Juvenilia

"I am the manager, said the manager, since he was the manager." Beckett, Mercier et Camier

This is, without a doubt, one of those things that most people would certainly never find funny (not even if they read it themselves in the context of the novelistic setting) but when I came across this brief vaudevillian line in one of Beckett's earlier novels about, what else, two vagabonds trying and failing to leave an oppressive and asphyxiating city, as he was still experimenting with and discovering his form and style (and also his first French-written novel), I laughed, out loud, by myself, for a good five minutes, repeating the sentence over and over in a joyous delirium I imagine Beckett would appreciate. Thinking of it now, still, I laugh, a good gut-pinching guffaw. 'Tis the little things that get us by, bit by fucking bit.

On Endings:

"The ending of a novel isn't usually very important. In fact,people never seem to remember the endings of novels (most especially crime novels--that's what makes them so re-readable) and movies (especially, once again, thrillers and whodunits). Conclusions and final explanations are often the most irrelevant--and disappointing--parts of a novel. What counts the most--and what we remember the most--is the atmosphere, the style, the path, the journey, and the world in which we have immersed ourselves for a few hours or a few days while reading a novel or watching a movie. What matters, then, is the journey along the horizon--in other words, the journey that never ends." Javier Marías, Spanish novelist and short-story writer.

First things first, Javier Marías is an excellent novelist of whom you need to be reading more. He's breathtakingly amazing. Secondly, This quote of his, which comes from a series of questions at the end of his short novel Voyage Along the Horizon, echoes my every sentiment regarding endings perfectly. Endings are, always, the part of novels I hate to read to the most, and I hate them even more when I can sense that the writer is trying, trying ever so hard, to smoothly end the novel in a conclusive and audaciously artificial way that just doesn't happen anywhere else in the world other than fiction, and I can catch the scent of an incoming "suddenly" epiphany from a mile away. Let the story linger, let the threads extend allusively, let the pieces fall where they fall, and then step away. Tie nothing up. Life goes on. My favorite books are the ones whose covers I close and wonder, with joy and awe, what comes next for these characters, where do their lives go from here? I'll never know, and that's the tragic beauty of it. My favorite books are the ones whose endings seem to end everything I've just read and yet, somehow, end nothing at all. My favorite books are the ones whose endings explore, explode, and dive into the absolute mystery and confusion present in this life, not attempt to wrestle it into a controlled, understandable, and safe submission.

Skewered

I always prefer it when authors personalize their little "the following portrayals are based in fiction" disclaimers in the first few pages of a book. What exactly it adds for me, I have no idea, but I think it's that it's entertaining, in a wink wink, nod nod sort of way, to see the author, outside of the work of art in question, discussing the work of art qua a work of art qua its basis in reality or lack thereof and how, at once, in holds dominion in both reality and unreality. How delighted I was then when I found this on one of the opening pages of Fernando del Paso's epic and masterful Palinuro of Mexico:

"This is a work of fiction.
If certain characters resemble certain people in real life, it is because certain people in real life resemble characters from a novel.
Nobody, therefore, is entitled to feel included in this book.
Nobody, by the same token, to feel excluded."

"All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music"

Two dope albums worth checking out that came out over the past week and this weekend with videos/songs dropped below: Abstract & ambient noise expressionist Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972 and Radiohead's long-awaited latest The King of Limbs, both of which are just excruciatingly good; one is a blissful dive into warped sonic wreckage and pipe-organ-smeared-by-synths-and-haze airiness, and the other is a surprisingly funky Brazilian dub kind of thing but not surprisingly amazing in the most peerless way (because it's Radiohead and I more or less expect amazing peerlessness from them). Both, however, are deeply transportive records but for very different reasons. The above quote is from Walter Pater, an English art critic, essayist, and fiction writer, and I agree with its assertion without reservation.

Quick note on Radiohead in general: I don't think there's been a single group of musical artists more deft at and willing to change, explore, and evolve without seeming to ever worry one bit about how this alteration will be received, and for that I'm incredibly thankful and excited. This record, for example, is one of the funkiest of their outputs, a word that I don't imagine had been used often in discussing Radiohead.

And to bookend the titular Pater quotation, I'll end with a Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain, which if you haven't read then shame on you: "Can one tell – that is to say, narrate – time, time itself, as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking..." He goes on to align storytelling (and I would argue art overall) with the tempo of experience, rather than the representation of some kind of linear, Newtonian time, which is false and misleading. But tempo, musicologically speaking, concerned with the mood and the speed and the pace and the feel and the psychological and physical space of a given piece, seems more appropriate to talk about when talking about the way in which we, as humans, experience time. Storytelling is eventually compared directly to music making, both similarly described in their ability to "only present themselves as flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after the other."

History, Civilization, & Time Are Our Subjects, Like It or Not

Obvious statement: Carlos Fuentes is masterful and spellbinding. That out of the way, I'm lost and immersed in his humongous Terra Nostra, which he described as his attempt to write and account for a new history of Spain and South America, and a couple passages (a lot of passages) have struck out at me with some pretty aggressive immediacy, which passages I will gladly drop below.

"'You continue to believe that the world culminates in you, do not deny it; you continue to believe that you, you yourself, poor señor caballero, are the privilege and the sum of all creation. That is the first thing I want to advise you: abandon that pretense.'"

"'You look at me with scorn; you believe I am mad. You know how to measure time. I do not. Originally because I felt I was the same; later because I felt I was different. But between before and after, time was forever lost to me. Those only measure time who can remember nothing and who know how to imagine nothing. I say before and after, but I am speaking of that unique instant which is always before and after because it is forever, a forever in perfect union, amorous union.'"

"'One lifetime is not sufficient to reconcile two bodies born of antagonistic mothers; one must force reality, subject it to his imagination, extend it beyond its ridiculous limits.'"

Reductio Ad Absurdum

"Once again, I'm aware that it's clumsy to put it all this way, but the point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed himself before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I couldn't be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraudulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds' silence's flood of thought into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person's life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn't even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second's flash of thoughts and connections, etc.--and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language out native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we're thinking and to find out what they're thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows that it's a charade and they're just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one little tiny part of it at any given instant." DFW, Good Old Neon

My favorite picture of Dave, because of his
smile, the unfettered warmth of it.

On the Construct of Time:

I think, perhaps, that I'm a weird reader, at least in this current generational crop, in that I feel immeasurably comfortable and at home in books with devastatingly long and dense paragraphs; minimalism does nothing for me; simplicity does even less; and brevity is, in general, not the soul of wit. Brain-straining fiction is what I crave. Mentally, emotionally, psychically, physically exhausting fiction. I enjoy that sensation of being lost inside a particular fictive world, a world that is as layered, fractured, complicated, disastrous, miraculous, beautiful, mystifying, horrific, and frustrating as our own; and I don't mind one bit when time is completely obliterated. As I see it, if one is enjoying a particular book, why on earth would you want to leave that book? Why would you need room to breath somewhere in the pages? When I'm reading, when I'm deeply, emotionally, and intellectually invested in a work, the pages are the oxygen. I don't need anything else. The best books, for me, are the ones I don't want to end, the ones in which I could remain entrenched and submerged forever. In point of fact, I wholly understand that sensation, of time being nonexistent and being encased in a form of gripping, strangulating nowness in which everything that has ever happened and will happen is happening right now, to me, distilled and acute, like that tiny fly golden-hued and amber-stuck inside a chunk of sap on the trunk of an ancient tree. Attribute this to a background in continental philosophy and world theology as well as just heaps upon heaps of anxiety and insecurity. That said, it's no wonder that I love W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz, who--Sebald, that is--has cited Robert Walser, of whom I am devoted admirer, as a major influence. I will say right now: I do not believe in time. 

"Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwhich, was by far the most artificial of all out inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate, quite apart from the fact that the solar day which we take as our guideline does not provide any precise measurement, so that in order to reckon time we have to devise an imaginary, average sun which has an invariable speed of movement and does not incline towards the equator in its orbit. If Newton thought, said Austerlitz, pointed through the window and down to the curve of the water around the Isle of Dogs glistening in the last of the daylight, if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, the where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow? Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river's qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, tht it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolved in no one knows what direction? Even in a metropolis ruled by time like London, said Austerlitz, it is still possible to be outside time, a state of affairs which until recently was almost as common in backward and forgotten areas of our own country as it used to be in the undiscovered continent overseas. The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future. In fact, said Austerlitz, I have never owned a clock of any kind, a bedside alarm or a pocket watch, let alone a wristwatch. A clock had always struck me as something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object, perhaps because I have always resisted the power of time out of some internal compulsion which I myself have never understood, keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was, or more precisely I shall find that all moments of time have coexisted simultaneously, in which case none of what history tells us would be true, past events have not yet occurred but are waiting to do so at the moment when we think of them, although that, of course, opens up the bleak prospect of everlasting misery and neverending anguish."

That sounds like a mission statement.

This Novel Slanders Mao Zedong

Practically all I have the time for these days are blog posts featuring quotes from books I'm reading. While the page count for the writing projects pile up into miniature towers of novelistic architecture of brutalist design, any idea of free time goes way out the window into the San Francisco Bay. So here's another, from Chinese novelist Yan Lianke's hysterical and gut-punchingly serious-indeed Serve the People!

