Stuff I like
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The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest -
“These were the things that built the world. Not to know or care about them was a betrayal of fundamental principles, a betrayal of gender, of...
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I’m sure it doesn’t hold up with volume but I very much enjoyed watching the mute image of what happens when I’m trying to summon the muse.
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“”Jealousy isn’t a pleasant quality, but if it isn’t overdone (and if it’s combined with modesty), apart from its inconvenience there’s even...
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I'm am SO on board with COMMUNITY 2.0
- Dan Harmon isn’t around to say stupid shit regularly and make me hate the show in...
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Yup….this is the best video on YouTube.
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“There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
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I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets
under the trees, catching the rain
of olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness
of the one covering the bad roof
of a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color
inside the winter’s weeks. Another one
took the shape of the pile of bricks underneath.
Another flew off the back of a truck,
black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air.
I have seen the ones under bridges,
the forms they make of sleep. I could go on
this way until the end of the page, even though
what I have in my mind isn’t the thing
itself, but the category of belief that sees the thing
as a shelter for what is beneath it.
There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over
a wave. You cannot put a tarp
over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken
oil well miles under the ocean.
There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind
that sits in a corner and shreds receipts
and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,
whose only recourse is language
so approximate it hardly means what it means:
He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember
her name. He is old. He is ashamed.
Tarp by Rick Barot (via Poetry)
Too good.
“It’s easy to make choices when you have things hampering you - a job, kids’ schools - but when all you have to go on is your own desires, then life becomes considerably more difficult, not to say intolerable.”
Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage
Guys this is important: History of Rap 4 (Jimmy Fallon & Justin Timberlake) (by latenight)
Tenth of December by George Saunders
I have finally read Saunders for the first time and it was pretty much as great as everyone said it would be. I remember reading Joel Lovell’s amazing profile of Saunders for the New York Times. It stands as one of the greatest profiles that I’ve ever read. It’s also quite a gushing review of the book, and the whole time I kept thinking to myself, “How the hell have I not read this guy yet?”
While reading Saunders I kept thinking about that famous David Foster Wallace quote about fiction: “Fiction is about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Wallace is one of my all-time favorite authors so it came as no surprise to find out in Lovell’s profile that Saunders had a relationship with DFW:
We talked for a while about his relationship to Wallace. For all the ways in which their fiction might seem to be working similar themes, they were, Saunders said, “like two teams of miners, digging at the same spot but from different directions.” He described making trips to New York in the early days and having “three or four really intense afternoons and evenings” with, on separate occasions, Wallace and Franzen and Ben Marcus, talking to each of them about what “the ultimate aspiration for fiction was.” Saunders added: “The thing on the table was emotional fiction. How do we make it? How do we get there? Is there something yet to be discovered? These were about the possibly contrasting desire to: (1) write stories that had some sort of moral heft and/or were not just technical exercises or cerebral games; while (2) not being cheesy or sentimental or reactionary.”
I guess it should come as no surprise to tell you that Saunders has succeeded in creating the type of fiction he and Wallace talked about. This book is a great combination of humor and intellect, emotion and philosophy.
The title story of the collection is worth the price of the book alone.
“Because, okay, the thing was - he saw it now, was starting to see it - if some guy, at the end, fell apart, and said or did bad things, or had to be helped, helped to quite a considerable extent? So what? What of it? Why should he not do or say weird things or look strange or disgusting? Why should the shit not run down his legs? Why should those he loved not lift and bend and feed and wipe him, when he would gladly do the same for them? He’d been afraid to be lessened by the lifting and bending and feeding and wiping, and was still afraid of that, and yet, at the same time, now saw that, there could still be many - many drops of goodness, is how it came to him - many drops of happy - of good fellowship - ahead, and those drops of fellowship were not - had never been - his to withhold.”
George Saunders, “Tenth of December”
“In the pond he was all animal-thought, no words, no self, blind panic. He resolved to really try. He grabbed for the edge. The edge broke away. Down he went. He hit mud and pushed up. He grabbed for the edge. The edge broke away. Down he went. It seemed like it should be easy, getting out. But he just couldn’t do it. It was like at the carnival. It should be easy to knock three sawdust dogs off a ledge. And it was easy. It just wasn’t easy with the amounts of balls they gave you.”
George Saunders, “Tenth of December”
“Based on my experience of life, which I have not exactly hit out of the park, I tend to agree with that thing about, If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. And would go even further, to: Even if it is broke, leave it alone, you’ll probably make it worse.”
George Saunders, from “My Chivalric Fiasco” in Tenth of December
Saunders, your humor is rad.
