“What Gabriel had to realize was that aristocrats, unlike intellectuals, had no desire to improve or prove themselves. In the world of the salons there was no future, only the present. One looked at a painting, one consumed a lime ice, one played a round of cards, one talked, walked, shopped, rode a horse, cooked up a practical joke. The absence of time was paradisal, if paradise is conceded to be splendid but dull. No one struggled to memorize the names of foreign painters, to question the meaning of money or society, to talk amusingly, to stand at a viewing distance from the moment.”
(Edmund White, Caracole, p. 259.)
“Nothing makes any difference as long as some one is listening while they are talking. If the same person does the talking and the listening why so much the better there is just by so much the greater concentration. One may really indeed say that that is the essence of genius, of being most intensely alive, that is being one who is at the same time talking and listening. It is really that that makes one a genius. And it is necessary to be at once talking and listening, doing both things, not as if there were one thing, not as if they were two things, but doing them, well if you like, like the motor going inside and the car moving, they are part of the same thing.”
(Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, “Portraits and Repetition,” p. 170. )
“The Auxiliary on guard with him had been in the Navy. Some time ago this man had seen ‘King Kong,’ the film of an outsize in apes that was twenty foot tall. Roe’s explanation was that the experience had had a lasting effect on his adjectives. One in particular, ‘conga,’ he used to cover almost everything.
‘A conga night,’ he said. He called each Rescue man ‘cock.’ He remarked that their whisky was dodgy. He went by the name of ‘Shiner,’ because his surname was Wright.”
(Henry Green, Caught (1943), p. 41.)
“Then Minerva said, ‘Father, son of Saturn, King of kinds, it served Ægisthus right, and so it would any one else who does as he did; but Ægisthus is neither here nor there; it is for Ulysses that my heart bleeds, when I think of his sufferings in that lonely sea-girt island, far away, poor man, from all his friends. It is an island covered with forest, in the very middle of the sea, and a goddess lives there, daughter of the magician Atlas, who looks after the bottom of the ocean, and carries the great columns that keep heaven and earth asunder. This daughter of Atlas had got hold of poor unhappy Ulysses, and keeps trying by every kind of blandishment to make him forget his home, so that he is tired of life, and thinks of nothing but how he may once more see the smoke of his own chimneys.’ ”
(Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler, book I, lines 44–60.)
“For many years I have worked in film production and seen more than once how the directors, during the screenings before public release, said that these were just sketches, something that would have to be reworked in the future.
People cringe when showing something that’s most precious to them.”
(Viktor Shklovsky, Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot, trans. Shushan Avagyan, p. 7.)
“Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to beat personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute ‘gives,’ but – demanding nothing of comparable value in return – perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement that engages the reader – titillates, repulses, excites, transports him – without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity.”
(David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fall 1988: Novelist as Critic, p. 45)
(Peanuts, 26 June 1995. From here.)
“The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice – the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar – no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority.”
(Erich Auerbach, from “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask, p. 14.)
“As this half of the countercultural ideal originated during the 1950s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of church-goers, tailfins, red-scares, smiling white people, lines of commuters, sedate music, sexual repression. An America of uptight patriarchs, friendly cops, buttoned-down collars, B-47s, and deference to authority – the America of such backward-looking creatures as Jerry Falwell. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch-evil in advertising and movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke. Picking up at random a recent Utne Reader, for example, one finds an article which seeks to question the alternativeness of coffee by reminding the reader of its popularity during that cursed decade: ‘According to history – or sitcome reruns –’ the author writes, the ‘the ’50s were when Dad tanked up first thing in the morning with a pot of java, which set him on his jaunty way to a job that siphoned away his lifeblood in exchange for lifelong employment, a two-car garage, and Mom’s charge card.’ The correct response: What a nightmare! I’ll be sure to get my coffee at a hip place like Starbuck’s.”
(Tom Frank, “Dark Age,” pp. 13–14 in The Baffler no. 6, 1995.)
“But, in the case of marriage, there is something more. By conceding the privilege of polygamy to the chief, the group exchanges the individual elements of security guaranteed by the rule of monogamy for collective security, which they expect to be ensured by the leader. Each man receives his wife from another man, but the chief receives several wives from the group. In return, he provides a guarantee against want and danger, not for the individuals whose sisters or daughters he marries, nor even for those men who are deprived of women as a consequence of his polygamy, but for the group considered as a whole, since it is the group as a whole which has suspended the common law for his benefit. Such considerations might be of some interest for a theoretical study of polygamy; but their chief importance is as a reminded that the conception of the state as a system of guarantees, which has been revived in recent years by discussions about systems of national insurance (such as the Beveridge Plan and other proposals), is not a purely modern development. It is a return to the fundamental nature of social and political organization.”
(Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. Doreen Weightman & John Weightman, p. 315.)
