self bias IS much easier to maintain when you avoid discussion.

 It is almost like the whole story was written to be really funny but only for those watching who have no part. 

 What is going on right now inside the mind?

“the lava of essential forces flowing beneath human life.”

But her greatest virtues as a writer

of fiction are old-fashioned: exquisitely constructed sentences,

a capacious moral imagination and a depth of feeling for human

frailty, a near-hallucinatory precision in describing physical phenomena as well as emotional states, interpersonal dynamics, and

shifts in consciousness so minute that they approach abstraction.

.........

The irony, of course, was that there was a child molester right

down the street who worked with my father, and who preyed on

me right under my parents’ noses. I can recall things happening

to me outdoors, in a public place where I could hear voices in the

distance. My mother would let me go to the park with him because

in her mind he wasn’t one of those people—he was a family man,

she was friends with his wife, his child played with us sometimes.

When I told her what was happening, she didn’t believe me, and

when I confronted her about it later, she said one of the reasons

she didn’t was that I always seemed to really like him, and that I

would climb into his lap. I do remember being very aware of how

much pain he was in—it is incredible how empathic children can

be—and of the depth of suffering that people could experience,

that it could seem to go on forever and that no pity could erase it.

Hell, to me, was clearly a story about that.

..............

After that, I went to

Berkeley with this guy, a twenty-five-year-old draft dodger—I worked

in a massage parlor and sold underground newspapers there—and

back to Canada, where I sold flowers outside liquor stores and bars.

I sold jewelry, too, and later I was a stripper for a while. I was in

touch with my parents all this time, by the way. I let them know

where I was and that I was okay. They were mad at me, they yelled,

but they somehow accepted this. I could also go home and visit—

it was in a sense the best of both worlds.

Sometimes I wish I had been more protected—that I had not felt

like I had to leave home, that I’d had a better formal education. But

the upside is that I met a lot of people that I wouldn’t have encountered if I had stayed in Michigan. It was great exposure to different cultures and ways of being, and I learned how to read people physically, which was very practical. I realized that when really bad

things happened, it was after I’d gotten clear warnings from people’s

eyes and body language and tone that I hadn’t paid attention to. I

learned to understand people through things beyond the words they

were saying. That was very, very good for me as a writer, because I

was tuned in to that kind of detail.

..........

At a certain point, it occurred to me that I didn’t even know

proper grammar, so I decided to go back to school, which meant

community college. I think one of the main reasons I was able

to pursue writing at that age is that I had no idea how difficult it

would be—I was just really ignorant. When I went on from community college to the University of Michigan, I was utterly lacking in any kind of intellectual sophistication. I didn’t know how to

translate anything I’d learned to that environment, which was very

competitive in a way I hadn’t experienced till then. The people I’d

met when I was selling jewelry on the street or working as a stripper

were more relaxed—I think that when I say I did these things, you

might imagine something brutish and dull, but most everyone was

culturally bright and curious. My best friend in the stripping world,

Rene, lived with a guy who was one of the best commercial photographers in Toronto, and he taught her how to take pictures. Rene

had run away from home too and had been a stripper since she was

thirteen years old, and she protected me. She was fascinated that I

wanted to be a writer and that I read things, and she wasn’t at all

intimidated by that—she was really open. Whereas my classmates at

Ann Arbor were all much younger than me, and I found them boring. The graduate students and other people hanging around had

mostly been to Europe and knew more, but in a predictable way.

.......

When I was out on my own and not going to school, a lot of junk—

though some high-end junk, like Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I was

living in Toronto then, so my attention was on Canadian writers—

Leonard Cohen, Margaret Atwood. I also had a thing for D. H.

Lawrence, whose writing seemed more passionate and more raw

than most of the stuff I was reading—although even as a kid I

could see the comedy in the Sturm und Drang over sex. I liked

Erica Jong’s first novel. And Tom Wolfe—I don’t mean the old guy,

I mean The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Later, I loved Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Joy Williams.

I didn’t want to like Norman Mailer, but I secretly did. I could

sense, although I didn’t have words for this at the time, something

bigger underneath the misogyny—a willingness to go deep into

what I’ve called, in an essay about him, “the lava of essential

forces flowing beneath human life.” Plus, he wasn’t worried about

offending people or being ugly or gross or anything—he was like

an animal. I think I secretly figured he had to be that way, to get to

the lava.

........

I read Lolita when I was twenty-three, and I was just overwhelmed

by the beauty of the prose and the depth of feeling, by that tension

between what you’re supposed to want and what you do want—

the wish for an ideal experience, whether it’s sexual or anything

else, and how the fixation on that ideal can become violent, how

the instinct to love can be so intimately related to real evil and

aggression. Humbert’s is an extreme case, but it’s the extreme cases

that make us understand ourselves best, whether we realize it or

not. I think I knew that Nabokov was a don’t-try-this-at-home kind

of thing—he was way above my skill level—but Lolita opened up

my senses, and my sense of what was possible.

