Cats of Scrimmage

One particularly successful exercise in patriarch-baiting

2012-01-08T13:22:00.000-08:00

Nicholas's conception of papal authority extended, it need hardly be said, over the churges of the East. At this time the patriarch of Constantinople was a eunuch named Ignatius--a blinkered bigot loathed by his flock, which was determined to get rid of him. The leader of that flock was Photius, the most learned scholar of this day, capable of running rings around Ignatius, whose mind was too narrow to encompass any but the simplest theological doctrines. In one particularly successful exercise in patriarch-baiting, Photius even went so far as to propound a new and deeply heretical theory that he had just thought up, according to which man possessed two separate souls, one liable to error, the other infallible. His dazzling reputation as an intellectual ensured that he would be taken seriously by many--including, of course, Ignatius, who should have known better; and after his doctrine had its desired effect by making the patriarch look thoroughly silly he had cheerfully withdrawn it. It was perhaps the only completely satisfactory practical joke in the history of theology, and for that alone Photius deserves our gratitude.

Norwich, John Julius. Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy. NY: Random House, 72-73. Print.

What was the understanding exactly?

2011-12-14T23:37:00.000-08:00

The strength you had when you sat there, a couple for many years now with all the landscape sewn together of habits and tics and old jokes. . . it was the strength you had of knowing that you were not alone--the solid, indestructible knowledge of the otherness of others.

Millet, Lydia. Ghost Lights. NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011. 52. Print.

You recognize them

2011-08-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

My Uncle Ben wrote me a letter twenty years ago in which he said, "Sometimes you run into someone, regardless of age or sex, whom you know absolutely to be an independently operating part of the Whole that goes on all the time inside yourself, and the eye-motes go click and you hear the tribal tones of voice resonate, and there it is--you recognize them."

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. NY: Anchor Books, 1994. Print.

A sacred repository

2011-05-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

In writing are the roots, in writing are the foundations of eloquence; by writing resources are stored up, as it were, in a sacred repository, when they may be drawn forth for sudden emergencies, or as circumstances require.

Quintilian. "Institutes of Oratory." The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 1st Edition. Eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press, 1990. Print. 338.

The lure of it is immense

2011-03-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps but how else is there to proceed? The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery. Perhaps it is a vanity. Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me? No. So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next.

Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside?

The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, of what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?

Walk with me, hand in hand through the neon and styrofoam. Walk the razor blades and the broken hearts. Walk the fortune and the fortune hunted. Walk the chop suey bars and the tract of stars.

I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up. I see like a bug, everything too large, the pressure of infinity hammering at my head. But how else to live, vertical that I am, pressed down and pressing up simultaneously? I cannot assume that you will understand me. It is just as likely that as I invent what I want to say, you will invent what you want to hear. Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other.

The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure of it is immense. We send starships. We fall in love.

Winterson, Jeanette. Gut Symmetries. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 24-25. Print.

A real one

2011-03-20T22:11:00.000-07:00

Woolf worried about the childlessness from time to time, and suffered from the imposed anxiety that she was not, unlike her friend Vita Sackville-West, a real woman. I do not know what kind of woman one would have to be to stand unflinchingly in front of The Canon, but I would guess, a real one. There is something sadistic in the whip laid on women to prove themselves as mothers and wives at the same time as making their way as artists. The abnormal effort that can be diverted or divided. We all know the story of Coleridge and the Man from Porlock. What of the woman writer and a whole family of Porlocks?

For most of us the dilemma is rhetorical but those women who are driven with consummate energy through a single undeniable channel should be applauded and supported as vigorously as the men who have been setting themselves apart for centuries.

Winterson, Jeanette. Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery. NY: Vintage Books, 1995. 62-63. Print.

All men live enveloped in whale-lines

2011-02-25T22:23:00.001-08:00

All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. NY: Penguin Books, 1992. 306. Print.

Delight in existence

2011-01-22T23:50:00.000-08:00

For one hundred days I lived anchored in the flow of rasa, counterbalancing two decades of modern life sheltered from winds, waters, the night sky, silence. The wilderness revived my native tongue: a protolanguage, words without words, floating into perception, submerging. I learned to be them: patience, surprise, contentment, foreboding, the natural, the supernatural, suspense, relief, fear, peace. My eyes saw verbs in motion. My ears heard the percussion of nouns. Scents became sentences. My mental treadmill, sprinting and slumping in exhaustion since birth, slowed. Apparently I didn't need to chase after brilliance. Everything was already brilliant.

This was more than a transient sensation. Surrounded by seabirds and the sea, I grew suppler, more grateful, afloat on life's buoyant preserver.

There is yet another Sanskrit meaning for rasa: delight in existence. On Isla Rasa, living deeply in the flow, I found myself delighted at my first homecoming to the planet where I was born.

Whitty, Julia. Deep Blue Home. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. 84. Print.

The part of silence that can be spoken

2010-12-31T17:32:00.000-08:00

Some people say that the best stories have no words. They weren't brought up to Lighthousekeeping. It is true that words drop away, and that the important things are often left unsaid. The important things are learned in faces, in gestures, not in our locked tongues. The true things are too big or too small, or in any case always the wrong size to fit the template called language.

I know that. But I know something else too, because I was brought up to Lighthousekeeping. Turn down the daily noise and at first there is the relief of silence. And then, very quietly, as quiet as light, meaning returns. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. NY: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. 135. Print.

You should say it

2010-12-29T01:58:00.000-08:00

Pew - why didn't my mother marry my father?

She never had time. He came and went.
Why didn't Babel Dark marry Molly?
He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love.
But they might not be telling you the truth.
Never mind that. You tell them the truth.
What do you mean?
You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own.
So what should I say?
When?
When I love someone?
You should say it.

Winterson, Jeanette. Lighthousekeeping. NY: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. 85. Print.

A feat of endurance

2010-12-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

You are young, you are on your way up, when you cannot imagine how you will save yourself from death by boredom until dinner, until bed, until the next day arrives to be outwaited, and then, slow slap, the next. You read in despair all the titles of the books on the bookshelf; you play with your fingers; you revolve in your upholstered chair, slide out of the chair upside down onto your head, hope you will somehow damage your heart by waiting for dinner in that position, and think that life by its mere appalling length is a feat of endurance for which you haven't the strength.

But momentum propels you over the crest. Imperceptibly, you start down. When do the days start to blur and then, breaking your heart, the seasons? The cards click faster in the spokes; you pitch forward. You roll headlong, out of control. The blur of cards makes one long sound like a bomb's whine, the whine of many bombs, and you know your course is fatal.

Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. NY: Harper Perennial, 1982. 165. Print.

Our complex and inexplicable caring for each other

2010-11-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil it's power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. That is given. It is not learned.

Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. NY: Harper Perennial, 1982. 19-20.

We ask a lot when we ask them to trust

2010-10-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

We need to talk, yes, and to talk back, yes, but when do we listen? How do we listen? How do we demonstrate that we honor and respect the person talking and what that person is saying, or what the person might say if we valued someone other than ourselves having a turn to speak? How do we translate listening into language and action, into the creation of an appropriate response? How do we really "talk back" rather than talk also? The goal is not, "You talk, I talk." The goal is better practices so that we can exchange perspectives, negotiate meaning, and create understanding with the intent of being in a good position to cooperate, when, like now, cooperation is absolutely necessary.

When I think about this goal, what stands out most is that these questions apply in so much of academic life right now. They certainly apply as we go into classrooms and insist that our students trust us and what we contend is in their best interest. In light of a record in classrooms that seriously questions the range of our abilities to recognize potential, or to appreciate students as non-generic human beings, or to appreciate that they bring with them, always, knowledge, we ask a lot when we ask them to trust. Too often, still, institutionalized equations for placement, positive matriculation, progress, and achievement name, categorize, rank, and file, while our true-to-life students fall between the cracks.

Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." College Composition and Communication. 47.1(1996): 29-40. Print.

Another way to God

2010-07-10T19:21:00.000-07:00

He gazed out the windshield. "You now, my grandmother lost her faith when she lost her husband," he said, "and she never got either one back. When I told her I was going to the seminary, she slapped my face. If you called her a Christian, she'd spit on the ground. Still, in her dignity, conviction, and compassion, in her humanity, she was one of the most spiritual people I've known. And this girl today...everything about her was like my grandmother. I mention this John, because your faith is lapsed for foolish reasons. You'll rediscover it one day. But with my grandmother, and I sense with this girl, too...it's as if they found something else. Another way to God.

Scribner, Keith. Miracle Girl. NY: Riverhead Books, 2003. 81. Print.

Time stops at the point of severance

2010-07-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov makes the poetic, or the playful, speculation that Russian children before the Revolution--and his exile--were blessed with a surfeit of sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to come. Of course, fate doesn't play such premonitory games, but memory can perform retrospective maneuvers to compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia--that most lyrical of feelings--crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. NY: Penguin Books, 1989. 115-116. Print.

We are not yet divided

2010-07-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

How absurd our childhood attachments are, how small and without significance. Why did that one, particular, willow tree arouse in me a sense of beauty almost too acute for pleasure, why did I want to throw myself on the grassy hill with an upwelling of joy that seemed overwhelming, oceanic, absolute? Because they were the first things, the incomparable things, the only things. It’s by adhering to the contours of a few childhood objects that the substance of our selves—the molten force we’re made of—molds and shapes itself. We are not yet divided.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. NY: Penguin Books, 1989. 74. Print.

