What We Expect

I have noticed that we are often inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind … Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them … Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.

- Lolita, Vladimir Nabakov

 

Dirty Business

She’s the kind of girl who gets her slings and arrows from the dumpster
The kind who tells you she’s bipolar just to make you trust her
She’s the kind of girl who leaves out condoms on the bedroom dresser
Just to make you jealous of the men she fucked before you met her

 

Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy

The boy waited at the arrivals gate with a sign that said: “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy” And that boy, he met his man.

 

Communism turns me on….

 

A Minute and 100 Metres Down the Road

I traveled out to Xinjiang Province (west China) at the start of September and wrote an article about the protests and military lock down in Urumqi. You can find it online at Kyoto Journal, along with photos.

The soldier outside the station had one hand on the barrel and the other on the butt of his shotgun. There were two military trucks by the bus stop and two soldiers in the back-right seats of every bus leaving Urumqi station.

Welcome to west China.

Continue to read here.

 

Purple Acid-Wash Denim Vest

Once, the idiots were just the fools gawping in through the windows. Now they’ve entered the building. You can hear them everywhere. They use the word ” cool”. It is their favourite word.

The idiot does not think about what it is saying. Thinking is rubbish. And rubbish isn’t cool. Stuff & shit is cool. The idiots are self-regarding consumer slaves, oblivious to the paradox of their uniform individuality. They sculpt their hair to casual perfection, they wear their waistbands below their balls, they babble into hand-held twit machines about that cool email of the woman being bummed by a wolf. Their cool friend made it. He’s an idiot too. Welcome to the age of stupidity. Hail to the rise of the idiots.

- The Rise of the Idiots by Dan Ashcroft from Nathan Barley, Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker

 

Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things

Entirely possible that my plangent cries against the possibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and attenuates all rebellion says more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than it does about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of “anti-rebels,” born oglers who dare to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall to actually endorse single-entendre values. Who treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point, why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk things. Risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, outrage, disgust, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. The new rebels might be the ones willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “How banal”. Accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Credulity. Willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.

- For M.M. Karr

- E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace

 

Four Years On…

(Click image to view)

But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.

- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

 

Little Bit Lykke Li

“Hands down, I’m too proud for love.”

“Working in corners / peaking over shoulders / waiting for my time to come.”

 

Emergency Use Only

As Hyde puts it, “Irony has only emergency use.. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.” This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks. This is why Hyde seems right about persistent irony being tiresome. It is unmeaty. Even gifted ironists work best in sound bites. I find them sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures. And as for actually driving cross-country with a gifted ironist, or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed.

- E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace