Good lines
The beats on “Eusexua” crawl in and peter out. They punish the ear, and then they give the ear aftercare.
Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye.
The movie is foregrounded, with surprisingly little of the past emerging in specific relation to the drama, but that past is ever-present, like an invisible weight for all concerned
That takes concentration, indicated here by the repetition, the working over, of certain words and phrases.
Her arms around me — whole arms, as if I were a loved and native rock
“My rage had always seemed greasy and salty, like something I binged on when I was alone, in fits of self-hatred.” When she wrote an earlier version of Goddard’s story, she spent days inserting and then deleting a single mention of her own experience, wishing she could bury “molested” somehow “so that just a bit of the word poked up, like the tip of a bombshell.
the sorcery of words
The show, held under the Pont Alexandre III bridge in a jury-rigged nightclub straight from Paris’s romantic old underbelly as a cold wind blew in off the Seine and waiters offered hot toddies and candied violets, was everything the fashion world once seemed to promise. It was sumptuous, excessive, rife with roiling emotion communicated in cloth, with models vamping, skittering and otherwise willing to sacrifice themselves on the pyre of unfettered imagination.
I am slit top to bottom with jokes.
Memory is never shaped in a vacuum. The motives of memory are never pure.
When you get to the last song it is devastating — and not because she is a monster but because she is a wound.
This sort of perfect mimicry in performance is essentially stunt work. Because the movie emphasizes the characters’ public faces even in private, it doesn’t demand (and would hardly allow) true emotional depth and expressive range.
There are packing lists — pot, poppers — as well as an assessment of his character. One positive: “basically honest.” On the negative side: “lack of self-control".
the agony of coming from where I came from and then dancing on the Champs Elysees — on the one hand, the darkness where you feel like you are just nobody, nothing. And on the other hand, you are the king, you’re on top of the world.
the darkness of winter has its clarifying benefits. One of my friends, a photographer, recently told me about a new energy in his work, coinciding with the slide toward the solstice. When the light’s this scarce, you’ve got to grab it while you can.
a feverish desire to appear knowing, no matter how deep one’s ignorance
On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice. Instead of looking for signs, I form an impression of a tone, and if I can hear in that tone the harmonies of the human improvisation extended through 5,000 years of space and time, then I read the book.
unencumbered by any trace of artistic merit
something new and affecting is simmering within the character, a damning glimpse of self-awareness. You get the sense that if her frantic, ambition-driven movement stops for a second, she'll deflate into a small and bitter creature.
Sometimes I look at a Socialist—the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist,” Orwell wrote, “and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.
What makes these artists great is not that they are foreigners, but rather that their visions are so foreign.
Celebrations of identity made in such deeply traditional styles are progressive in content but conservative in form. They offer a détournement of cultural appropriation by trying to atone for the sins and omissions of the past with a series of art-historical pastiches: canonical art remade by artists with minority identities.
Everyone in the world of contemporary art wants to revive a tradition, however recent: Hellenistic Greek sculpture, the Roman cult of Adonis, ancient Nubian wedding ceremonies, Ancestral Pueblo pottery culture, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican song, Mapuche cosmology, Maya Tz’utujil weaving, Incan mythology, African mask-making and the early Cubist painting it inspired, Fifties Americana, the Sixties New Sacred Art Movement of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Eighties Beijing migrant-worker cruising culture, late-Aughts contemporary art, etc. Everyone, it seems, wants to escape the present. We just long for different pasts.
His mouth was a little open, showing his teeth in the half-snarl of a baffled animal. He licked his lips
Drunks seethed around the bar, talking as if everyone else were stone deaf
His ravaged charisma
movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it
Yanked away from his fake identity as a writer, he doesn't know which way is up -- he gets the bends.
They did tricks off of a monument in the interment camp, wondering what people driving by thought of the sight of skateboarders in the middle of hell
Hope is not always an organic emotion.
we were both young invincibles
I’ll extend grace so long as people demonstrate growth. I think we are shooting ourselves in the foot when we create no incentive for people to grow, because they perceive that they will be permanently guilty for having been wrong.
The outsider feeling—somebody who people want to both kiss and kill—occurred quite early in my life
editorial tenderness
you can use a windfall of wealth to become a completely redundant human being, or you can sort of use it and try to expand yourself
I love the molasses time of Egypt, where time has no meaning, and no matter the time the night goes on
Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses.
Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in
the textbooks’ selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
and the soda machine; the apocalypse of the settlement and
the jars of scalps; there was the bedlam of the cannery; the radioactive rain;
the chairless martyr demanding a name.
For all its tour de force comedy, the special had a couple of barbed thesis statements.
Maybe they’d briefly touched the hem of a dream but then been awakened from it; now with their instruments, they could reach for what felt most immediate, what was called for and nothing else.
I called my mom on the eve of the election. She was unusually chipper. The worst has already happened to me, she said. What everything else can follow is totally fine!
The politics of being anti is a tactic. It is not focused on a set of issues, nor does it draw on a political philosophy.
We can call it a censorship bureau. We can call it homophobia, but we can also call it a part of you that protects you from something that feels the worst thing that could happen.
He’s eating candied yams and catfish on a private plane; riffing on skipping the Met Gala but still holding influence on the fashion game.
You should be reaching in art of any kind for the uncomfortable, out of the realm of safety, for the possibility of making big mistakes.
There's nothing I'm tired of. Each is an incredibly rich experience that's inflected by all sorts of different categories, that cannot be worn out. Really there aren't new stories. Human life follows a limited number of patterns.
Seeing Julian in his aspect of fluent bitchiness makes Kant feel, all over again, like an unwelcome outsider in the land he was born to.
You want to winch yourself up from yourself. You want to winch the book out of your balky mind
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
I tip toe up the dawn. Safe! I look down. What a world! This huge disaster like a dark balloon goes soft right below my eyes--
In these words, what he is missing are maybe these subtle shades of meaning and usage
There’s a cramped black box in my skull I am every so often tempted to return to. A hallelujah for the triumphs that sustain us, that welcome us instead into the light.
When I ask him to describe a through line between the characters he’s played, he says, “People who want to be something so much but don’t have the instrument to play that kind of music.”
Now, we both laugh about how cursed that summer was. It was just her turn to take a beating from the universe.
You’ve turned your loneliness into this, like, fetish necklace of martyrdom.
Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology; at its worst, a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality.
The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it?
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how someone like Munro experiences life. How can a writer be someone who does not have a historical sense of her own life? I think her art is an attempt to give her life a historical sense. But in the crude day-to-day, there is just that life without history.
I recently learned of an Icelandic word, nær-gætni, which means, I’m told, “near-carefulness”—the care one should take when coming near to another person.
There is no word that explains what it means to be near a fictional character, to enjoy the particular intimacy that fiction alone allows so unself-consciously. But we leave him as we must—the man we first met in “What Belongs to You,” tramping alone, always alone, in his blissful alienation, in a city where no one could pronounce his name. He is now L’s “bello.” It is almost evening and he is almost home.
They said my pulse was gone. It was so — you’re here, you’re not. I thought: wow, you don’t even have your memories. Strange porridge.
"You’re going to make yourself sick with hatred,” someone warns a young man in Baldwin’s 1964 play, “Blues for Mister Charlie.” “No, I’m not,” he replies, “I’m going to make myself well."
But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.
a syntax that enacts bewilderment
These sentences curve in on themselves and force themselves to fray—not only to reveal the hidden strands in even our simplest thoughts or wants (the seed of reluctance in desire, the spark of want in fear) but, it seems, to incapacitate our predilection for quick judgment. This is the real setting of his fiction—not the hospital, the classroom, the night clubs in Sofia, but this space that exists within them, within ordinary life, a realm unlatched by those forked sentences, in which time is slowed, and a deep, receptive kind of contact with the other, with the self, is permitted to bloom.
Where is your philosophy now, I asked myself. But human beings aren’t ever philosophical, I don’t think, not really, at least I was the opposite of philosophical, a minuscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the whole world.
Death had brushed past, not grand and literary but a brute crushing fact, a hammer pounding meat.
An evening spent with Lyonne is like pirouetting through a syllabus.
When Roger promises to stop seeing other sex workers in an act of make-believe monogamy, Shane is moved to study the shape of his infatuation. Through the keyhole of Roger’s unhappy marriage and his infidelity, she fixes upon the bad scripts and the thicket of delusions that keep men and women in a state of ritualized misalliance.
he’s like vaguely 80’s disco coded
What that means politically, to my mind, is that we all owe each other things. A queer democracy would take that communitarian sense of relationship as its basis, as a way of thinking about political structures that best express our obligations to each other.
