I went through a period, after [In An Aeroplane Over the Sea, the Neutral Milk Hotel LP], when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling. The songs were what I stood for. It was a representation of the platform of my mind that I stood on. And if the platform of the mind is crumbling … then the songs go with it.
Jeff Magnum, interviewed
When you hear dub you fly on the music. You put your heart, your body and your spirit into the music, you gonna fly. Because if it wasn't for the music, oppression and taxes would kill you. They send taxes and oppression to hold you, a government to tell you what to do and use you like a robot. So they will torment you to death. So when you hear dub you hide from the fuckers there.
Lee Perry, interviewed
I don't want happiness to be part of the currency," he sighs, "but by that I don't mean that I want people to be miserable, but I do think that if you have a sense of reality you are going to be really troubled. Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy – there's something wrong with them …"
But isn't eliminating the scourge of depression a good aim? "It's very simple. The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It's not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: 'Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!' That's totally unrealistic and it's bound to fail."
Adam Phillips, interviewed
One of the more distracting things about capitalist culture is that there is no stupor, no time to vegetate. What I would suggest is more time wasting, less stimulation. We need time to lie fallow like we did in childhood, so we can recuperate. Rather than be constantly told what you want and be pressurised to go after it, I think we would benefit greatly from spells of vaguely restless boredom in which desire can crystallise.
Adam Phillips, interviewed
Because he did not find his voice, but his voices, Pessoa never fell into the trap of knowing what he was doing; he didn't need to imitate himself to keep writing.
Ivan Ilyich cannot die, not because humanity is unable to confront the great Truth of its Death but because it will not accept the hum drum of its deaths. That is the It we displace with our endless representations of it: we are born, we labour, and we die, and the ways that we do so are homely and unoriginal.
from the blog Life Unfurnished
I recently went on vacation with the band, my first vacation in years, and I noticed something interesting. Everyone wanted to go down to the beach during the day, and stare at the stars in the sky at night. I noticed that I seemed more bored with these activities than the others. I realised that people probably liked to look at the vast horizon of the beach and the endless sky at night because it took them out of their daily routine and reminded them about bigger things. But I never seem to stop thinking about these bigger things.
from Mark Everett, Things the Grandchildren Should Know
My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.
E. M. Cioran
Nothing is granted to me, everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past, too – something after all which perhaps every human being has inherited, this too must be earned, it is perhaps the hardest work.
Kafka
At the end of half an hour he pronounces a few phrases of general import on periods of blankness, extends my leave of absence and increases my dosage of medication. He also reveals that my condition has a name: it's a depression. Officially, then, I'm in a depression. The formula seems a happy one to me. It's not that I feel tremendously low; it's rather that the world around me appears high.
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
The night of 31 December will be hard. I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they're rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed.
Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude
My God, my God, who am I watching? How many am I? Who is I? What is this gap between me and me?
Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude
I can do nothing without fearing the effect on my body. When I see others twice, sometimes thrice my age, running to catch buses, gaily digging flower beds, beating mats, painting walls, my eyes go beady and hard. 'They've nothing to worry about', I think coldly. I snarl to myself over all the hours I have to waste, lying with my handkerchief over my eyes. I wonder if I am living for an improvement, or if that hope has really died in me and I'm only pretending to so.
Frustration like this has never come to me before. There is so much sensible, obvious reason for feeling it that I am made helpless. I used to think that encouragement, appreciation, could help me do better and better, could keep me happy and busy all day long. Now they are bitter goads prodding me to impossible tasks. There should be many new words for what I mean, words that don't whine and pity. But now, if one does not use whining or self-pitying words, there is only the dreadfulness of cheerful optimism.
Denton Welch, Journals, 23rd January 1948, shortly before his death.
… I greedily embraced the never-ending sadness of human life. At that moment I wanted to be overwhelmed by it. Nothing else but the sadness of destruction seemed real. I would sink down, be its victim, fall asleep in it. How can I describe the deep vibrating pleasure I felt? Perhaps it was a little like the moment just before a child bursts into tears. He knows he is going to cry, he does nothing about it, he has no shame, he wants to be drowned, to be swallowed up for ever in his own unhappiness.
Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud
A writer seizes on a particular aspect of the culture; and I believe that life is basically ridiculous. The ridiculous quality can be tragic, it can be pessimistic or dark, or it can be highly comic. One writes about the sadness of life or one writes about the comedic qualities of life. In a country such as ours we have reached a point at which there is hardly anything left to do but laugh or cry. It’s a kind of hysterical laughter, it’s strained and unreasoning laughter, or it is a morbid, bleak sobbing. I don’t think that anything is going to get changed in this country except that it’s going to become grimmer.
Gilbert Sorrentino, interviewed
Milan Kundera musing on Don Quixote:
Poor Alonzo Quijada meant to elevate himself into the legendary figure of a knight-errant. Instead, for all of literary history, Cervantes succeeded in doing just the opposite: he cast a legendary figure down: into the world of prose. 'Prose': the word signifies not only a nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life. So to say that the novel is the art of prose is not to state the obvious; the word defines the deep sense of that art.
A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote jounreying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.
Once again I want to call up the figure of Alfonzo Quijada; see him mount his Rosinante and set off in search of great battles. He is prepared to sacrifice his life for a noble cause, but tragedy doesn't want him. For, since its birth, the novel is suspicious of traegedy: of its cult of gandeur; of its threatrical origins; of its blindness to the prose of life. Poor Alonzo Quijada. In the vicinity of his mournful countenance, everything turns into comedy.
… novelistic thinking, as Broch and Musil brought it into the aesthetic of the modern novel, has nothing to do with the thinking of a scientist or a philosopher; I would even say it is purposely a-philosophic, even anti-philosophic, that is to say fiercely independent of any system of preconceived ideas; it does not judge; it does not proclaim truths; it questions, it marvels, it plumbs; its form is highly diverse: metaphoric, ironic, hypothetic, hyperbolic, aphoristic, droll, provocative, fanciful; and mainly it never leaves the magic circle of its characters' lives; those lives feed and justify it.
… Bresson thought of 'performance' as something the entire film was doing, not just the 'actors' in it. The actor is one instrument, along with framing, lighting, editing, and sound, and it is usually these elements that displace the most dramatic 'actorly' scenes. In place of facial expressions of tension and rage, for example, we see falling objects, toppling tables, a skimmer clattering across the floor, impeccably shot and cut, and piercing the sonic compusre of the moment. We 'hear' and 'see' the emotion reverberating through space, often without the agent that sparked it.
One remembers a Bresson film not for a performance but for the accumulated effect of the world created. This is beyond a theory of acting.
The word scene, tied to the narrative film tradition since Griffith, the one Bresson labels 'cinema', is a component of dramatic structure of the rising and falling action type. Scenes crystallise tensions in the story, bring emotions to the surface, and move toward a climax. They excel in expressive and expository dialogue and the clashing of conflicting wills. Acting is the primary vehicle of scenes …
… whereas a scene has a certain settling-in quality in which actors move about and speak freely as if the camera did not exist and the word cut were not an imminent threat, a sequence in almost any Bresson film after 1950 minimises or dispenses with acting and expansive dialogue, neutralises features essential to the dramatic thrust of a scene, and shifts the burden of carrying tensions, conflicts, and emotions to the cinematographic register: to framing, editing, and, even more tellingly, to off screen space and sound.
… The less a film is broken down into scenes, the more momentum it is capable of building and the more inexorable seems its trajectory.
from Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film
Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.
Geoff Dyer, advice on how to write.
Speaking of my readers, once I was walking through the Flores neighborhood on a very solitary street and I crossed paths with a man who said, “Hi, Aira!” I looked at him thinking, “Where do I know him from?” And he said, “Don’t worry, you don’t know me, I’m a reader, a humble reader.” Humble reader? He might be a humble reader of Isabel Allende. A reader of mine is a deluxe reader, not because I’m so great but because in order to get to me you have to take a path through literature, not through some books bought out of curiosity at the bookstore. A reader of mine has to have read other things.
