for/pq
Ingmar Bergman,
Martin Amis,
Michael Ondaatje,
Yara Rodrigues Fowler,
Lucia Berlin,
Elia Kazan,
Merritt Tierce,
Italo Calvino,
Karen Tei Yamashita
Strange people circulate in this valley: literary agents awaiting my new novel, for which they have already collected advances from publishers all over the world; advertising agents who want my characters to wear certain articles of clothing and drink certain fruit juices; electronic technicians who insist on finishing my unfinished novels with a computer. I try to go out as little as possible; I avoid the village; if I want to take a walk, I choose the mountain trails.
how is he SO FUNNY omg
When you write, you feel how it must be, you know that at such a spot a certain thing is needed, at another spot something else; you compose pictures for yourself that you see, you have rather the feeling that you are going to bring something to flower; you feel it in your heart like the distant echo of all the passions you are going to create; and the inability to render all that is the eternal despair of those who write; the poverty of languages, which have scarcely one word for a hundred thoughts; the weakness of man, who cannot find approximations -- and to me it is an eternal anguish.
Oh my God, my God, why did you cause me to be born with so much ambition? [...]
As symbol, or as the structuring of symbols, art can render intelligible—or at least visible, at least discussible—those wilderness regions which philosophy has abandoned and those hazardous terrains which science’s tools do not fit. I mean the rim of knowledge where language falters; and I mean all those areas of human experience, feeling, and thought about which we care so much and know so little: the meaning of all that we see before us, of our love for each other, and the forms of freedom in time, and power, and destiny, and all whereof we imagine: grace, perfection, beauty, and the passage of all materials to thoughts and of all ideas to forms.
The task, then, of all the arts in each century is to rescue the clichés, not to turn from them, and to dedicate themselves each new decade to more comprehensive forms of beauty and understanding. It is to expand those arts’ purviews, to expand the arc of the comprehended world, and not to restrict any vision according to the demands for purity set by theory. Purity of practice guarantees that the artist will not err, and that superficial critics will find no flaw in the work, and that nothing has been ventured. Within the bare pantry of purity, stocked solely with what the mind knows to be essential, symbol, which is itself material and which requires a chaotic wealth of materials, can neither grow nor flourish. Symbols arise from material messes.
In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bitterness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.
god he's so funny
Marry young, and a melancholy comes over you at thirty, which has to do with thwarted possibilities. It was worse for Guy. Hope was a little older, and had had her fair share of guys at Oxford, earlier on, and at NYU, and for that matter in Norfolk, Virginia. So a new adventure: they overcame their ecopolitical anxieties and decided to go ahead and have a baby. Even then there were difficulties - Guy's difficulties. A process that began with him equably switching from jockey pants to boxer shorts ended up with him out cold and his legs in stirrups while a team of Japanese surgeons and a particle-beam laser rewired his nethers. Thus, after half a decade of 'trying': Marmaduke. For years they had worried about the kind of world they were bringing their child into. Now they worried about the kind of child they were bringing into their world. The gap or hollow that the baby had been meant to fill — well, Marmaduke filled it, and more; Marmaduke could fill the Grand Canyon with his screams. It appeared that from here on in a mixture of fatigue, depression and incredulity would be obliged to keep them faithful. Most of the psychiatrists and counsellors agreed that Hope's unreasonable fear of getting pregnant again might soon start to fade. Their last attempt at lovemaking had featured the pill, the coil, the cap, and three condoms, plus more or less immediate coitus interruptus. That was July. This was September.
The Harley Street doctor they had just consulted was an expert on infant hypermania. He had seen Marmaduke at his surgery and had also paid a stunned visit to the house, where, as promised, Marmaduke was able to relax and be his normal self. Absolutely impossible at the surgery, Marmaduke had been absolutely unbelievable at home. Even today, nearly three weeks later, the doctor was still wearing a patch of gauze over his right eye. All parties agreed that the legal matter need not affect their professional relationship. Recently, Guy had taken out insurance on Marmaduke-related personal-injury suits, on what seemed to be highly advantageous terms. More recently, he had taken out insurance on the insurance.
Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.
Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.
Guy looked down and gave a smile—not of affection but of wonder. He loved Marmaduke. He would joyfully die for Marmaduke. He would die for Marmaduke, not next week, not tomorrow, but now, right now. He loved Marmaduke despite the clear sense, constantly refreshed, that Marmaduke had no lovable qualities. Marmaduke gave no pleasure to anyone except when he was asleep. When he was asleep, you could gaze down at him and thank the Lord that he wasn't awake.
He was now faced with the task of equipping Marmaduke for the outside world - of dressing him entirely, from soup to nuts, with the child throwing all he had at him every inch of the way. In the nursery Guy took off Marmaduke's nappy and despairingly wedged him into the potty. 'Are you going to make a present for daddy?' he asked, again quite hopelessly. Twenty minutes later, following Marmaduke's reliable failure to make a present for daddy, Guy wrestled him into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper and, downstairs, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat, scarf. As he was dragging him towards the front door and reaching out to free the doublelock, Marmaduke 'went supervoid', in the local phrase (the phenomenon usually marked the end of Marmaduke's experiments in week-long, white-lipped constipation). The child, in other words, had swamped himself in ordure. When Guy unravelled Marmaduke's scarf he saw that some of it was even peeping over the collar of his shirt. In the nursery again Guy wrestled him out of bobble hat, face mask, gloves, anorak, jumper, shoes, socks, trousen, shirt, vest, nappy pants, nappy and nappy-liner, waved away the game but gagging nannies, hosed Marmaduke down in the master bathroom, and wrestled him back into nappy-liner, nappy, nappy pants, vest, shirt, trousers, socks, shoes, jumper, anorak, gloves, face mask, bobble hat and scarf. During these struggles, Marmaduke's lifelong enthusiasm for hurting his father- and, within that, his specialization in hurting his father's genitals — was given play only twice. A flying headbutt to the testicles, and an unrestrained blow with a blunt instrument (a toy grenade-launcher) to the sensitive tip. The new pains joined and reinforced and starred in all the ensemble pains that were there already. This time, he actually got the front door open before Marmaduke was noisily and copiously sick.
oh my god
I sat down in a booth to wait. I felt the clock pressing on me. Now I had less than two hours to rest at home before I had to be at the Italian restaurant where I worked nights. I closed my eyes. Can you help run some stock? barked Marlo. No, I thought. Sure, I said. If it got close to one hour there wasn’t much point in going home, and I kept my other uniform in my car because sometimes that happened. But sometimes even if I could only be home for five minutes I would make the drive. I would sit on the floor in the bathroom and close the door, even though I lived alone. To feel like there was something between me and all that for a few moments.