“But this knowledge of history did not deflect my sadness. She saw my whole despair and, one afternoon as I returned home from the club, she said: “Perhaps even now it is not too late. Change style. Learn to snap. Leave government service, plunge into jungles of commerce.”
(Donald Barthelme, “Snap Snap,” Guilty Pleasures, p. 33.)
“INTERVIEWER [Terry Southern]: And yet, as I understand this theory, its success does not depend upon any actual sensory differences between people talking, but rather upon psychological or emotional differences between them as readers, isn’t that so? I’m referring to the serious use of this theory in communicative writing.
GREEN: People strike sparks off each other; that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together. After all, we don’t write letters now, we telephone. And one of these days we are going to have TV sets which lonely people can talk to and get answers back. Then no one will read anymore.”
(Henry Green’s Paris Review interview, from summer 1958.)
“ ‘And then eloping’s out of date, it went out with horses.’
‘Oh dear now they’re all eaten poor things.’
‘Too many people on this island keep carnivorous pets Mary,’ he replied. ‘The waste is fearful.’ ”
(Henry Green, Nothing, p. 87.)
“Not that Mr Pomfret appeared to pay heed. A pale smile was stuck across his face while he looked about as though to receive tribute. But the attention of almost everyone in that room was still fixed on the awkward happy couple, and Elaine Winder smacked their backs and generally behaved as if she were in at a kill.”
(Henry Green, Nothing, p. 78.)
“It’s a curse of our culture, this addiction to smartness and knowingness. It’s not just Tarantino. Look at MTV. Look at Spy magazine. Look at the ads in The Sunday Times Magazine. What’s so great about being so knowing, so smug, so cocky? Why do we want to be cool and ironic? Why are we so afraid of emotions? It’s an American disease. Our emotions can help us out of traps. Emotions are the way of truth. We need works of art that defeat our intellectual and emotional habits, that force us to see and feel freshly. We need an education in emotion. That’s why we have artists. They can be our teacher, if we are willing to let them.”
(Ray Carney, “Pulp Affliction: The Sorry State of Contemporary Film,” p. 49 in The Baffler #8, 1996)
“Certainly [Guy Davenport] can’t be convicted of not having a theory, though it is not a theory of reading but a theory of history. It is very likely untrue, but it got his book written. It says, I was happier at ten than I am at fifty-four, and a like pattern is discernible in America. As the fields where we sought those arrowheads are now under an immense lake, so oblivion has engulfed American consciousness, and arts vainly array particulars hardly anyone can command the knack to read. Hence these pages, in which I take pleasure in my own bright arrays, culled in homage from Poe and Pound and Grant Wood and Whitman and Joyce and Zukofsky and Eudora Welty and as many other sly but masterful spirits as I’ve had occasion to pay attention to.”
(Hugh Kenner, “A Geographer of the Imagination: the astute eye of Guy Davenport,” Harper’s, August 1981, p. 68.)
(Agnolo Bronzino, Head of a Smiling Young Woman in Three-Quarter View, ca. 1542–43. Musée du Louvre.)
(found here.)
(Jonathan Barnbrook’s Priori Acute, from Emigre.)
“Tom Disch, the late poet and novelist, once gave me a piece of advice: if I wanted to write a best-selling novel, I should write a novel about a poet. All literate Americans, he said, love poets, even though they don’t much care for modern poetry, or read a lot of it. I followed his advice, and though the resulting book fell well short of the best-seller list, I saw the fictional advantages of such a character. A poet in a novel is in touch with a realm of words more potent than the prose fiction in which he or she is embedded, and thus gains a numinous intensity of feeling from the start. It is not even necessary to supply your poet with great poems: he merely has to ponder the possibility of them.”
(John Crowley on Nicholson Baker in the Boston Review.)