“I can see no way in which it is a good thing for humans to have accidentally and pointlessly evolved on an earth which they must inhabit (irrespective of my own local happiness). Life-under-God seems a pointlessness posing as purpose (the purpose, presumably, being to love God and to be loved in return); life-without-God seems to me also a pointlessness posing as a purpose (jobs, family, sex—all the usual distractions). The advantage, if it can be described as one, of living in the latter state, without God, is that the false purpose has at least been invented by man, and one can strip it away to reveal the actual pointlessness.”
— James Wood, “The Broken Estate”
12:55 pm • 7 November 2011 • 10 notes
Anonymous asked: your blog is so god damn boring. what the fuck, put some sexy pictures of your self up to spice things up
5:11 am • 7 November 2011 • 2 notes
“The child of evangelicalism, if he does not believe, inherits nevertheless a suspicion of indifference. He is always evangelical. He rejects the religion hew grew up with, but he rejects it religiously. He has buried evangelical belief but he has not buried the evangelical choice, which seems to him the only important dilemma. He respects the logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment, the little cell of belief. This is the only kind of belief that makes sense, the revolutionary kind. Nominal belief is insufficiently serious; nominal unbelief seems almost a blasphemy against earnest atheism.”
— James Wood, “The Broken Estate”
5:09 am • 7 November 2011 • 10 notes
“By absorbing so many book he was trying to purge his own failure as a writer. It wasn’t working, but he feared what would happen if he stopped.”
— Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
2:37 pm • 3 November 2011 • 8 notes
“Okay, you could tell that part like a story, a creative-writing assignment, could even toss in a florid last line to keep people on their toes, but that was because it wasn’t the real story. By which she meant it wasn’t an answer to the questions she feared most: Who are you? What do you do? Well, what do you want to do?”
— Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding
2:36 pm • 3 November 2011 • 6 notes
“
At the very end of a life spent in the pursuit of knowledge Faust has to confess: ‘I now do see that we can nothing know.’
“That is the answer to a sum, it is the outcome of a long experience. But as Kierkegaard observed, it is quite a different thing when a freshman comes up to the university and uses the same sentiment to justify his indolence. As the answer to a sum it is perfectly true, but as the initial date it is a piece of self-deception. For acquired knowledge cannot be divorced from the existence in which it is acquired.
”
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
7:41 pm • 2 November 2011 • 25 notes
“When you feel lost in the world, there is some joy to be gleaned from exact imitations of familiar things.”
— Zadie Smith, “Hanwell in Hell”
12:06 am • 2 November 2011 • 72 notes
“The girl had a manner that was all itinerary, charmless and focused, and Pam, a Midwesterner by birth, had the shameful idea that she might go far, this Martha Penk, here on the East Coast.”
— Zadie Smith, “Martha Martha”
11:38 pm • 1 November 2011 • 85 notes
Thrilled to receive this in the mail today. Had to order it from the UK because it’s not for sale here (odd, since both of the stories were published in American magazines*). Now she just needs to hurry up and write another novel.
*My mistake: Granta is actually a British publication. One of the stories, however, was published in the New Yorker.
10:15 pm • 1 November 2011 • 1 note
books I read in october
Spring and All - William Carlos Williams
Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
The Messiah of Stockholm - Cynthia Ozick
The Ghost Writer - Philip Roth
The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides
Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
White Noise - Don DeLillo
***
Some good reading this month, some bad. I had only read Portnoy’s Complaint—and that was a long time ago—but now I finally understand why people like Roth. If you are baffled like I was, you should read Ghost Writer. But Graham Greene wins the month. If I didn’t have to read shitty stuff for school (Jong, Stephenson), I would sit down with a stack of Greene novels and plow through them.
Surprisingly, I found White Noise almost unbearably tedious on rereading it. I loved it when I last read it, but that was six or seven years ago, and I guess it seems less novel to me now than it did then. Can’t deny that, on a sentence level, the writing is mostly sharp—I don’t think anyone’s ever accused DeLillo of being a bad prose writer—but does everything have to be so portentous? Can’t we have some real characters, Don? Do we have to scoff at everything? (Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the book so much as a teenager…)
12:27 am • 31 October 2011 • 32 notes