........

I find it hard to talk about influence, because it’s mostly unconscious and unpredictable—it can come from things that we

don’t especially admire as well as from the things we love. I’d say

my work is strongly influenced by music, for example, but it would

be very hard to explain how. I used to play certain pieces of music

before sitting down to write. A recent example would be the second

Cream album, before writing an essay on Pale Fire. And when I was

writing Veronica, I deliberately read things that I thought would

affect the voice in a good way—such as Housekeeping by Marilynne

Robinson. But in general, as I got more mature, I began to avoid

work that might influence me while I was writing, because it can

take you off your own instincts.

.....

He was the first person to

reinforce my intuition that style was a valid thing to care about, that

it’s not simply for decoration—it’s how your story is given shape,

how you allow the clarity and force of your ideas to come through

and draw out the deepest possible meaning.

......

(I struggled with) trying to describe accurately what I’m wanting to say. So much is

happening in any given moment, both internally and externally—

so much of life is not about words.

..

Re Ayn Rand:

Two Girls went in a very different direction than I’d pictured

initially. I’d meant to make it more like a satire of Ayn Rand. At

the Strand I’d had a coworker I was friendly with who was probably

technically a narcissist—you could be walking down the street with

him and he’d just stop and be transfixed, looking at his reflection

in a window—and he barely read but he loved Rand, he believed in

her message. At the cardiologist’s office, too, I’d met someone who

was profoundly affected by her writing, just raving about it while

I was doing an EKG on him. I was surprised that these people who

seemed so ordinary would be susceptible to something like that,

that it could create such powerful emotional reactions. I began to

read about this cult she had around her, and I interviewed other

devotees who also seemed completely normal—not at all fanatical,

very nice and sincere. I actually wrote an article about this for

Mother Jones, but it didn’t get published. The character of Dorothy

is based on a woman I spoke to who’d worked for Rand very briefly.

When I asked why Rand meant so much to her, she said, “Because

I was raped by my father at a very young age, and Ayn Rand was

the only thing that helped me hold on to any sanity.” I’d planned to

include a counternarrative to the story of Justine and Dorothy—an

imaginary Rand-esque novel—but I lost interest in that and got

more into their childhoods.

...

How much can you write on a good day?

Sometimes it’s only a paragraph. I think the most I’ve ever written

in one go is four pages. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

....

Biffen

In the 1891 novel New Grub Street by George Gissing (pictured here), a character named Harold Biffen writes a novel called Mr Bailey, Grocer, which describes the life of an ordinary grocer in absolutely realistic detail and with zero dramatic shaping. Biffen’s novel is “unutterably boring” by design; it is about the dull monotony of a man’s life. The novel is a work of art but sheer drudgery to read. Disappointed in love and in art, Biffen ends up poisoning himself.

butchery

A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on. When they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other: “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher,” whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother’s neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs, and when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child’s neck and, in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who had been the butcher. She then rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub, but in the meantime it had drowned in the bath. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself. When her husband returned home from the fields and saw this, he was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter

Cowrage Sinularity

Seeking cow rage

singularity beads glistening in sunlight moon night

beam boom blimp

loft

hover lower livery lara croft lover

limping lyme pegs being pegged

at prices far below slung

underlings

Opposable thumbs

But the pride of the hand is the fully opposable thumb. Without thumbs, our hands would be only a marginal improvement over a pirate’s hook. Other animals, with their thumbless extremities, can merely paw at the world, or butt and scrape it with their hooves. But because we humans have thumbs, we can seize hold of it and manipulate it to our ends.

...

Well, a hand is obviously for eating. A hand is for caressing. A hand is for making fists and bludgeoning. A hand is for making tools and wielding them. A hand is lascivious: it is for groping and tickling and teasing. Hands are for making sense: we wave them around to amplify what we are saying. My own hands are for all of the above, but these days they are mostly for thumbing through books and typing.

Our hands are tools, but evolution did not shape them for one single thing. The hand is not the biological equivalent of a hammer or a screwdriver; the hand is a multipurpose tool like a Swiss Army knife—it is for many things.

it had been years, decades,

 She wasn’t a great reader. It took her ages to get through a page,

and though her son had suggested audiobooks, she found them

tiresome and dull.

Drinking used to

make her feel like she was more than just the cavernous gut of a

starving jackal, but it had been years, decades, since it had made

her feel anything like good

It was nice,

so nice that Julius closed her eyes and found herself in the elated,

dreamy state she’d occasionally felt at church as a little girl when

the choir performed. A kind of feeling like God was real, and so

was Heaven, and so were things like purpose, meaning, beauty,

connection.

