“RV Dusk” by Scott Listfield, 2011, in Picks of the Harvest at Thinkspace Gallery
Christopher Beha “on Making Sentences Do Something”: “I had finally learned the lesson, and it applied to my fiction as well as my nonfiction: Whenever my sentences had a function outside themselves — whether that function was connecting up other sentences, honoring the truth of a loved one’s life, or setting down an imagined world already existent in my head — they could in time be made to work. Whenever my sentences were built to be beautiful yet self-sufficient objects of attention, they collapsed.”
A Grading Scale, Composed of Samuel Beckett Quotes: “F: Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful. So all things limp together for the only possible. In the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. I forgive nobody. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity. All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing. Words are all we have. Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness. To restore silence is the role.”
“John Jeremiah Sullivan Answers Your Questions”: “My only piece of advice before recommending some titles would be: don’t fall for the inferiority/superiority racket. We’re not on a ladder here. We’re on a web. Right now you’re experiencing a desire to become more aware of and sensitive to its other strands. That feeling you’re having is culture. Whatever feeds that, go with it. And never forget that well-educated people pretend to know on average at least two-thirds more books than they’ve actually read.”
“in which the digital self threatens to supersede the physical”: “To be human is to always be beckoned toward an ever-receding ideal of yourself. What motivates us to get up on that treadmill each morning if not the imagination of how we really should be? But if that image of who we believe we should be has always existed in our minds—or maybe in the hidden pages of our diaries—it’s now taken on a holographic form on the web."
”On Keeping A Liary: Anais Nin, Autobiography, and the Lady Narcissism Debate“: "It’s not as simple as saying that Nin wrote exhaustively about her own life, or that she did it (as bloggers do now) with an emphasis on an unfolding day-to-day narrative, or even that she received much the same criticism as contemporary women who write about their intimate lives. All of these things were true: By the time she was in her late twenties, at least, she considered her diary to be her major work, and she went at it with a professionalism that some people don’t apply to their paid work. She produced hundreds of pages per year, indexed, numbered, and regularly re-typed so as to prevent physical decay of the text. But by the time Anais Nin got through with writing about “her life,” it rarely bore any resemblance to her experience.”
Catatonia: “The internet’s preference for cats runs so deep that when Google’s secretive X Lab showed a string of ten million YouTube images to a neural network of 16,000 computer processors for machine learning, the first thing the network did was invent the concept of a cat. The US might have inflated the internet-feline bubble – the Cheezburger Network raised $30 million (£19 million) last year in venture funding, and the Bible has been translated into Lolcat — but Japan was where the internet-feline market began, and persists, as a quiet, domestic cattage industry. If you want to know why the internet chose cats, you must go to Japan.”
A brief history of Leo Tolstoy: