The Soko has its own celebrities, but it is a precarious honor, one is likely at any second to be cut down and cast away, for the Soko audience, having seen just about everything, is excessively fickle. Currently, however, they are starring Estelle, a beautiful girl who walks like a rope unwinding. She is half-Chinese and half-Negro, and she works in a bordello called Black Cat. Rumor has it that she once was a Paris model, and that she arrived here on a private yacht, planning, of course, to leave by the same means; but it appears the gentleman to whom the yacht belonged sailed away one fine morning, leaving Estelle stranded.
– Truman Capote
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
… “I am an Armenian,” I say. It is a meaningless remark, but they expect me to say it, so I do. I have no idea what it is like to be an Armenian or what it is like to be an Englishman or a Japanese or anything else. I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive. This is the only thing that interests me greatly. This and tennis. I hope some day to write a great philosophical work on tennis, something on the order of Death in the Afternoon, but I am aware that I am not yet ready to undertake such a work.
– William Saroyan
Many people were eliminated from my orbit by virtue of the fact they had more money than I did, which placed me, in my own eyes, in the humiliating role of a free-loader; and other people were eliminated by virtue of the fact that they enjoyed their poverty, shrilly insisting that this wretched round of hotel rooms, bad food, humiliating concierges, and unpaid bills was the Great Adventure. It couldn’t, however, for me, end soon enough, this Great Adventure; there was a real question in my mind as to which would end soonest, the Great Adventure or me.
– James Baldwin
The books I ordered weeks ago arrived today from Romania. I met a friend for lunch and spent an enjoyable hour catching up. I left work at five and wandered to a bookstore in town, sat down in their café, and started reading.
I feel the thrill of expectation, of starting a good book, of going to listen to good music. I read Steinhardt’s answer to the question of the most influential teachers of his generation. He talks about Nae Ionescu. They all talk about Nae Ionescu: Cioran, Eliade, Sebastian. What Ionescu understood better than anybody else, Steinhardt says, is that – before existentialism became “fashionable and a quasi-official doctrine” – we are “all condemned to freedom and choice, that in philosophy, the individual and the spirit fight to the death, that this so called theoretical discipline can be as close as a guardian angel or a tempting demon, that you can only find your way out of its pluralities through an act of courage rather verging on audacity. For there is no Ariadne’s thread in the reflexive labyrinth. You have to make it through on your own, alone with yourself and your being, as unknown to you as to those around you.”
He dreamed in solitude about how one day he would all of a sudden accomplish a heroic feat and so burst into the brilliant future, into the circle of the new generations – to this end he had even submitted a request to the local aerodrome, asking to be taken up to the very highest altitude and to be dropped from there by parachute without an oxygen mask, but he had not received any reply.
Andrey Platonov
He pictured life as faultless marble, granite of even grain, out of which he could hew his own image with the hard chisel of will; and instead he finds a lump of mucky dung in his hands which either cannot be molded, or which, molded indeed, will not hang together. Too much idealism, say the wiseacres who have gotten used to the smell. And “too much” is right! Young men die of that “too much” more often than of the little piece of lead they shoot through their hearts. But verily I say unto you: there is no surer sign of “smallness” of nature than contentment with everything. Peace can come only when youth is over, when the cycle of inner and outer experience has been completed, when we find solace for the eternal nothingness of things, in exquisite enjoyment of the Now that will never return again.
– Giovanni Papini
In the last twenty years the colleges have been emphasizing creative writing to such an extent that you almost feel that any idiot with a nickel’s worth of talent can emerge from a writing class able to write a competent story. In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence. We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class.
– Flannery O’Connor
I come from a suburb of Montreal called the West Island, which isn’t actually its own island. Middle-class Anglophones built themselves houses there after the war, and over the years the houses have gotten bigger alongside the growing fear of a Francophone majority. Despite Montreal’s reputation as a kind of diluted Paris, the place I’m from is decidedly more banlieue than arrondissement. It’s the kind of place that dangles in cultural outer space like the capital of nowhere. I lived there until I was twenty-three, and everywhere I go now I carry its silence with me like a blank postcard.
I’ve heard it’s the wealthiest area in the country. People certainly have money. They keep their lawns green and close-cut; they go to hockey games and parent committee meetings; every summer they spread their useless possessions out in the driveway to sell to neighbors. Kids spend the afternoons stealing things at the mall. At night they borrow the car and drive to the field behind the airport to get stoned and watch the planes take off, maybe have a quick one in the back seat. I did those things. There isn’t much else to do. We knew with inborn certainty we’d have our own money one day.
…I did remember the invasion of cockroaches, the black swarm which had nightly filled the darkness with a spidery running. All cracks in the floors were full of moving whispers, each crevice suddenly produced a cockroach, from every chink would shoot a crazy black zigzag of lightning. Ah, that wild lunacy of panic, traced in a shiny black line on the floor! Ah, those screams of horror which my father emitted, leaping from one chair to another with a javelin in his hand!
– Bruno Schulz
