The vanity speaks so stark. DFW

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian.

You say his politics were Utopian. Are you implying they were unrealistic?

He looked forward to the day when politics and the state would wither away. I would call that Utopian. On the other hand, he did not invest a great deal of himself in these Utopian longings. He was too much of a Calvinist for that.

Please explain.

You want me to say what lay behind Coetzee's politics? You can best get that from his books. But let me try anyway.
In Coetzee's eyes, we human beings will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient and attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions. Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancour and spite and jealousy and bloodlust and so forth. In other words, politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.

--"Sophie," from Summertime

France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners.

The mornings are growing colder, I enter them unprepared. Icy mornings. The streets are still dark. The bicycles go past me, their parts creaking, the riders miserable as beggars.

I have a coffee in the Cafe St. Louis. It's as quiet as a doctor's office. The tables have chairs still upturned on them. Beyond the thin curtains, a splitting cold. Perhaps it will snow. I glance at the sky. Heavy as wet rags. France is herself only in the winter, her naked self, without manners. In the fine weather, all the world can love her. Still, it's depressing. One feels like a fugitive from half a dozen lives.

These dismal mornings. I stand near the radiator, trying to warm my hands over iron that's cold as glass. The French have a nice feeling for simplicity. They merely wear sweaters indoors and sometimes hats as well. They believe in light, yes, but only as the heavens provide it. Most of their rooms are dark as the poorhouse. There's an odor of tobacco, sweat and perfume, all combined. A dispirited atmosphere in which every sound seems cruel and isolated--the closing of a door, footsteps beneath which one can detect the thin complaint of grit, hoarse bonjours. One feels part of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there's an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it. I see her almost daily. I can always go down there on some pretext, but it's difficult to talk while she's working. Oh, Claude, Claude, my hands are tingling. They want to touch you. In her elaborately done hair there is a band which she keeps feeling for nervously. Then she touches the top button of her sweater as if it were a jewel. Around her neck there are festoons of glass beads the color of nightclub kisses. A green stone on her index finger. And she wears several wedding bands, three, it seems. I'm too nervous to count.

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

"He doesn't count because we don't know where he is."

a disease artist

I'd done one film only, an idea for a film, some people said. I did it, I finished it, people saw it but what did they see? An idea, they said, that remains an idea.

I didn't want to call it a documentary, although it was assembled completely from documents, old film footage, kinescopes of TV shows from the 1950s. This was social and historical material but edited well beyond the limits of information and objectivity and not itself a document. I found something religious in it, maybe I was the only one, religious, rapturous, a man transported.

The man was the one individual on-screen throughout, the comedian Jerry Lewis. This was Jerry Lewis of the early telethons, the TV shows broadcast once a year to benefit people suffering from muscular dystrophy, Jerry Lewis day and night and into the following day, heroic, tragicomic, surreal.

I looked at kinescopes of the early years, every distant minute, it was another civilization, midcentury America, the footage resembling some deviant technological lifeform struggling out of the irradiated dust of the atomic age. I edited out all the guest appearances, the lounge acts, movie stars, dancers, disabled children, the studio audience, the band. The film was all Jerry, pure performance, Jerry talking, singing, weeping, Jerry with his ruffled shirt open at the collar, bow tie undone, a raccoon flung over his shoulders, Jerry inviting the nation's love and wonder at four in the morning, in closeup, a crew-cut sweating man in semidelirium a disease artist, begging us to send money to cure his afflicted children.

I had him babbling in unsequential edits, one year shading into another, or Jerry soundless, clowning, he is knock-kneed and bucktoothed, bouncing on a trampoline in slow motion, the old flawed footage, the disturbed signals, random noise on the soundtrack, streaky patterns on the screen. He inserts drumsticks in his nostrils, he sticks the handmike in his mouth. I added intervals of modern music to the track, rows of tones, the sound of a certain re-echoing drone. There was an element of austere drama in the music, it placed Jerry outside the moment, in some larger surround, ahistorical, a man on a mission from God.

--Don DeLillo, Point Omega

where you aren't is more fun than where you are

You started on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad's mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren't is more fun than where you are.

Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City

I was obliged to repeat the story that I had already told hundreds of times that morning; then I went up to my room to think. But instead I fell asleep, sitting on the sofa, and dreamed that bird-women, gathering in a flock outside, near the balcony, were looking at me through the windows, their wings beating quietly in the warm humid air. One by one I began to recognize them: Lola and Nuria, and other women from Z, although their faces were blurry so I couldn't be sure. The old woman was fluttering in the middle, like a queen surrounded by her entourage. She was the only one really watching me. A gust blew the windows open and I felt her voice, just as the group of bird-women began to rise and clouds came down over the town. Even so, the dead woman's voice made the windowpanes shake. She was singing. The words of her song were simple and repetitive: Avenge me, avenge me, avenge me--dear colleague, avenge me, avenge me, avenge me.

Roberto Bolano, The Skating Rink

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy --
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure --

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum --
which they cannot express --

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent --
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs --

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us --
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

William Carlos Williams

For Grace, After a Party

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
                 me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
             and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
                                                                  writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
                    an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed?  And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
                                    you like the eggs a little
different today?
                            And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

Frank O'Hara

He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned. Kin long dead washed up and cast fey sidewise looks upon him. None spoke. He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. There was a woman at a table there with her head in her hands. Years later he'd stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He'd not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.

...

He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay modering. No sound sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Doc got out and strolled under a Byzantine archway and into the seedy vastness of the main gaming floor, dominated by a ruinous chandelier draped above the tables and cages and pits, disintegrating, ghostly, huge, and, if it had feelings, likely resentful--its lightbulbs long burned out and unreplaced, crystal lusters falling off unexpectedly into cowboy hatbrims, people's drinks, and spinning roulette wheels, where they bounced with a hard-edged jingling through their own dramas of luck and loss. Everything in the room was lopsided one way or another. The ancient bearings on the roulette wheels made them spin erratically faster and slower. The classic three-reel slots, set long ago to payout percentages unknown south of Bonanza Road and perhaps to the world, had since each drifted in its own way, like small-town businessfolks, toward openhanded generosity or tightfisted meanness. The carpets, deep royal purple, had been retextured over the years with a million cigarette burns, each fusing the synthetic nap to a single tiny smear of plastic. The all-over effect was of wind on the surface of a lake. The level of the main floor was ten feet below that of the desert outside, providing natural insulation, so the chill in this vast indeterminate space wasn't all from air-conditioning, which had been set on low in any case to save current.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice

Sunrise was on the way, the bars were just closed or closing, out in front of Wavos everybody was either at the tables along the sidewalk, sleeping with their heads on Health Waffles or in bowls of vegetarian chili, or being sick in the street, causing small-motorcycle traffic to skid in the vomit and so forth. It was late winter in Gordita, though for sure not the usual weather. You heard people muttering to the effect that last summer the beach didn't have summer till August, and now there probably wouldn't be any winter till spring. Santa Anas had been blowing all the smog out of downtown L.A., funneling between the Hollywood and Puente Hills on westward through Gordita Beach and out to sea, and this had been going on for what seemed like weeks now. Offshore winds had been too strong to be doing the surf much good, but surfers found themselves getting up early anyway to watch the dawn weirdness, which seemed like a visible counterpart to the feeling in everybody's skin of desert winds and heat and relentlessness, with the exhaust from millions of motor vehicles mixing with microfine Mojave sand to refract the light toward the bloody end of the spectrum, everything dim, lurid and biblical, sailor-take-warning skies. The state liquor stamps over the tops of tequila bottles in the stores were coming unstuck, is how dry the air was. Liquor-store owners could be filling those bottles iwth anything anymore. Jets were taking off the wrong way from the airport, the engine sounds were not passing across the sky where they should have, so everybody's dreams got disarranged, when people could get to sleep at all. In the little apartment complexes the wind entered narrowing to whistle through the stairwells and ramps and catwalks, and teh leaves of the palm trees outside rattled together with a liquid sound, so that from inside, in the darkened rooms, in louvered light, it sounded like a rainstorm, the wind raging in the concrete geometry, the palms beating together like the rush of a tropical downpour, enough to get you to open the door and look outside, and of course there'd only be the same hot cloudless depth of day, no rain in sight.