inspo/setting
Vladimir Nabokov,
Ocean Vuong,
Sally Rooney,
Rachel Kushner,
Saul Bellow,
Ellen Ullman,
Victor Serge,
Roberto Bolaño,
David Foster Wallace
really good descriptions of nature or other vivid life-like details for memoir/fiction
[...] The next day I flew out of Egypt, just after sundown. It’s the most beautiful time to rise into the air because the sky is dimmed but you can still make out the city’s sparks and hollows, its many bumps and breaks. There are always kids on balconies shining lasers towards the planes as they take off from the runway, and alongside the white high beams and the orange street bulbs and the strips of green neon draped down the sides of minarets they make the earth seem restless and electric and alive. As we climbed towards the delta, I stared out of the window. Cairo looked like shattered glass, light coursing through the cracks.
The view of the golf course from the deck of my borrowed McMansion is calculated to hit the pleasure center of every human brain: a still pool of water framed by an undulating ribbon of greenery. Above the fairway, the desert mountains rise like great heaps of bone and ash that have been welded together by the sun.
wow
‘Keep biting the hand and it might slap you across the face one day,’ she said. ‘Boys like you are a dime a dozen out there. You think those Hollywood people will be lining up just to tie your shoes? You think you’re so lucky? You want an easy life? You want to roller-skate on the beach? Even the hairs on your head are numbered. Don’t forget that.’
I really did want an easy life. I looked out the window at the short little houses, the flat open plains, the sky purple and orange, blinding sparks of honey-colored light shooting over the western mountains where the sun went down. ‘Nothing ever happens here,’ I said.
sunset desc is nice
But on this Sunday, at peace as soon as the bells stopped banging, this velvet autumn day when the grass was finest and thickest, silky green: before the first frost, and the blood in your lungs is redder than summer air can make it and smarts with oxygen, as if the iron in your system was hungry for it, and the chill was sticking it to you in every breath ... Pop, six feet under, would never feel this blissful sting again. The last of the bells still had the bright air streaming with vibrations.
lovely
Books in Chicago were obtainable. The public library in the twenties had many storefront branches along the car lines. Summers, under flipping guttapercha fan blades, boys and girls read in the hard chairs. Crimson trolley cars swayed, cowbellied, on the rails. The country went broke in 1929. On the public lagoon, rowing, we read Keats to each other while the weeds bound the oars. Chicago was nowhere. It had no setting. It was something released into American space. It was where trains arrived; where mail orders were dispatched. But on the lagoon, with turning boats, the water and the sky clear green, pure blue, the boring power of a great manufacturing center arrested [...]
the passage referred to in James Wood's intro! arresting
On our first date, we walked through Chinatown, stopping for lotus paste buns. “Diaphanous,” he said, and had me take a bite of his. It was the closest our two bodies had been, in an afternoon of walking side by side, each careful not to touch the other. The lotus paste had more fragrance than flavor. Later, I was never able to re-create that taste, after visits to bakeries all over Chinatown.
None of it could be re-created. We’d eaten the lotus paste buns on a cold, damp November day, on which the sun shone and rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruits and vegetables in vendors’ bins, green bok choys, smooth, sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, the huge, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.
Fall had arrived, and a feeling of hope and freshness suffused the city. The sky was a vivid, seersucker blue. I was finished with my first day back working with Marvin and Eric at Bowery Film, strolling under a canopy of green leaves that were big and floppy, a few gold or ruby-red around the edges, one twirling downward as I crossed Washington Square Park. The light cut a sharp shadow instead of summer’s fuzzy outlines. Autumn had brought in definition, a sense of gravity returning to a place where it had been chased out by the sun, by the diffuse rule of humidity. There was a late-September crispness in the air. I thought of smashed horse chestnuts on the sidewalks of Reno. The feel of new corduroy. Of course I had a great story to report, and the hopefulness I sensed from the gold-edged leaves above me could have been my own.
I had run an errand for Marvin, dropping off processed film to an address on lower Fifth, and was on my way to meet Sandro. The NYU students loafing around the empty fountain in the park were trying out the fall fashions, the boys in sweaters of wholesome colors, orange, brown, and green. The girls in pleated, brushed-cotton coats and suede clogs or those oxfords with the wavy soles. Lace knee socks and hand-tooled leather purses with a long strap worn crosswise between the breasts. A few berets. In light, dry gusts, the air riffled the leaves, yellow as wax beans, and a few floated softly downward. In such hopefulness, even a beret seemed like a good idea.
I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.
Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening - polarized and golden - that I can only describe as loss.
Robert Frost's gold that cannot stay.
They look together: high-wire surveyors of a newfound land. The view cracks open his chest. Cloud, mountain, World Tree, and mist—all the tangled, rich stability of creation that gave rise to words to begin with—leave him stupid and speechless. Reiterated trunks grow out of Mimas’s main line, shooting up parallel like the fingers of a Buddha’s upraised hand, recouping the mother tree on smaller scales, repeating the inborn shape again and again, their branches running into each other, too mazy and fused to trace.
Fog coats the canopy. Through an opening in Mimas’s crown, the tufted spires of nearby trunks stand swirled in the gauze of a Chinese landscape. There’s more substance to the grayish puffs than there is to the green-brown spikes poking through them. All around them spreads a phantasmagoric, Ordovician fairy tale. It’s morning like the morning when life first came up on dry land.
Watchman sweeps back another wall of tarp along its rope runner and looks up. Dozens more feet of Mimas unfold above—trunks that took over when lightning clipped this one. The top of the tangled system disappears into low cloud. Fungi and lichen everywhere, like splatters of paint from a heavenly can. He and Maidenhair perch, most of the way up the Flatiron Building. He looks down. The floor of the forest is a dollscape a little girl might make out of acorns and ferns.
[...]
Nicholas watches the drama as if thumbing an infinite flip-book. The land unfolds, ridge beyond ridge. His eyes adjust to the baroque abundance. Forests of five different shades bathe in the mist, each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered. And every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them.
[...] This morning, Seattle is at war. Something about the future of the world and all its wealth and property. The breakfast hosts, too, sound confused. Delegates from dozens of countries try to gather in a convention center; thousands of ecstatic protesters refuse to let them. Kids in ponchos and camo pants jump on the roof of a burning armored vehicle. Others tear a mailbox out of the concrete and send it through a plate-glass bank window while a woman screams at them. Under trees that twinkle with the white point lights of Christmas, ranks of black-clad, helmeted troops launch canisters of pink smoke into the crowd. Ray Brinkman, who spent two decades in the trenches protecting patents, cheers each time the police subdue an anarchist. But Ray Brinkman, whom God stopped with a little backhand flick, is smashing glass.
The crowd surges and splits, lashes out and regroups. A phalanx of riot shields beats them back. Synchronized lawlessness flows over the barricades and around the armored cars. The cameras linger on something remarkable in the throng: a herd of wild animals. Antlers, whiskers, tusks, and flapping ears, elaborate masks on the heads of kids in hoodies and bomber jackets. The creatures die, fall to the pavement, and rise again, as if in some Sierra Club snuff film.