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At about the same time, Lucilla began to blag the occasional celebrity interview, the proceeds of which she squandered on new clothes for both of them: for her, little patterned sundresses and great clunky shoes; for Chester, Paul Smith safari suits and gut-tight rollnecks.
Thus refashioned, they went to drinks parties in Hampstead and Notting Hill, and instead of rooting himself, as he previously would have, by the buffet table, Chester mingled. At first he felt dreadfully adrift and vulnerable among the yakking shoals of writers and consultants. But he realized quite quickly that their conversation was mainly burnished gossip and routine innuendo, and that the people he had feared or despised were, depressingly perhaps, no more or less competent or entertaining than he was himself.
omg lol
After eating, Chester would, as a rule, spend twenty minutes contemplating his own unhappiness, its nature and its depth. This was like dropping a stone into an old quarry and waiting for the eventual splash, except every year the wait was longer, and while he waited the empty sound of loneliness screamed in his ears and his face felt as numb and nerveless as if he had been novocained. Occasionally he drooled.
jesus
Commencement
They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agnostic
Maybe that's because I was talking
to Ed Webster on the phone tonight
and he described himself as an agnostic
who got a job teaching at a Catholic school
in the Bronx or maybe because I was reading
the classifieds in The Daily News today
and several greeted dead ones in heaven
in any case I like seniors maybe the rest of us
are juniors and sophomores and we still have
the junior prom and all that romantic angst
to go through before we reach the holy land
:)
[...] The newspaper column is too finished, too regular; it is an easily digested piece. The essay of the kind that I have long enjoyed reading-as perfected by, say, Montaigne, Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Orwell or E.B. White-has all but disappeared from modern English. Anyone with an argument of more than 1,000 words is called an essayist-which is a shame given that, at its best, the essay strives for the literary permanence of a poem or novel and, I think, concerns the search for a personal voice. For Montaigne the essay was a philosophical form-amorphous, reflective, digressive and informed by self-revelation. Above all, it was personal and confidential. And he was writing not because he was commissioned but because he felt compelled to do so. His essays were ends in themselves. Hazlitt somewhere likens the idea of the essayist's role to that of a traveler embarking upon a long journey, the destination of which is uncertain. It is something like that for an essayist ... the idea of starting in one place and ending up somewhere completely unexpected. The word essai, in French, means an attempt, which captures the tentative nature of the form, a questing for knowledge. In this sense, the best essayists are those who have the gift of digression, those who can surprise the reader and themselves, who are able to luxuriate in language and to elaborate and inflate any chosen subject. One of the frustrations of being a writer in Britain, at the moment, is that there are very few places where you can publish essays which are not, in effect, extended book reviews. There is the monthly magazine Prospect, which in eclecticism, range and style recalls the defunct Encounter, and very little else. Few publications offer space for long, discursive essays.
by Jason Cowley
JOHNSON: There was a horrible piece I wrote in 1968 praising the student revolution. I'd gone to Paris to cover the Vietnam talks and then in the middle of this the students exploded, for no reason at all, and this became the story. Everyone forgot about Vietnam. It was very exciting, of course, and I fell for it and wrote a piece, which was a kind of imitation of The Communist Manifesto saying that a new specter was haunting Europe, a specter of students. It went down very well—that wasn't the problem. I realized I'd made a huge error of judgment when, in the same week, no less than four very rich men congratulated me on it.
lol
LAPHAM: Maybe I'd try to tell the wonderful story of Robert Benchley, who was given an examination at Harvard when he was in law school. He hadn't been to a single class in his entire year and was asked to discuss the fishing rights off the Grand Bank from the point of view of the French, the British and the Americans. It was a three-hour exam. Benchley's opening sentence was to the effect that he never knew what the French position was, he never wanted to know what the British position was and he didn't care what the American position was. He would, however, like to discuss the question from the point of view of the fish. Then follows a long conversation between a cod and a flounder as to whether it's better to be fried by the French or boiled by the British.
Once, when he lost himself in the details of Wes’s passing—the helicopter airlifting Wes’s body from the bend in the road where the RV had struck him and where a hole in his head had opened and bled and refused to close-Harper had spilled an entire tray of huevos rancheros for a table of very disappointed midwesterners (Boilermakers, it appeared from their sweats), who shook their big sad heads at him. Harper was tempted to think that head-shaking, when placed within the context of death, should seem pathetically trivial, and that knocking these same heads together would produce a highly satisfying sound, but then, from somewhere deep in his head, he heard Wes’s voice saying, “What if you were a very hungry person with a big fat sad head, wouldn’t you be a little pissed off after being crammed into a tour bus all day, breathing the stink of your fellow man, only to have your waiter dump your food on the floor?” So Harper forgave the head-shaking, shut his eyes, took a deep breath, counted to seven [...]
lol
INTERVIEWER
What traditions are behind your writing?
MOODY
The modernist notion that anything is possible, the postmodernist notion that everything is exhausted, the post-postmodernist notion that since everything is exhausted, everything is permitted.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a daily schedule you try to stick to when you’re working?
MOODY
No. I’m against schedules. Write when you feel excited by the prospect. Otherwise, don’t bother. Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, fornicate, blaspheme, bless a street urchin, browbeat a civil servant, and when you’re done with these things, if you feel excited by what you’ve seen and heard, then go write.
When I was on tour people would say, I’m so sorry about your mother, as if the work was transparently autobiographical. But my mother is in the pink, and grateful for many things, except for the fact that she has a writer for a son. You’re correct that writing about sons and mothers is deeply demanding and complex, and in my experience it does make you feel kind of uncomfortable. But if you find you need to write about subjects like this, you have no choice but to commit entirely. You can’t get part way in and then try to be dainty, you know?