A web of words

2010-05-01T21:04:00.000-07:00

There seemed to be no wind at all. We could watch the heat from the fire pull and tease the air out of shape, stretching the fabric of dimension and repose with its furious ascending. The magazine pages went black, and the print and the dark parts of pictures tuned silvery and black. Weightless and filigreed, they spiraled to a giddy height, till some current caught them in the upper air, some high wind we could not feel assumed them. Sylvie reached up and caught a flying page on the flat of her hand. She showed it to me--in dark silver, a woman's face laughing, and below that in large letters, BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Sylvie tried to wave the page off her hand, and the corners and edges tattered away, leaving just the laughing face, from the brows downward. She clapped her hands in the pillar of heat, and the lady ascended in cinders and motes. "There!" Sylvie said, watching them fly. She wiped her sooty hands on the flanks of her skirt. I saw the fiery transfiguration of a dog, and the bowl he ate from, and a baseball team, and a Chevrolet, and many hundreds of words. It had never occurred to me that words, too, must be salvaged, though when I thought about it, it seemed obvious. It was absurd to think that things were held in place, are held in place, by a web of words.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. NY: Picador, 1980. 199-200. Print.

What have I seen, what have I seen

2010-05-01T20:58:00.001-07:00

One evening one summer she went out to the garden. The earth in the rows was light and soft as cinders, pale clay yellow, and the trees and plants were ripe, ordinary green and full of comfortable rustlings. And above the pale earth and bright trees the sky was the dark blue of ashes. As she knelt in the rows she heard the hollyhocks thump against the shed wall. She felt the hair lifted from her neck by a swift, watery wind, and she saw the tress fill with the wind and heard their trunks creak like masts. She burrowed her hand under a potato plant and felt gingerly for the new potatoes in their dry net of roots, smooth as eggs. She put them in her apron and walked back to the house thinking, What have I seen, what have I seen. The earth and the sky and the garden, not as they always are. And she saw her daughters' faces not as they always were, or as other people's were, and she was quiet and aloof and watchful, not to startle the strangeness away. She had never taught them to be kind to her.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. NY: Picador, 1980. 19. Print.

Looking to how the language is used

2010-04-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

We tend to behave as if we have already achieved a genuine multiculturalism, diverse and complex but uncomplicated, when we add writers of color to our readings. But we haven't. And we only begin when we not only include but also acknowledge that power and hierarchy are always involved in the representation of color. What I mean is that if we just include and then discuss the issues written about without looking to how the language is used, we might not really be working at making things more multicultural, not really.

Villanueva, Victor. "The Voice of Voices in the Writer of Color." English Journal. 84.8 (1995): 68-69. Print.

Unsaying every word I had said

2010-04-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

I was interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy, with a voice which I took to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out."—I look'd up and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman, or child, I went out without further attention.

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage.—"I can’t get out—I can’t get out," said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity.—"I can't get out," said the starling.—God help thee! said I, but I'll let thee out, cost what it will; so I turn'd about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open without pulling the cage to pieces.—I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, press'd his breast against it, as if impatient.—I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty.—"No," said the starling—"I can't get out—I can't get out," said the starling.

I vow I never had my affections more tenderly awakened; or do I remember an incident in my life, where the dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so suddenly call'd home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastille; and I heavily walk'd up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.

Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. NY: P.F. Collier & Son, 1917. Print.

Not exactly peace

2009-10-05T01:35:00.000-07:00

What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace. Only one person I knew at Berkeley later discovered an ideology, dealt himself into history, cut himself loose from both his own dread and his own time. A few of the people I knew at Berkeley killed themselves not long after. Another attempted suicide in Mexico and then, in a recovery which seemed in many ways a more advanced derangement, came home and joined the Bank of America's three-year executive-training program. Most of us live less theatrically, but remain the survivors of a peculiar and inward time. If I could believe that going to a barricade would affect man's fate in the slightest I would go to that barricade, and quite often I wish I could, but it would be less than honest to say that I expect to happen upon such a happy ending.

Didion, Joan. The White Album. NY:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979. 208.

Him they taught us to love

2009-09-05T21:00:00.000-07:00

This is what happened after the Lincoln impersonator stopped talking in the year 2000: The eight-year-old boy sitting next to me pointed at Getty and asked his mom, "Isn't that guy too short?"