"As things stood, matters had now swung from the deadly serious to the unimaginably ridiculous--to a level of absurdity beyond Wu Dawang's own comprehension, but still artistically consistent with the fantastical parameters of our story. Neither character, in fact, had grasped the full ludicrousness of the scene they were acting out, or of their roles within it. Perhaps, in very particular circumstances, emotional truth can shine only through the curtain of farce, while earnest restraint will always fail to ring true. Maybe absurdity is the state that all affairs of the heart are, finally, destined for: the ultimate and only test of worth." Lianke, Serve the People!

Truer words, never spoken. I long for more of Lianke's translations. His most recent novel, Dream of Ding Village, concerns an AIDS outbreak in China and was, once again, banned by the government for, and I quote, "dark descriptions, to exaggerate the harm and fear of AIDS." Apparently, there's a bright side to AIDS of which I've been unaware? It's been referred to as the Chinese answer to Camus' The Plague, and even were I unfamiliar with Lianke's work up to this point, that comparison alone would interest me, as the The Plague was, I always thought, Camus' best work.

Arcade Fire Comes In & Soothes

Not even with their music this time, either. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, brothers Win and Will Butler said a number of wise things which not only resonated with me in a big way but also apply in a sort of general way to the literary scene of the day and the ways in which major publishing houses, like major record labels, are floundering, and why I tend to find a lot of the current crop of literature written contemporaneously quite dull, unimaginative, self-involved, and artificial (and yes, there are more than a few exceptions to that last bit). A couple of the gemlike standouts below, but check out the whole interview at The Fork and not to mention their latest long player, which is a phenom of a record, a sonic event.

Pitchfork: A recent New Yorker piece used your success as an argument against major labels, what's your take on that?

Will Butler: Major labels just lost their way. It's like the housing bubble. They lost a sense of the fundamentals. They were just flailing about and throwing money around. They weren't thinking about putting out good music or embracing new things.

Win: When we were getting courted in the early days of Funeral, we would get taken to these dinners, and it was just like, "We'll take the dinner, but who's paying for this?" I guess Led Zeppelin is. But, at the end of the day, we were just like, "Would we be paying for other peoples' dinners?" It's such a weird thing.

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge.

And more, commenting on a kind of myopia amongst young people making art these days:

Will: We are ambitious, and I think that the general mode of almost all art these days is pretty small-focused. In literature and in film, the culture is all about these Miranda July-esque small moments observed in a lovely manner. Nothing against Miranda July, but I think that's the prevailing aesthetic.

I remember reading a book where the author was making fun of people who liked [Melville's] Bartleby, the Scrivener instead of Moby Dick-- like favoring a well-crafted short story instead of his flawed, epic thing. But I think we're definitely much more of a Moby Dick kind of band, and a lot of bands just aren't. And there are some beautiful small songs out there, and it would be nice if we could theoretically do a small album. Maybe we will. But the music we really reacted to growing up was stuff that was a little bigger and more major label.

Pitchfork: Like what?

Will: The original stuff that got me excited about music was Björk and Radiohead and the weirder spectrum of the bands that were popular and on MTV. Radiohead weren't small in their focus. It definitely seemed like they were talking about the world at large. I think the first indie music I heard was Neutral Milk Hotel and the Music Tapes, who were both Elephant 6 bands on Merge.

Still more, hinting at autonomy and the absolute silliness of art school, academia, and some of the absurd rules and theories occasionally found therein:

Pitchfork: On "Ready to Start", you sing about an emperor who "wears no clothes" that the kids "bow down to... anyway." Do you ever worry about reaching that kind of level of hero worship yourself?

Win: America's a big country. There're still way more people who've never heard of us. For me, the feeling of "Ready to Start" came from going to art school and meeting a lot of people who had really defined political ideas and rules about art. But I just wanted to make something in the world and worry about the rest of it later and not get too caught up in rules.

This Particular J.C. We Know Existed; He Sang, Played Jazz, & Left a Paper Trail

"'Eat your flan,' ordered Clara, still looking at Andrés out of the corner of her eye. His eyes he'd closed. He seemed to be awaiting either an electric shock or a miracle." Julio Cortázar, Final Exam.

The sentence has such power. We all, today, seem to be either impatiently awaiting either an electrokinetic jolt or a miracle or a universe-delivered sign storming in on a cloud of good tidings from one of the few thousand gods, none of which show any signs of coming or ever existing in the first place. 

In other related news, Cortázar, who's one of those deeply-missed authors whom I will recommend almost always, also evidently presaged the whole globular-insectile-frame-sunglasses craze we know see going on crazily today:
He, however, does it with a handsome flair and wise éclat that's hard to find these days amongst the notable notables, even just mugging for the photogs. Methinks it's the beard and that thick, wild hair. All that said, read Hopscotch. Go to the library and get something, anything by Cortázar and drink that elixir down. 