He hated their boring rancor, so depressing, he said, so small, which was the opposite of the impression his own conversation gave, of expansiveness and scope.
It had been my whole life, puzzling over phrases, trying to account for the unaccountable in what art makes us feel: it had been my whole life, sometimes it had seemed like a full life and sometimes a wasted one, it had felt full and wasted at once.
It was my temperament, maybe, to think of life as temporary, but that felt like a betrayal now, unfaithful to the life we had made.
So much of art, that is queer art, doesn’t feel like it is for me to say yes to life. Which great art has done for me. It feels like propaganda for life.
There is something humiliating in desire. Because it defeats your agency. It brings you close to the earth, the humus. And there is a shame in the body — in being an organic being. All of that gorgeous abstraction. All of that gorgeous meaning we make of our lives. It depends on this complex, fallible machine.
Illogic and uncanniness barely require pointing out. Only one kind of art has been whisked into the batter of our world until it flavors everything.
It’s not merely that bandying around these neon words—abuse, coercion—dilutes their power; it’s that these words are being deployed to foreclose thought and impose silences of their own.
He was screaming about it while everyone else was crying about it.
He is one of the few remaining public intellectuals who is willing and eager to brawl, and he has paid a high political price for the brawling.
I want you to feel strongly and to hold space for the strength of others’ feelings.
What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone.
even when it is clumsy or strident, or both, the writing blisters with conviction and heart. it obliterates two decades past, becoming a time machine, transporting us back to the era it depicts with disorienting intensity.
Is this some special way you talk when you don’t wanna talk?
On one side was a small theatre where movies played on a warped screen, and on the other side was the entrance to the area where men met men. It was like a cotillion of cock.
I said what I meant / but I said it / in velvet. I said it in feathers. And so one poet reminded me / Remember what you are to them. / Poodle, I said. /
Theater was a plastic art, where body and story could be molded as we wanted
Our vast and opulent stories have been silenced for too long.
The spirit of the times, of being made to keep time, is one of joyless urgency
Humor is the razor sharp edge of the truth. It's never just kidding.
For others it was a decadent interregnum — Weimar with listicles. The War on Terror expanded, the reactionary far right organized, the wealth gap grew. Meanwhile, my generation was dressing up as the kid from Where the Wild Things Are and reading Hipster Runoff to know how they should feel about Converse versus Vans.
It is difficult to find that human untidiness — what Pryor called the “madness” of everyday life — in the formulaic work of lesser comics.
I’m legally wed, and to who I’m legally wed to is an amazing cook.
I think that's a Scottish thing—I just need to go and have a fucking bender.
So much of what I had thought of as femininity was really just youth.
And yet, even though they might be a fiction, the images remain in my mind, and those images — the weeping doctor, the Iraqi dead and the young Marine who has carefully framed the shot so that none of those dead could be seen — are sharper and more personal for me than some things that I know happened because I actually lived through them.
I found his prose stifling, like being trapped in an overheated room with a close talker.
We made eye contact but not conversation, so I lit a cigarette. The photos on the pack depicted the absolute limits of what can happen to a body.
In August she wrote, I have had a really fine summer, strange in many ways, in others exactly the same. In the afternoons the light drops suddenly, the day waits and you feel a melancholy repetition, as though you were living moments before, maybe long ago by someone else. In September she wrote to say that she had started divorce proceedings.
Russia, a country that can surprise and disappoint you, even as it holds your attention
She was the patron saint of ruthless clarity, this time dismantled by shock and grief
there is a time after you’ve lost your old face, but before you’ve gotten your new one … and, I would add: This is the time of greatest grief and greatest potential
How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.
I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.
This lemon perfume — for me, the distilled essence of lemon — is what gives Moroccan dishes so much of their particularity.
You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
We do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
She thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency – as an act with consequences.
White Americans have always known how to develop aristocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the Mayflower and become founding fathers. German laborers move to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings.
We sat in adjoining seats, each with a little TV set we put quarters in.
The poetry reading is no more holy than the dark room or the sauna.
Being a brilliant writer does not elevate one above the common smallness of being a person.
It is a kind of death and a kind of dream.
I hate to see anything lovely by myself.
Too often I was dazzled by exercise classes and fashion runways, the shiny baubles of capitalism.
Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labelled and ready for export is dead . . . and meaningless
Ruth knows the lay of this desiccated land, with its reservoirs of furious disappointment
He is not a dandy; he is an actor in the habit of watching himself go by
On reading Shakespeare: You are called upon to grapple with a perspective in which the horizon alternately collapses and re-forms behind you, in which the mind is subject to an intense diversity of atmospheric
as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes–a fresh, green breast of the new world
not even really an image, but an idea of an image, a realization that it will be possible to visualize this at some later point
No. I have fantasies about him not existing.
loving Judy became not only passé but slightly shameful, an activity associated with the most pathetic kind of closetedness: evocative of mothballs, jazz hands, and a deferred life of masochistic yearning
indie sleaze, the neon-splattered club nights of the mid- to late-2000s
apologies for the apparently untethered digression
An open, soft mass of a person in life
As the show grew rawer the performance got more complicated, and craggy. My favorite part has always been not the polish but the cracks.
Wild things leave skins behind them
It is exquisite prose, gooey and fantastic as Italian pastry, mounds of it, piled on prodigally.
How do you know so much about it when you've never been there?
crazy world, full of crazy contradictions like a child
the buzzing, blinking pageant of life hounds us
he felt it lift him and stagger him at the same time
Now that I've solved my crisis, I've got to come to grips with having the time to create and shape the multifaceted diamond that a fine life can be
I was a legendarily self-involved person. But she had helped me rearrange some of the furniture of my mind.
They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because who wouldn’t want it?
Seducing us and then repelling us — in that order — it dramatizes why we flock to such things in the first place
I can do anything, be anything I want. I can challenge the wind....
But poetry is not a marketing strategy or even an aesthetic — it’s a whole way of looking at the world and its language, turning them both upside down in search of new meanings and possibilities.
He was transfixed by the portrait. This is someone who has really seen, who has gone back again and again to see.
She wore a cream-colored silk blouse, black kitten-heeled shoes and a gauzy black bow tied artfully around her neck.
Many films are basically kits that require the audience to do the work not merely of interpretation but of characterization, based on a handful of clues.
What passed between me and Olive was not nothing. Many types of people, strange to me in life, might be revealed, through the intimate space of fiction, to have griefs not unlike my own. And so I read.
The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.)
The suggestion that the equivalent of juxtaposing bag/beg/big/bog/bug on a page could grant any noteworthy “insight into Vietnamese society” defies belief, but at least it’s funny.
They enjoyed reminding me of this ever since my childhood, spitting on me and calling me bastard, although sometimes, for variety, they called me bastard before they spit on me
the intense arabesque of Coney Island, with its violent, gyrating pleasures
It was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being part of something bigger than yourself, even though each side of the equation put the other in jeopardy.
They were too caught up in the business of developing and finding ways to represent their various selves.
Race became nothing more than ancestry and a collection of superficial physical traits. The 14th Amendment was no longer about alleviating the extraordinary repercussions of slavery but about treating everyone the same regardless of their “skin color,” history or present condition.
Wear whatever you want to wear at all times. I don’t own a tux. I don’t own a suit. I don’t own a tie. I don’t believe in dress codes. If there’s a restaurant that says it has a dress code, I intentionally violate it.
I swim and I don’t think of anything but the movements, my body extending stretching gliding. And even her ears, and her fingers in my mouth, and the hours and the hours, and Your boobs are amazing, and I bite her neck, and my tongue on her tongue, and her clean-shaven, delicate skin.
Vibes-based professorship. It’s working so far.
Censorship in the waning years of Communist Hungary was a velvet prison.
When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life
Why must there be more? This is just this.
You could fit most of the solar system into the chasm between how the average American of the era would have reacted in that hypothetical situation and how Jeanne Manford responded upon learning that Morty was gay. “You don’t love him in spite of something,” she later declared on national television, her face free of shadow or blur. “You love him.”
If occurs to me that there are often two sets of trickery going on in my life. The illness -- the entity -- is always just off to the side. And then I try to trick the people around me. I'm OK, I'm functional, I'm fine. And maybe, sometimes, this determination to trick them tricks the illness itself. People with thought disorders to not keep a list of famous and successful people who share their problem. There is no such list.
For nearly two centuries, everyone but trans women have monopolized the meaning of trans femininity. Fearful of interdependence, many have tried to violently wish trans femininity away. The non-trans woman has become gender critical, willing to dispose of her trans sister to secure her claim on womanhood. The gay man celebrates queens as iconic but separates himself anxiously from faggotry’s intimacy with trans femininity, claiming he is only on the side of sexuality, not gender.
“Once again I’d compromised my own taste,” Priscilla writes of that moment in the memoir, which in Coppola’s world is the worst kind of fate.
In Narvik, at the top of Norway, I danced to James Brown at a disco in a geodesic dome in the August midnight twilight, when someone came in with a newspaper announcing Nixon’s resignation. In a museum in Basel I stared for a long while at a row of Lucretias, each stabbing herself through the heart. In Rome my youth hostel was in the Olympic stadium built by Mussolini, where the showers only ran cold.
that thought was pasted to my windshield, and yet I looked through it, having trained myself to do so.
I was about to make a radical break with my previous existence, but I have no way to reconstruct just how I proceeded to its execution. All I can remember for sure is driving 300 miles trying to decide whether to hit the mall in Albany in search of a wig store.
Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed.
Manhood itself was peacocking, edged with violence. A strange combination.
there’s such a lightness of touch. You let things bloom in multiple directions at once. Your book is all about the unconscious. You make it feel as though these things are just rising up.
the difference between ideas and ideology is that ideology doesn’t require thinking. It actually lends itself to not thinking, and that, in turn, lends itself to being weaponized by bad actors
He is in the midst of a renaissance, a new public image propelled by private sensations: the weight of a ring, the scent of a leather microphone and how it’ll wear with age.
There was a real weight, even to wonderful reactions. I just feel like I’ve handed you a weapon. And even though you say “I love you, I promise I will never use this bow and arrow which has been specifically fashioned to find your heart,” you’re still holding it. So I felt like I was giving away something that could kill me.
My assumption that people are ultimately self-serving lowers my expectations and allows me to forgive.
I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting work: ‘Are you a good girl or a bad girl?’ I was 16, and my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.
Sometimes you’re a friend of the family, sometimes you’re a tray that talks. It’s that sense of how your role can flip quite suddenly, without any warning depending on who’s talking to you, that you always have to navigate.
I think writers are often terrifying to normal people. There is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write. Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion.
The little boy I used to be, in the mirror making faces. I jones for it like it’s cocaine.
It felt brutish and graceful
The second and more intimate variety of reading is “unlicensed, private, leisurely, disreputable, promiscuous and anarchic.”
where midnite thinking begins at 5pm
Methinks what?” muses Sabbath in his grief. “Methinking methoughts shouldn’t be hard. The mind is the perpetual motion machine. You’re not ever free of anything. Your mind’s in the hands of everything.” It’s a passage unstable enough to remind you that Roth, the towering novelist, was a failed playwright as well.
Beautiful feelings. They sweep you away with their beautiful feelings. But the feelings disappear quickly once you are no longer posing for them. Once they’ve got you figured out and written down, you go. All they give is their attention
Rebecca loved gossip. She knew that it was where the truth lived.
His performance was almost all there, though he managed to enrich it for New York
For the recursive narrator, everything is a madeleine of torture.
great philosophical question for which I'm going to give you weird answer
she touches his hair while he is sleeping, a personal choice she made on instinct
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
I’m the prize! I’m the fucking prize!
I think we should postpone that fascinating and, um, timeless, question.
You ask why I am doing these things that I sense are largely inexplicable to you
it is a question of how much we can feel in the doing.
Nobody expected it but nobody is surprised
He planned to get an investment banking or consulting position at age 29, then start a company by 30, and ultimately exit it all by age 40, when he could finally turn his time to volunteering. The conviction of his assurance astonished me.
He’s always been allergic to just starting at the beginning and going from there. “I bristle at pretty much straight storytelling,” he said.
Time is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it.
When I watched “Barbie,” I realized how seductive patriarchy is onscreen or onstage, even when we say we are trying to smash it. Why do the Kens get that massive and amazing dance scene?
I felt more alive than I ever had, but alive in all ways: in love, in lust, in fear, and in pain. My relationship with the city was a chemical, visceral one. Back then I was fucking it, now I have married it. My life back then was scattered, impulsive, animalistic, messy. I generally hate the phrase making love, it's a euphemism that denies the darker, baser, rawer traits of another human that we should embrace and exalt. I was maddened by him, he was my succubus.