I glance at the kid with envy. He's at the first, great, artsy-craftsy age where Americans learn about Abraham Lincoln. How many of us drew his beard in crayon? We built models of his boyhood cabin with Elmer's glue and toothpicks. We memorized the Gettysburg Address, reciting its ten sentences in stovepipe hats stapled out of black construction paper. The teachers taught us to like Washington and to respect Jefferson. But Lincoln--him they taught us to love.

Vowell, Sarah. The Partly Cloudy Patriot. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2002. 8.

An effective way of hiding

2009-08-18T16:21:00.001-07:00

I've discovered that I can keep anyone from seeing the true me by being selectively blatant. I set a precedent of being up-front about intimate issues, but I never bring up the things I truly want to hide; I just let people assume I'm revealing everything. It's an effective way of hiding. Any good liar knows that the way to perpetuate an untruth is to deflect attention from it.

Ericsson, Stephanie. "The Ways We Lie." Readings for OSU Writers 3rd ed. NY: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 32-40. 35.

At least a little

2009-08-17T22:40:00.001-07:00

No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

Card, Orson Scott. Speaker for the Dead. NY: TOR, 1994. 131.

Its own separate life

2009-08-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has and idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away. Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 169.

A certain seductiveness

2009-08-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

Time is a great deadener; people forget, get bored, grow old, go away. She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe knot it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat's cradle. She said those sorts of feelings were dead, the feelings she once had for me. There is a certain seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter and recolour what's dead. It won't complain.

Winterson, Jeanette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. 171.

At the point where cultures and classes intersect

2009-07-02T02:49:00.000-07:00

To understand the nature and development of literacy we need to consider the social context in which it occurs--the political, economic, and cultural forces that encourage or inhibit it. The canonical orientation discourages deep analysis of the way these forces may be affecting performance. The canonists ask that schools transmit a coherent traditional knowledge to an ever-changing, frequently uprooted community. This discordance between message and audience is seldom examined. Although a ghetto child can rise on the lilt of a Homeric line--books can spark dreams--appeals to elevated texts can also divert attention from the conditions that keep a population from realizing its dreams. The literacy curriculum is being asked to do what our politics and our economics have failed to do: diminish differences in achievement, narrow our gaps, bring us together. Instead of analysis of the complex web of causes of poor performance, we are offered a faith in the unifying power of a body of knowledge, whose infusion will bring the rich and the poor, the longtime disaffected and the uprooted newcomers into cultural unanimity. If this vision is democratic, it is simplistically so, reductive, not an invitation for people to truly engage each other at the point where cultures and classes intersect.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared. NY: Penguin Books, 1990. 237.

Invisible

2009-06-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. NY: Vintage International, 2006. 74-75.

Labyrinthine windings

2009-05-16T12:24:00.000-07:00

It was one of those things that get torn out of you and thrust into oblivion just because they didn't matter enough. And yet what I had missed completely took root in Ira and changed his life.

So you don't have to look much further than Ira and me to see why we go through life with a generalized sense that everybody is wrong except us. And since we don't just forget things because don't matter but also forget things because they matter too much—because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint—it's no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.

Roth, Philip. American Pastoral. NY: Vintage International, 1997. 55.

Sorrow

2009-05-12T15:17:00.001-07:00

As for the child honoring the parent, I believe that had to be commanded because the parent is a greater mystery, a stranger in a sense. So much of our lives has passed, and that is true even for your mother, who is a good generation younger than I am but who had a considerable life before she came to me—by which I mean only that she was well into her thirties when we were married. As I have said, I think she experienced a good deal of sorrow in those years. I have never asked, but one thing I have learned in my life is what settled, habitual sadness looks like, and when I saw her I thought, Where have you come from, my dear child? She came in during the first prayer and sat in the last pew and looked up at me, and from that moment hers was the only face I saw. I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it's fair to say that. There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say. It's a fine face, very intelligent, but the sadness in it is engrafted with the intelligence, so to speak, until they seem one thing. I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God's good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not mean that it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practical purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of the sufferers against those who afflict them. (I hope you are familiar with the prophets, particularly Isaiah).

Now, your mother never talks about herself, really, and she never admits to having felt any sort of grief in her life at all. That's her courage, her pride, and I know you will be respectful of it, and remember at the same time that a very, very great gentleness is called for, a great kindness. Because no one ever has that sort of courage who hasn't needed it.

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. NY: Picador, 2004. 136-137.

Unthinkable thoughts

2009-04-19T20:05:00.000-07:00

An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that somebody considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source from the power of an unthinkable thought.

Baxter, Charles. The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007.

Not yours

2009-03-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

"Will you go yourself to see these priests?" I asked.
"I know what will happen," he said. "You tell the story, and then it's retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours."