But the song was over after about five minutes, and one couldn’t

go on listening to music that made you feel like that forever, and

worse, even if you found music that made you feel like that, it wouldn’t

always make you feel like that. Everything had its life span.

...

Via social media, she knew words and phrases like gaslighting,

trauma-informed, disorganized attachment, kink-friendly, pinkwashing, and could use them all in a sentence.

vague

There is something deeply unsatisfying about... not having questions answered... and not being able to formulate the right questions... slipping away from hands like water... and all too soon it's all over in a way that seldom is satisfying... maybe painful, perhaps sudden and...

to compare is default and easy... to not compare is... well, there are no answers... that is this relinquishing of the questions... its like submerging the questions... and not seeking any answers... and merging into a silent flow of neuromuscular tensions and release valves... but to seek the truth within is ever more nuanced and deeply underlying under the skin... inside the skin..

well is it even the truth? or is it... well what is the truth.. even such concepts are disinteragting smell... just word convience.. and when you look deeper, the process of catting looking deeper is all that is issing.. it cannot be seen.. it cannot be glanced.. there is nothing to be glanced perhaps.. but now it is dream walking environmental pulling poetry oozing out of no where and every where garbage shit junk and nothing but trash talk verging on filter cide and nubbing the snub on the gutters in the lizard trail in montreal subway highway nigh lon bomb blast material covered in tin wrap gin tonic paste full of swab long tunic frogger wrapper comic stan multitude.

about dreaming

"So far we have considered fictions created by artists. But what about the stories we tell ourselves? We are at our most creative at night. When we sleep, the untired brain dreams richly, wildly, and at great length. Consciousness is altered in dreams but not extinguished. We just have a limited ability to remember the adventures we consciously experience throughout the night. (People vary in their ability to remember dreams, but sleep labstudies show that virtually everyone dreams.) In dreams, our brains—like cheating spouses—live a whole separate existence that they conceal from the waking mind."

G Jonathan

Against Disruption... On the Bulletpointization of Books

https://lithub.com/against-disruption-on-the-bulletpointization-of-books/

kalpatta

ദിവാകരന്റെ ലക്ഷ്യം അവളല്ലെങ്കിലും അവളുടെ ലക്ഷ്യം ദിവാകരനാണ്,......

the story telling animal quote

"Tens of thousands of years ago, when the human mind was young and our numbers were few, we were telling one another stories. And now, tens of thousands of years later, when our species teems across the globe, most of us still hew strongly to myths about the origins of things, and we still thrill to an astonishing multitude of fictions on pages, on stages, and on screens—murder stories, sex stories, war stories, conspiracy stories, true stories and false. We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories."

*

"I sat there for a long time feeling sad but also marveling at how quickly Wicks’s small, musical story had melted me—a grown man, and not a weeper—into sheer helplessness. How odd it is, I thought, that a story can sneak up on us on a beautiful autumn day, make us laugh or cry, make us amorous or angry, make our skin shrink around our flesh, alter the way we imagine ourselves and our worlds. How bizarre it is that when we experience a story—whether in a book, a film, or a song—we allow ourselves to be invaded by the teller. The story maker penetrates our skulls and seizes control of our brains."

*

"Neverland makes many people nervous. Fictions, fantasies, dreams—these are, to the humanistic imagination, a kind of sacred preserve. They are the last bastion of magic. They are the one place where science cannot—should not—penetrate, reducing ancient mysteries to electrochemical storms in the brain or the timeless warfare among selfish genes. The fear is that if you explain the power of Neverland, you may end up explaining it away."

*

"As Wordsworth said, you have to murder in order to dissect."

*

The writer is not, then, an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination.

TLS Jan 6 2023

" perhaps re-reading Mansfield might be one of our new year’s resolutions? Our very own “Katherine Mansfield project”? Ian Sansom, in this week’s Afterthoughts column, offers a more jaundiced account of such ambitions, admitting that “I always start out with good intentions, but by February my resolve has collapsed and I am reading in as disorganized and haphazard a fashion as always – the reach, the grasp exceeded, just the stuff that takes my fancy”."

Wilson Edward O Social conquest notes

We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to ourselves and to the rest of life.

..

In every game of evolutionary chance, played from one generation to the next, a very large number of individuals must live and die. The number, however, is not countless. A rough estimate can be made of it, providing at least a plausible order-of-magnitude guess. For the entire course of evolution leading from our primitive mammalian forebears of a hundred million years ago to the single lineage that threaded its way to become the first Homo sapiens, the total number of individuals it required might have been one hundred billion. Unknowingly, they all lived and died for us.