Cesar Aira, interviewed
And I live with the dead – my mother, my sister, my grandfather, my father … Every day is the same – my friends have stopped coming – their laughter disurbs me, tortures me … my daily walk round the old castle becomes shorter and shorter, it tires me more and more to take walks. The fire in the fireplace is my only friend – the time I spend sitting in front of the fireplace gets longer and longer … at its worst I lean my head against the fireplace overwhelmed by the sudden urge – Kill yourself and then it's all over. Why live? … I light the candle – my huge shadow springs across half the wall, clear up to the ceiling and in the mirror over the fireplace I see the face of my own ghost.
Edvard Munch. 1890. Via
Van Gogh was like an explosion, he was consumed within five years, he painted hatless in the sun and became mad … his brain fever gave a density and fluidity to the colours on his palette. I tried it and couldn't. After a time I dared no longer.
Edvard Munch, describing the effect of the Midi on his work in a letter. Via
And for several years I was almost mad – that was the time when the terror of insanity reared up its twisted head. You know my picture, The Scream? I was being stretched to the limit – nature was screaming in my blood – I was at breaking point …
Edvard Munch, in a letter. Via
I must retain my physical weaknesses; they are an integral part of me. I don't want to get rid of illness, however unsympathetically I may depict it in my art … My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different to others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.
Edvard Munch, under treatment in a mental hospital, 1907. Via
… the writer is not the only author of his work. He is a kind of point of coagulation, a knot in the social and linguistic fabric. But it is the fact that he is a single point, as they say in mathematics, that makes a difference, and that difference is painful. Even while writing for others, the writer feels isolated. He speaks for others; not only does he address himself to others, but he also succeeds in saying what others would like to say. But this function makes him solitary. It is because one suffers more than others that one begins to write, in order to find a means of expressing that suffering. it is because one is at the centre that one is alone. And it is because one is at the centre that one is marginal.
Michel Butor, interviewed
Dreams, desires, etc. are part of reality because reality is a trap door: it is not full, it does not even exist in the usual sense of the word. It is something which exists and does not exist at the same time, and the holes are as important as the solid parts. I look for the holes, for that which hides and that which we desire without knowing it. Thus all my books are dreams, but they are not dreams of me, they are dreams of reality. Others dream my dreams. I am only their scribe, their typewriter.
Michel Butor, interviewed
For Larkin, there is a stage after tears, which doesn't continue to escalate into violence or tragedy, but rather sinks down into a kind of lame gloom, from which any undulations out of its pessimism – including tears themselves – are part of the problem they purport to express, as a melodramatic holidaying from realism and an indulgence of idealistic expectations. That is to say, for Larkin, what's saddest of all is that life is less than tragic. Indeed, to his mind, tragedy is secretly a modality of hope, for the extremity of complaint is seen as a sort of covert refuge whereby our suffering is accorded a significance it doesn't deserve and thus surreptitiously 'redeemed'.
from Hopps's Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart
Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves.
from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis
I don't have another life. I don't exist as another person, somewhere else doing something else with other people. There is no other me. There is no clocking off.
Morrissey, interviewed
… Morrissey's evocative 'no, no, no' betokens, I suggest, the seeping in of a darkness that lies everywhere in wait; that speaks in the name and with the voice of its victim; that separates everything from everything; that is ingenious in its torments and tireless in its persecutions; that turns every defence to its own advantage – including the art that would capture its likeness; that wrestles without giving itself to be wrestled with; that is not dispelled but is intensified by the knowledge that it exists in the eye of the beholder; that has no place of refuge; that answers no call; that gathers everything up into a sterile epiphany and makes of everywhere one's little room. This is the darkness that laps at the edges of Morrissey's vision in so many of his songs, whose ingress is registered by the half-articulate cries of 'no' that recurrently irrupt in their crevices – a darkness which, like Banquo's ghost, is invisible to all but the haunted.
from Gavin Hopps' Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart
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