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. NY: Penguin Books, 1998. 246.

We threaten God in Prayer

2008-11-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

68. Prayer.

PRAYER is our whole service to God. Earnest
Prayer hath the nature of Importunity ; Wee
presse, wee importune God in Prayer ; Yet that puts
not God to a morosity, to a frowardnesse ; God flings
not away from that ; Gods suffers that importunity,
and more. Prayer hath the nature of Impudency ; Wee
threaten God in Prayer ; as Gregor: Nazi: adventures
to expresse it ; He saies, his Sister, in the vehemence
of her Prayer, would threaten God, Et honesta quadam
impudentia, egit impudentem ; She came, saies he, to
a religious impudency with God, and to threaten him,
that she would never depart from his Altar, till she had
her Petition granted ; And God suffers this Impudency,
and more. Prayer hath the nature of Violence ; In the
publique Prayers of the Congregation, we besiege God,
saies Tertul: and we take God Prisoner, and bring God
to our Conditions ; and God is glad to be straitned by
us in that siege. This Prophet here executes before,
what the Apostle counsailes after, Pray incessantly ;
Even in his singing he prayes ; And as S. Basil saies,
Etiam somnia justorum preces sunt, A Good mans dreames
are Prayers, he prayes, and not sleepily, in his sleepe, so
Davids Songs are Prayers.

Full text of "Donne's sermons; selected passages." Internet Archive. 13 Nov 2008 http://www.archive.org/stream/donnessermonssel00donn/donnessermonssel00donn_djvu.txt.

The living instrument

2008-09-18T22:44:00.000-07:00

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but deepeningly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his narrow-flowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left behind; so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentrated cannon upon its own mad mark; so that far from having lost his strength, Ahab, to that one end, did not possess a thousand fold more potency than ever had had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick or The Whale. New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1964. 248-249.

All the difference in the world

2008-08-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew--and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents--that there was all the difference in the world.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. NY: Scholastic Inc., 2005. 512.

Stealing your own life

2008-08-22T01:09:00.000-07:00

But you go into battle it's a blood oath to look after the men with you and I dont know why I didnt. I wanted to. When you're called on like that you have to make up your mind that you'll live with the consequences. But you don't know what the consequences will be. You end up layin a lot of things at your own door that you didn't plan on. If I was supposed to die over there doin what I'd give my word to do then that's what I should of done. You can tell it any way you want but that's the way it is. I should of done it and I didnt. And some part of me has never quit wishin I could go back. And I cant. I didnt know you could steal your own life. And I didnt know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasnt mine. It never has been.

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. NY: Vintage International, 2005. 278.

Claims

2008-08-22T01:01:00.000-07:00

You always tried to be available for your social events and I could always go to things like cemetery cleanins of course. That was all right. The women would fix dinner on the ground and of course it was a way of campaignin but you were doin somethin for folks that couldnt do it for themselves. Well, you could be cynical about it I reckon and say that you just didn't want em comin around at night. But I think it goes deeper than that. It is community and it is respect, of course, but the dead have more claims on you than what you might want to admit or even what you might know about and them claims can be very strong indeed. Very strong indeed. You get the feelin they just don't want to turn loose. So any little thing helps, in that respect.

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. NY: Vintage International, 2005. 124-125.

Won't be shocked

2008-08-06T18:56:00.000-07:00

The 1990s were great because suddenly lonely people had a place where they could all be lonely together while pretending to be fine on the outside. Well, that's what I do in coffee shops. My head may be cyclonic with desperation on the inside but I've worked damn hard to ensure that I don't look the way I feel. I try to look as if I have a meaningful slot in society. Do people look at me, Liz Dunn, and wonder if I merit a fully stocked condo and a late-model Honda Accord? I have a job, and I'm good at it, but what if I were so messed up that I couldn't contribute to society? What if I were so messed up that I couldn't even stuff envelops for a living? Strap her onto the iceberg and cast her out to sea. If it does happen someday, I'll be angry, but I won't be shocked.

Coupland, Douglas. Eleanor Rigby. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. 68.

Loneliness hierarchy

2008-08-06T18:52:00.000-07:00

I'm doing the thing that lonely people do, which is fine-tuning my loneliness hierarchy. Which is lonelier...to be single and lonely, or lonely within a dead relationship? Is it totally pathetic to be single and lonely and be jealous of someone lonely inside a dead relationship? Again, remember, this is all theoretical to me. Okay, here's another one...is it possible to be lonely within a dead relationship while the other person isn't lonely at all? Or the corollary of that question: is it possible to be in love with two people at the same time?

Coupland, Douglas. Eleanor Rigby. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. 67.

One hundred years

2008-07-22T23:47:00.000-07:00

“How many years have I slept?” she inquired. “The whole island seems changed A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics. How many ages ago did Madame Antoine and Tonie die? and when did our people from Grand Isle disappear from the earth?”

He familiarly adjusted a ruffle upon her shoulder.

“You have slept precisely one hundred years. I was left here to guard your slumbers; and for one hundred years I have been out under the shed reading a book. The only evil I couldn’t prevent was to keep a broiled fowl from drying up.”

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. NY: Harper Collins, 1996. 50.

My word

2008-07-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so0-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line "You have to swear you will never repeat this." I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing.

Sedaris, David. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. New York: Back Bay Books, 2004. 147.

It doesn't pay

2008-06-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

My attorney finally agreed that Lucy would have to go. The possibility of a Mann Act conviction, resulting in disbarment proceedings and a total loss of livelihood, was a key factor in his decision. A nasty federal rap. Especially for a monster Samoan facing a typical white middle-class jury in Southern California.

"They might even call it kidnapping," I said. "Straight to the gas chamber, like Chessman. And even if you manage to beat that, they'll send you back to Nevada for Rape and Consensual Sodomy."

"No!" he shouted. "I felt sorry for the girl, I wanted to help her!"

I smiled. "That's what Fatty Arbuckle said, and you know what they did to him."

"Who?"

"Never mind," I said. "Just picture yourself telling a jury that you tried to help this poor girl by giving her LSD and then taking her out to Vegas for one of your special stark-naked back rubs."

He shook his head sadly. "You're right. They'd probably burn me at the stake...set me on fire right there in the dock. Shit, it doesn't pay to help somebody these days..."

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. 116-117.

Shame

2008-05-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

"At the end of last class I asked each of you to be ready with a subject for your class presentation--something that addresses a contemporary social or psychological or spiritual dilemma....

Lemry says, "So make your point, Mr. Ellerby."

"My point is that God created a prototype for a reasonably sturdy carbon unit, gave us a perfectly usable place to live, some excellent advice, as in 'words to live by'--most of which are misunderstood by the least of my brethren--and stood back to see what we'd do."

I'm surprised. I didn't know Ellerby had any philosophical considerations. I thought he just drove his Christian Cruiser through the world seeing whose nose he could get up. And how far.

Lemry's eyes land on me. "Mobe?"

My hands shoot up in surrender. "I give a wide berth to all religious discussions. My plan is to get baptized late in the afternoon the evening I die, so I don't have time to sin. A spot in heaven awaits me."

"Cute," she says. "And chicken. Jody?"

Shoot. I should have uttered something biblical.

Jody flashes a sideways glance at Mark, saying simply, "I guess I think God takes a closer look than that."

I could go either way on this. I don't have a quarrel with Christianity one way or the other. As near as I know, Mom doesn't have religious beliefs, so I wasn't brought up with any. I know some Bible stories from going to Sunday School with my friends when I was younger, but mostly they were just good stories. I see where getting religion quick here could work to my advantage with Jody, but I can't jump ship on my friend Ellerby. Steve has a reputation as a verbal trouble-maker, and I would abandon him in a second for Jody alone, but not for Mark Brittain. So though I can once again see how the Russians and the Americans fought on the same side in WWII, I'm Switzerland. Good-bye, Jody, my love.

"Give us more information, Steve," Lemry says. "If you're right, what does it mean?"

"I'm not sure what all it means, he says. "But I'll tell you what made me bring it up. The other day when Mobe was trying to figure out whether the world was a good place or a bad place, and he used Sarah Byrnes for an example, I was ready to agree with him. No question, she's got a rough road to go down. But when I thought about it more, I realized the world is a good place for me, most of the time anyway, and that got me to thinking about fairness. If God is fair, how do you explain me and Sarah Byrnes on the same planet? And if he really rewards piousness and public prayer and all that, like Brittain seems to think, how come he lets me drive my car around without blowing out my tires, and how come he lets me kick Brittain's butt in the pool?"

Lemry says, "Watch it..."

"I had this Sunday School teacher," Ellerby goes on, "and every time I asked her a tough question--like 'How come nobody ever caught Jack the Ripper?' or "Why did my big brother get killed when he got straight A's clear through college and was going into the seminary?'--she'd say the Lord works in strange and mysterious ways that we may not understand." Ellerby leaned forward on his desk now, his intensity as visible as the pulse in his temple. "But I think there's nothing strange and mysterious about it. I figure if those things were in God's jurisdiction, he'd do something different about them. But they aren't. Those are in our jurisdiction."

I glance over to check Jody's reaction, but can't read a thing. Brittain, on the other hand, is having blood pressure difficulty, and explodes. "This is so much BS! People throw out this line of crap for one reason: so they can do whatever they darn well please. It's a bogus way of not having to be accountable to God."

Ellerby ignores him--I mean like Brittain isn't even in the room--and continues. "From a distance," he says, "my car looks like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she's going to get help, she'll get it from herself or she'll get it from us. Let me tell you why I brought this up. Because the other day when I saw how hard it was for Mobe to go to the hospital to see her, I was embarrassed that I didn't know her better, that I ever laughed at one joke about her. I was embarrassed that I let some kid go to school with me for twelve years and turned my back on pain that must be unbearable. I was embarrassed that I haven't found a way to include her somehow the way Mobe has."

Jesus, I feel tears welling up, and I see them running down Ellerby's cheeks. Lemry better get a handle on this class before it turns into some kind of therapy group.

"So," Lemry says quietly, "your subject will be the juxtaposition of man and God in the universe?"

Ellerby shakes his head. "My subject will be shame."

Crutcher, Chris. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. New York: Harper Collins, 2003. 85-86.

Something he was not doing

2008-05-08T20:35:00.001-07:00

Another Mexican American in another class, approaches Victor after class, carrying his copy of Fahrenheit 451, required reading for the course. The student doesn't understand the reference to a salon. Victor explains that this is just another word for the living room. No understanding in the student's eyes. He tries Spanish: la salon. Still nothing. The student has grown up as a migrant worker. And Victor remembers the white student who had been in his class a quarter ago, who had written about not understanding racism, that there was none where he had grown up, in Wennatchee, that he has played with the children of his father's migrant workers without there being any hostility. His father's workers. Property. Property that doesn't know of living rooms. And Victor thought of what the man from Wennatchee knew, what the ROTC Mexican American knew, what the migrant worker knew. And he thought of getting up the next morning to go with Serena to St. Mary's for cheese and butter. And he knew there was something he was not doing in his composition classrooms.

Villanueva, Victor Jr. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1993. 90.

More than life, more than death

2008-05-03T22:14:00.001-07:00

If you want nothing more than life, you'll do anything to stay alive. If you loathe nothing more than death, then you'll do anything to avoid disasters. But there are things people won't do to stay alive, and there are things people won't do to avoid disasters. So there must be something we want more than life, and something we loathe more than death. And it isn't something that only a sage's heart possesses: everyone has it. It's just that a sage never loses it.

Mencius. Mencius. Trans: David Hinton. New York: Counterpoint, 1998. 206.

Memory

2008-03-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

Memory is part of the present. It builds us up inside; it knits our bones to our muscles and keeps our heart pumping. It is memory that reminds our bodies to work, and memory that reminds our spirits to work, too: it keeps us who we are. It is the influence that keeps us from flying off into separate pieces.

Maguire, Gregory. Son of a Witch. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. 211.

An older contract

2008-03-29T21:18:00.000-07:00

I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing--by dint of ignorance and innocence--that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame.

Maguire, Gregory. Wicked. New York: HarperCollins, 1995. 383.

The Uncanny

2008-02-13T22:47:00.000-08:00

The uncanny is not a literary genre. But nor is it a non-literary genre. It overflows the very institution of literature. It inhabits, haunts, parasitizes the allegedly non-literary. It makes 'genre' blink.

Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. New York: Routledge, 2003. 19.

Change

2007-10-09T16:46:00.000-07:00

To change the experience of childbirth means to change women’s relationship to fear and powerlessness, to our bodies, to our children; it has far-reaching psychic and political implications.

As long as birth—metaphorically or literally—remains an experience of passively handing over our minds and our bodies to male authority and technology, other kinds of social change can only minimally change our relationship to ourselves, to power, and to the world outside our bodies.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 182, 185.

Friendship

2007-08-23T14:25:00.000-07:00

There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997. 179.

Glitter Gulch

2007-06-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

Glitter gulch is for transients, most of them elderly and dressed to kill: old women in lime green or banana yellow or Florida orange pant suits, clutching Dixie cups of small change in one hand, the lever of one of Vegas's fity thousand slot machines in the other; old men with plastic teeth and sky blue plastic suits shooting craps for a dollar, playing fifty-cent blackjack and three-dollar-limit stud poker; wrecks in wheelchairs or with walking frames, the humped, the bent, the skeleton thin, and the obese, cashing in their Social Security checks, disability allowances, and pensions, waiting out their time in the hope of a miracle jackpot to transform their last pinched days. All of them are animated by a terrible Walpurgisnact jollity, gamblers' optimism compunded by nostalgia. THE GOOD OLD DAYS, say the neon signs, and 50¢ BAR DRINKS, WIN A CAR 25¢, FREE ASPIRIN & TENDER SYMPATHY. For the Snopeses of this world, Glitter Gulch is the absurd last top on the slow train to the grave.

