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"[...] I love In the Heart of the Country, which I suppose a reviewer would describe as a metafictional novel narrated by an ageing white virgin in a remote corner of South Africa. It’s the best book I know about hysteria and also one of the best metafictions, nor is this a coincidence: metafiction is hysteria, it’s a feeling that you have not made contact with the world, that you do not know your dimensions, that you don’t know what sound you will make on contact with the
Really everyone who wins the Nobel Prize does seem overrated. Is this the best anyone can do? you wonder. Note to self, she thinks: Don’t win Nobel Prize. So far there is little danger. Three months ago she sent out her best short story to five publications; the result to date is two perfunctory rejections. Meanwhile she is at work on a novel—that is what she tells Daniel and her parents. It would be truer to say that the idea of the novel simply follows her wherever she goes. It is one of her skills to be able to describe how other novelists sound. But she doesn’t for the life of her know what her own fiction should sound like; that is the missing timbre for which she is constantly listening, the unknown tune to which her ears are pricked up. How much easier it would be to write a pastiche of Coetzee! But that is not how to do it. The way to write is not as if you have just learned the craft, at the school of the masters; the way to write is as if you have somehow always known how.
In this way I managed to get locked in the archive; I was sitting at my carrel and lost track of time, and suddenly all the lights went out. When I got up, I realized that the entire library was not only dark but also deserted and locked. I banged on the locked doors for a while with no result, then felt my way in the dark into the hallway with the administrative offices, where I finally found a tiny Russian woman reading a microfiche and eating lasagna from a tiny plastic box. She seemed surprised to see me, and even more surprised when I asked for directions on how to leave the building.
“Get out?” she echoed, as if referring to the exotic custom of an unknown people. “Ah, I do not know.”
“Oh,” I said. “But how are you going to get out?”
the website version is slightly different for some reason
We drove by another billboard: “Ted Lempert for State Senate.”
“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”
I said that I didn’t know, but that I thought he wanted to be a senator.
“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to say “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert”.
We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.
i enjoyed this
also, noticed another diff between the print version & the web version: the print version got rid of " but I guess the connection was still pretty weak" before the last sentence (the final result is way stronger and more deadpan imo)
I told her about my freshman advisor, a middle-aged British woman with a kind, weary demeanor, who worked in the telecommunications office and had never once known the answer to a single question I had asked.
“The telecommunications office?” Anna repeated.
I nodded. “I would see her when I went to pay my phone bill.”
“Did she have any other connection to Harvard, other than working in the telecommunications office? Was she an alumna?”
“Yeah, actually, she got an MA in the seventies, in Old Norse literature.”
Anna stared at me. “Old Norse literature? What good is an MA in Old Norse literature?”
“I think it’s useful in telecommunications work,” I said.
the print version cut the last sentence in this extract: "This was supposed to be a joke, but she didn’t laugh." (YES much better without the explanation)
“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”
I was amazed anew at the varieties of human experience: to think we had both read the same story under such similar circumstances, and it had such different effects on us.
the web version has everything after the colon replaced with "I had been assigned Isaac Babel’s “My First Goose” in a creative-writing class, and it had meant nothing to me! And I had thought it was because I wasn’t Jewish. But even Ma, the Muslim Chinese, nodded when he heard “My First Goose.”"
some of the first para is changed too
Not that I was myself homosexual. True, my heterosexuality was notional. I wasn’t much to look at (skinny, acne-prone, brace-faced, bespectacled, and Asian), and inasmuch as I was ugly, I also had a bad personality. While Ethan was easing himself into same-sex experimentation, I was learning about the torments and transports of misanthropy. “That kid,” I remember overhearing one of the baseball players say, “is a misfit.” No one ever shoved my head in a locker, the way they did the one amber-tinted Afghani kid, or P. J., the big dumb sweet slow kid, and nobody ever pelted me with rocks, as they did Doug Urbano, who was fat and working class (his father was a truck driver, and sometimes, when he lectured us about the vital role that truck drivers play in the American economy—they really do, you know—he was jeered). But these judgments stayed with me.
similar to neil lol
[...] We know, in short, identity politics, which, when it isn’t acting as a violent outlet for the narcissism of the age, can serve as its antidote, binding people into imagined collectivities capable of taking action to secure their interests and assert their personhood.
this is optimistic but i kind of like that
You saw a look of sadness and yearning in Samuel’s face when he had subsided from one of his misanthropic tirades—there was no limit to the scorn he heaped on the intellectual pretensions of others—and it put you on guard against him. What you sensed about him was that his abiding rage was closely linked to the fact that he was fat and ugly in a uniquely unappealing way, and that this compounded with his unappealing rage made him the sort of person that no woman would ever want to touch. He seemed arrayed in that wild rancor that sexual frustration can bestow on a man, and everything about his persona—his coruscating irony, his unbelievable intellectual snobbery—seemed a way to channel and thus defend himself against this consuming bitterness. He was ugly on the outside and once you got past that you found the true ugliness on the inside.
And then below that ugliness you found a vulnerable person who desperately needed to be seen and touched and known as a human phenomenon. And above all, you wanted nothing to do with that, because once you touched the source of his loneliness, there would be no end to it, and even if you took it upon yourself to appease this unappeasable need, he would eventually decide to revenge himself against a world that had held him at bay, and there would be no better target for this revenge than you, precisely because you were the person who’d dared to draw the nearest. This is what you felt instantly, without having to put it into words (it’s what I felt, anyway, though it might have been pure projection), the moment you met Samuel. For all that he could be amusing to talk to, and for all that he was visibly a nice guy despite all I’ve just said, you were careful to keep your distance.
[...] when you think of the long-standing idea of art in opposition to the dominant culture, if only by keeping its autonomy from the pursuit of money—the only common value great writers from right to left have acknowledged—you begin to sense what we have lost. Capitalism as a system for the equitable distribution of goods is troublesome enough; as a way of measuring success it is useless. When you begin to think the advances of doled out to writers by major corporations possess anything but an accidental correlation to artistic worth, you are finished. Everything becomes publicity. How many writers now refuse to be photographed? How many refuse to sit for idiotic “lifestyle” pieces? Or to write supplemental reading group “guides” for their paperbacks? Everyone along the chain of production compromises a tiny bit and suddenly Jay McInerney is a guest judge on Iron Chef.