That touch had no place here, in a home two men had shared for fifty two years
The living cinema! Amazing! Unhinged!
waiting in line, I felt I had no body, but when I left the line, I felt hungry
the pause and lunge of his movements; the chewy lisp of his voice; and the dark, unsleeping fervor of his stare. It is as if someone were stoking a fire inside his head.
she runs through the offices with breathtaking strength as if gulping up freedom with each step. It echoes other films Gerwig has been involved in: the scene in Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha” in which her Frances sprints down Manhattan streets, and the quicksilver way Saoirse Ronan’s Jo races through “Little Women”
You do what your heart says you have to. Because you don’t owe anyone your life. Not even me.
Seduction, like grief, is a state of mind and happens when preconditions are present, such as a hole in your heart left behind by a loss, or a loneliness that comes from circumstances that hold the spirit, a prisoner
And there [the ants] stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the life of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.
In the immediate aftermath of this failed exchange, I did the only thing I could do: take to my room and fester. On gender trouble: a punishing hieroglyphic
Or rather I am talking about them both, about the representation and the man himself, for didn’t I know he would like that story, about an old prospector who finds a nubile young girl left for dead in the desert? Glad you like it, Lee. It’s for you
try to get to something that really clicks for you, that you can feel the sting or glow of
I have built a working miniature replica of the patriarchy in my mind.
Watching, you almost feel mugged by the sense of belonging. That fabricated connection can be more beautiful than love itself
She also points to another intricate, devastating moment
I watched them again and again—especially the major ones: Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown. Like all works of genius, they invited repetition. I ate them. They became part of me, the way something loved does.
Scopophilia - 'The consuming pleasure of looking’ is how he and I define it.
He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.
Or was there?
on loving movies: their ability to obliterate reason and abolish taste
all the people I had seen in my life driving with their windows down — I leaned my head out the window and howled.
If you do it well enough, the book or painting or film or sculpture you made will hold off time, in a way, for a while, and that is an extraordinary thing, and for me it’s the highest aim of art.
The question that should serve as a looping incantation is: who benefits? Who is feeding off this?
the true interiority is enshrouded in thick thoughts.
The singer sounded like he was foaming at the mouth. I was stuck in bed, but I felt like I was on fire. Someone screaming helped. But other music offered a more incandescent depth of feeling.
over her shoulder tried to take, with the camera of my head, a snapshot I could keep of the house
It's as if all these characters were already inside him, angles of his own personality.
bringing a new incoherence to my gender.
Instead, he takes the word apart, and doesn’t take Chiron apart with it.
Moss writes of a New York returning to what he sees as its rightful entropy, energy heaving up from under pavement to reveal a dirty, spontaneous city where anything can happen.
I’ve gone looking for that feeling everywhere.
He talked to each of us in language cut to our different understanding
Sometimes I feel like a big cat in a small cage. I've done such desperate things at 3am.
She knew to believe in what is, not what if. She really understood that whole river of life. You have to let it pass through you so you can be emptied out and open to what’s next.
He loved films by David Lynch, the Coen brothers or Spike Lee, which unfold in their own elevated reality.
feeling worn down, my dreams are spinning out so i wake up freaked out and wondering what sort of world i'm in
What people went to Club 82 for was to experience bodies in a world of bodies.
Transitions are brave work. Like birth, like writing, transition is when hopes take material form and in doing so take on a life of their own.
We all have movies like that, titles that transcend ordinary categories of good and bad, and penetrate straight to our hearts.
The most lasting images are its joyous ones. There's a lot in the movie that's sad and painful, but after a few years what you remember is that classic white disco suit, and the Bee Gees on the soundtrack.
My skin a tight membrane stretched thinly over gallons of fluid feeling
It was a completely testesterone-addled set to film on
The tropes of writing about one’s ethnic heritage as an anglophone Vietnamese-something: “Vietnamese is a language that can caress or slice”, as though that weren’t true of any human tool
There is some serious vexation here. This time Cage really is cross as two sticks.
The Pynk is a refuge and a maw, a heaven and a hell.
You’re dressed like nic at nite.
How is your day here? Wet and vibrant. As all queer classes should be.
The film, with its space-food-like artifice, only seems to be made of nothing at all. It passes through the nervous system without delivering any sustenance or even leaving a residue.