Alvarez, A. The Biggest Game in Town. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1983. 22.

Ou libéré?

2007-06-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

"Listen. Listen before it passes. Paról gin pié zél. The words can give wings to your feet. There is so much to say, but time has failed you," She said. "There is a place where women are buried in clothes the color of flames, where we drop coffee on the ground for those who went ahead, where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her. There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?"

My grandmother quickly pressed her fingers over my lips.
"Now, she said, "you will know how to answer."

Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1994. 234.

Distracted

2007-06-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

So when she seemed distracted or absent-minded, it was in fact, I think, that she was aware of too many things, having no principle for selecting the more from the less important, and that her awareness could never be diminished, since it was among the things she had thought of as familiar that this disaster had taken shape.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. 25.

Lost in the dark

2007-06-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

We had really never had any use for friends or conventional amusements. We had spent our lives watching and listening with the constant sharp attention of children lost in the dark. It seemed that we were bewilderingly lost in a landscape that, with any light at all, would be wholly familiar. What to make of sounds and shapes, and where to put our feet. So little fell upon our senses, and all of that was suspect.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. 130.

Moon Lake

2007-04-30T23:13:00.000-07:00

Easter was lying rocked in the gentle motion of the boat, her head turned on its cheek. She had not said hello to Jinny Love anew. Did she see the drop of water clinging to her lifted finger? Did it make a rainbow? Not to Easter: her eyes were rolled back, Nina felt. Her own hand was writing in the sand. Nina, Nina, Nina. Writing, she could dream that her self might get away from her--that here in this far-away place she could tell her self, by name, to go or to stay. Jinny Love had begun building a sand castle over her foot. In the sky clouds moved no more perceptibly than grazing animals. Yet with a passing breeze, the boat gave a knock, lifted and fell. Easter sat up.

Welty, Eudora. The Golden Apples. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1977. 130.

For Heaven's sake

2007-04-09T23:23:00.000-07:00

An irresistable discontent overwhelms us! The paved hand of the city spreads out beneath us, holding down the grass and shutting off the salutary earth-pores, and we pine for balm and moisture! The over-worked mind offers no asylum of thought. It is the out-door time of day. Nature calls us to her bared bosom, and there is a floor of impenetrable stone between us and her! At the end of the omnibus-line we turn and go back, and resume our paved and walled-up existence; and all the logic of philosophy, aided by ice-creams and bands of music, would fail to convince us, that night, that we are not victims and wretches. For Heaven's sake, some kind old man, give us an acre off the pavement, and money enough to go lie down on the outside of it, of summer afternoons!

Willis, Nathaniel Parker. "Open-Air Musings." Writing New York: A Literary Anthonlogy. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Washington Square Press, 1998. 88.

The laughter

2007-02-24T00:11:00.000-08:00

But I aint so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what aint. It's like there was a fellow in every man that's done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same horror and the same astonishment.

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International, 1985.

Mysterious faculties

2007-01-20T20:10:00.000-08:00

Arthur had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them. This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed unperceived. It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.

Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Resignation

2007-01-16T19:42:00.000-08:00

While there's still time, I hasten to defend myself against it, and therefore I absolutely renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one little tear of even that one torment child who beat her chest with her little fist and prayed to 'dear God' in a stinking outhouse with her unredeemed tears! Not worth it, because her tears remained unredeemed. They must be redeemed, otherwise there can be no harmony. But how, how will you redeem them? Is it possible? Can they be redeemed by being avenged? But what do I care if they are avenged, what do I care if the tormentors are in hell, what can hell set right here, if these ones have already been tormented? And where is the harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive, and I want to embrace, I don't want more suffering. And if the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. I do not, finally, want the mother to embrace the tormentor who lets his dogs tear her son to pieces! She dare not forgive him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she wants to, let her forgive the tormentor her immeasurable maternal suffering; but she has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces, she dare not forgive the tormentor, even if the child himself were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, then where is the harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who could and would have the right to forgive? I don't want harmony, for love of mankind I don't want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I'd rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we cannot afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It's not that I don't accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

"Meek tears for 'dear god'"

2007-01-16T19:36:00.000-08:00

"What are you driving at, brother?" Alyosha asked.
"I think that if the devil does not exist, and man has therefore created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness."
"As well as God, then."
"You're a remarkably good 'implorateor of unholy suits,' as Polonius says in Hamlet," Ivan laughed. "So you caught me, but let it be, I'm glad. A nice God you've got, if man created him in his own image and likeness."

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.