napkin, preparing to throw it out of the window.
‘Oh, don’t,’ Alice says, regretting it almost immediately – the mumsy tone. Min raises an eyebrow at her, though she does withdraw her hand from the open window, throwing the napkin instead in the cupholder beside the gearstick.
‘Fair enough,’ she nods, and while her tone is light Alice feels she can detect the faintest note of mockery. ‘Mustn’t be bitter with my litter.’
It can be like this, sometimes. A sudden quirk of the lip. Alice biting back the wrong words. Sitting together in History, passing notes until Alice writes something stupid or uncool, underlines the wrong thing, and Min crumples the note in her fist.
‘Fair enough’, this stock phrase, its cringing detachment. The sudden removal of camaraderie and Alice clawing after it.
[...] I woke up on January second, perhaps the dullest and most obligated day of the whole year, a living garbage pile topped by a discarded Christmas tree, and couldn’t breathe through my face. I went to the gym because I didn’t believe myself, and it took me nearly a week of dragging my body around the city, leaking and listing to the side like an old ship with a hole in it, to admit that I actually was sick. Surely I must be faking it. Surely I must want this, this excuse from class, this note that says I can stay home today, under the covers, with a mug of something warm, allowed to sit out this round of doing life, excused from getting up and walking myself to the next thing and the next. Surely I must want the sick day. And worse, some part of me did.
argh i just love how she writes
8.3 Edmund hung around the Il Piccolo coffee house, where he met the lost Chinatown kids he recognized to be like himself: fresh off the boat but with nothing to show for it, and no pop to bless their arrival in America with a break-your-legs warning. To see oneself in another is to learn both fate and possibility.
[...] He had simply never in his life felt so unattractive or been so sick. He wept silently in shame and pain at the passage of each brightly lit public second's edge, and the driver ants that boiled in his lap opened needle-teethed little insectile mouths to catch the tears. He could feel his erratic pulse in his sty. The Gray Line was of the Green- and Orange-Line trundling-behemoth-type train, and he sat all alone at one end of the car, feeling each slow second take its cut.
dead
[...] 'And I'd bunker up all white-knuckled and stay straight. And count the days. I was proud of each day I stayed off. Each day seemed evidence of something, and I counted them. I'd add them up. Line them up end to end. You know?' Gately knows very well but doesn't nod, lets her do this on just her own steam. She says 'And soon it would get... improbable. As if each day was a car Knievel had to clear. One car, two cars. By the time I'd get up to say like maybe about 14 cars, it would begin to seem like this staggering number. Jumping over 14 cars. And the rest of the year, looking ahead, hundreds and hundreds of cars, me in the air trying to clear them.' She left her head alone and cocked it. 'Who could do it? How did I ever think anyone could do it that way?'
Gately remembered some evil fucking personal detoxes. Broke in Maiden. Bent with pleurisy in Salem. MCI/Billerica during a four-day lockdown that caught him short. He remembered Kicking the Bird for weeks on the floor of a Revere Holding cell, courtesy of the good old Revere A.D.A. Locked down tight, a bucket for a toilet, the Holding cell hot but a terrible icy draft down near the floor. Cold Turkey. Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds — he couldn't deal. He could not fucking deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second — less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gullwings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. [...]
[...]
The look he was giving her was meant to like validate her breakthrough and say yes yes she could, she could as long as she continued to choose to. She was looking right at him, Gately could tell. But he’d also gotten a personal prickly chill all over from his own thinking. He could do the dextral pain the same way: Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. And the projected future fear of the A.D.A., whoever was out there in a hat eating Third World fast food; the fear of getting convicted of Nuckslaugh-ter, of V.I.P.-suffocation; of a lifetime on the edge of his bunk in M.C.I. Walpole, remembering. It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. What’s real is the tube and Noxzema and pain. And this could be done just like the Old Cold Bird. He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise. He hadn’t quite gotten this before now, how it wasn’t just the matter of riding out the cravings for a Substance: everything unendurable was in the head, was the head not Abiding in the Present but hopping the wall and doing a recon and then returning with unendurable news you then somehow believed.
Joelle and Gately
[...] And so begins what I see as his slow fade from me. We talk less and less, and since we both grew up in houses schooled to letting people vaporize into their own internal deserts with alacrity, we each let the other get smaller.
the beginning of the end, after she announces her pregnancy
[...] I hold my liquor enough to hear--from the mouths of poets--work I'm itching to read, books I can vanish down into from my grind. The night is a burst of sea spray washed across my face, tangible evidence of a fresh existence only slightly out of reach.
Maybe that time is so blurry to me--more even than my drinking time--because we remember through a filter of self, and of self I had little, having been flattened like a cartoon coyote by an inner anvil. With no self, experience streams past. Time lags until it's sponged up. [...]
I don't know how to enter the debate without leaving everything else behind-the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stocking feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet.
I find that when I try to write in my "other" voice, I am immediately critical of it. It wobbles, vacillates back and forth, is neither this nor that. The voice in which I write about epistemology is familiar, I know how it ought to sound. This voice, though, I hardly know. I don't even know if it has anything to say. But if I never write in it, it never will. So I have to try. (That is why, you see, this doesn't sound too good. It isn't a practiced performance, it hasn't got a surface. I'm asking you to bear with me while I try, hoping that this, what I write, will express something you yourself have felt or will help you find a part of yourself that you would like to express.)