I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.
I could understand anything, under the right circumstances and for the right person. It was both a strength and a weakness.
People rape. Very few people are rapists in every sexual exchange.
Trans MC's family abandons them, but they're brave and strong. But what if I don't want to be brave and strong.
But I could see the stress like / percolating in his eyes
Accidental cameras happen all the time without reason. Things become cameras without our even intending it.
I regret this decision, as I regret all the times in my life I have turned away from living.
You don’t actually have to shoot Chekhov’s gun.
Yes to some extent. I listened to it when I was a teenager and I said to myself, is he singing to me??
These small but varied pleasures had distracted him for a while, but there was a difference between pleasure that soothed and lulled one to sleep and pleasure that drew the self more widely and vividly into the world.
He felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to.
There are times when it can feel as if your performances are vibrating at a different frequency than the movies in which they appear.
you are not a bad cat. You are not a good cat. You are good and bad. And bad and good.
Let’s face it. We’re
by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.
At ease in a white T-shirt, a slender golden chain visible underneath, he has the ready and easy smile of a boy, a collection of elegant porcelain urns and vases arranged on a shelf behind him. He recounts happy memories of being alone in Tokyo or Hokkaido, checking into a hotel with a novel, riding a bicycle for hours, going alone to art galleries and museums, and dining by himself at izakayas afterward, drinking sake and eating internal organs—liver, intestine, and ox tongue, which he remembers as a favorite of his father’s.
I love to irradiate myself with tweets and comments and likes and the frothy chaos of the feed.
From your cold apartment in January, you watch tricycles piled with like an 8-10 feet high pyramid of pomelo go down the street
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
Baldwin, tracking microclimates of feeling
I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
We wanted to stick a little knife in everything. If things are too sweet or too kind - I think a little bit of dissonance enhances the joy.
You don’t need to tell me anything about the leg. That’s up to you.
Have on hand your own stimulants, loved passages of the prose that matter most to you
Many days you’re sitting there not feeling like you’ve spiked a vein or like you’re in the roll and the trance of it.
The conflict would slip loose from the confines of a single image.
The joys of the night ride were the joys of feeling present in my body again, orienting myself amid the disorientation of pandemic life, which has a tendency to erase the body even as it threatens it, even as it demands of it endless productivity. Pedaling felt like a celebration of kinetic energy, of blood, cartilage and bone.
I wanted to pursue a restlessness of form. Can a country contain a restless mind, a restless person, a different person, a queer person?
Such delicate, profane fiction - these stories are grace and salt, tenderness and shadow
I am writing with my burnt hand about the nature of fire
These weekends, which I took at the beginning of each month, were the full expression of all the compulsions within me that are unshareable by definition: to be lavishly alone; to eat in priestly silence; to stay up late reading; to think in the morning and write all night. Each trip was similar—the train, the car, the work, the pasta—but each thing was a little different every time.
I get afraid that I’m not hungry enough at least some of the time
It’s like the soundtrack to a life that’s already leaving.
I wanted to know what it would feel like to have a sound like that in my mouth.
Eloquent, unpredictable sentences
The music had always contained jaggedness and dissonance, intervals that make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end, spidery notes.
My daughter’s friend has always been volatile, impulsive, creative, and compassionate.
Clarity and exhilaration.
People always tell the same stories, even when they try to tell new stories.
You see the point. I want to tell you the truth, and already I have told you about the wide rivers.
He wore a mustache and paint-spattered white jeans.
Alan, who looks like a thrift store James Dean, handsome and burly with a dimple on his chin.
There’s a man dressed like a Cossack, like an extra from the big pogrom number in Fiddler on the Roof.
The messy splendor of being alive.
“Part of the reason for the trip was simply to expand my lungs emotionally,” McCann said, to come in contact with what he calls “a true democracy of voices.”'
Great stories are born to those who can tell them.
Take gardens, for example. Gardens are really excellent sources of infinity.
All that coiled up youthfulness.
On eating a perfect eggplant curry: so magnificent, there's a sort of rip in the atmosphere.
I was still me in that world, but I felt like I felt now — grown up, after a fashion.
If you’re a writer, it’s because literature has saved you at some point. - Nathan Englander
We must have a desire to make scale models of the universe. - George Saunders
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I want you to be a human being, not a human doing.
NOSMO: the necessity of sometimes missing out.
It wasn't easy to build an alliance. I had to run with those cats, break bread with them, hang out at the pool hall. I had to lay down on their couch, in their neighborhood. Then I had to invite them into mine. - Bobby Lee, Black Panther, on allying with white groups.
Nicole Krauss on Oliver Sacks: that curiosity and humanity. All his stories were lit with that humanity.
The proper label for the study of the mind informed by computers is not Artificial Intelligence but Natural Computation. Steven Pinker
the sparse and noisy data of an uncertain world. - Goodman and Tenenbaum
I've got my feelings in my fingertips again - Brad Pitt on quitting boozing
What a sad trick. - Her
Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention? - Lady Bird
we found ourselves being critiqued from all sides. - Critique Response, Brendan Lake
Details in a story are just a means to give shape to another person’s consciousness. Choose them that way. - Chang Rae Lee
These characters want to emerge but they don’t know who they want to be when they emerge. - Chang Rae Lee
The only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. - Alexander Chee
The terrible thing that is called life. Terrible, and beautiful. But you must know that is both. - James Baldwin
Historical novels have the aura of the well-mannered about them. This is wrong, of course. But I wanted to avoid any stink of stasis. The novel had to touch the present. It had to be raw up against the ‘now. - Colum McCann
He was in his element: he loves parties, materialism, and the sea.
To tell a good story you must look at the people specifically. Individually. And you will find there will be beauty there.
On confronting death: It was like trying to dress every morning for the weather in a nation we’d never heard of.
We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.
Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
It is impossible to believe now, but I was someone who could be pleased by simple things once. Back then, everything was new to me: all the world and all the people and all the soups.
"it’s “competitive with the problem, where it’s me vs. the unknown.”
Dennett, on 'looking' for symbols in the brain: Such rules no more need be explicitly represented than do the principles of aerodynamics that are honored in the design of birds' wings
(Stevens, on simple explanations form messy solutions): Reality in all of its radiant, complex profusion .
'A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.' (Turing)
To approach it with a kind of crazy joy?
I would rather have scientists who carry doubt with them as they proceed. (The Bad Show)
A parent’s love is always haunted by the specter of loss. We love our children so much it’s physically painful; they’ve made hostages of our hearts.
It was as if, in giving up racing and coming home, he had caused his life to come unstrung.
I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.” - Thanksgiving in Mongolia
You asked me what I care about most. Well, whenever I see anything that any person has done, what I care about is who did it and why. - Yo Yo Ma
Keep the nonmeasureables intact.
He stopped, looking inward, looking helplessly young, looking old. - James Baldwin.
On caviar sandwiches: All at once a little messy and a little decadent and a little modest. As my father would cheerfully say, “Diamonds and burlap!”
It’s very likely you’ll bust ass in all directions forever to compensate for not being a prodigy. Become okay with this.
On buttons at auschwitz: The variety and sameness of human life.
On picking books to live: Choosing is always a sweet sorrow.
Speak to your dead. Write to your dead. Tell them a story. - Alexander Chee
What we see and feel with our bodies, caught midway between atoms and galaxies, is but a small swath of the spectrum, a sliver of reality.
They have to live these gigantic lives to feel anything.
In the past I’ve repeatedly found myself away from the city, as a reporter or as a touring musician — it often felt like I was just pretending to live here. (On traveling)
He feels himself fill with strata of emotions.
Neoscholastic, occult properties (on Galileo)
Somewhere along the way, I felt very uncherished.
Time, that pliable illusory multidirectional stuff
Facts can be like gemstones. If you achieve perfect lucidity, oh my god, go and clone yourself.
For a good thing: simply ask yourself - can you make it better?
A riot of glutamates
You know, I still remember what it tastes like to be 11, 17, 27.
Consider an individual chickadee, call her Jayla.
Speaking freely but thoughtfully
A wild and reckless sympathy for humanity.
People in structurally inventive clothing lingered over plastic cups of wine.
They were probably thinking something that I often think in these situations, which is, just make the right kind of face.
Over the years I've come to realize that unity does not entail the eradication of difference. We don't have to be afraid of contradictions.
This is what we’re doing when we dismiss the relevance of other stories—the relevance, therefore, of other lives—and suggest that the aesthetic value of a human experience, such as straight-male desire, is exhaustible.