And but so

"Do you know where all the really sad stories I'm getting are coming from? They're coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I'm starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don't get the sorts of things I've been getting from people who are merely...interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I'd fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-places pieces I was getting by the gross at Hung and Peck. I'm concerned about today's kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I'm a little worried. Really." David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System

I won't sit here and belabor the point: yes, David Foster Wallace is and was incommensurably amazing and you should read everything he wrote, like, five times and then five more times. But on a side note: I sincerely miss the pre-nineties Vintage Contemporary softbacks with the cheesy art-deco meets pop-art for these pseudosurreal covers which pointed at something suggestively deep, emotional, painful, or harrowing possibly to be found in the text. I seriously miss those. Like this: Cormac McCarthy's early novel,and one of his best, far better than his smash hit The Road, Suttree.

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself.
Longest way round is the shortest way home."
James Joyce, Ulysses.

Trieste, Italy, where Joyce first began penning the epic and moving novel about everything powerfully all at once, without reprieve.

As I toil away at my Fulbright application for a potential writing grant in Italy (with a fantasized permanent relocation afterwards), Joyce's own personal triumphs, travails and emigrations move along similar pathways with my mind, the words echo, his own rails pitted against his native land and his reasons for leaving synch with mine, and this image above, along with rereading Joyce for the umpteenth time and sort of swallowing up that fierce and tirelessly humane esprit, gives me both joy and hope.

Brief tangental PSA: Ulysses is a book whose gorgeousness, insight, and pure jouissance exceeds so much of the fiction out there I often genuinely feel bad that so many people are cheated out of the pleasure of reading it courtesy of far too many trumped-up charges citing its purposeful difficulty, its modernist posturing, its inaccessibility, and so on; none of that's true. Yes, it's playful; yes, it's demanding. But it's also, and most importantly, a wonderful read and in its celebration of the human body and the human being a vital one; that it requires patience and concentration, as all good books should, is no reason to ignore it. 

Accretions So Large You Could Climb Them

I still owe money
to the money
to the money I owe;
The floors are falling
out from
everybody I know.
The National. "Bloodbuzz Ohio"¹, High Violet²

1. ∴
2. On a developmental note, this entire new LP of theirs (The National) is overflowing with moody, foreboding, dread-inspired, nail-bitingly ominous, social-phobically sorrowful, and somehow triumphant songs, not to mention some beautiful raw music. If you haven't checked it out, you absolutely must. Ditch your Lady Gaga; or your freshest singer-songwriter with a guitar, a pretty face, and a swiped-clean, overproduced voice singing that same trite song that's been sung three hundred times before; or the latest American Idol ideation of "popular music", and listen to something with a little pluck and emotion. 

Thank You, Jennifer Egan

In a discussion with the contributing Rumpus writer Alec Michod, he and the protean fiction writer Jennifer Egan predictably found themselves talking about genre, whether she thinks about genre, what her opinions on genre are if she considers genre at all in her process. After admitting she doesn't gift genre much consideration--as a limiting device--and considers it your standard consumerist selling tool, which she is one hundred percent right in saying, she had this wonderful addition; and if I could shake her hand and say thank you all the way from her native San Francisco I would:

"How about Cervantes? How crazy is Don Quixote? Even nineteenth-century novels, which are supposed to be so staid, they’re actually not. I reread Middlemarch recently. It’s narrated by a really flexible, intrusive, at times quite strange, overbearing, but also very funny and arch narrator, and it’s not even a first-person narrator. Although at times the narrator addresses the reader in the first person. I think if you did that now you’d be perceived as being a little out there. I mean, I do think we’ve gotten really quiet about pushing any limits, all limits, as fiction writers. I would love to see more craziness out there. The novel began as this completely weird outpouring of strangeness. It was there from the beginning. It’s inherent in the form. At least the possibilities are there, but I feel like we’re not exploiting the possibilities as much as we could be. I just want to feel some playfulness happening on the page, and if genre has started to hold people back, then it’s time for genre to disappear. Or change."

Please, please, please, por favor, let there be more craziness out in there in our novelists; let us push the limits a little bit more; let us be brave and write with a little more abandon; let us be a little bit more honest with the very world about which we write: a complex, wild, confusing, messy, terrifying, beautiful, exciting and anything but simplified maelstrom. 

Read the whole interview here. Egan's latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is out now and demands reading. Put down your beach read and get on a different level.

On Pain:

"You decide. You be the judge. It says You are welcome regardless of severity. Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain."

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

The Future Belongs to Crowds

I appreciate sentences that never get old, sentences founded and constructed upon an undeniable and inelastic, almost chondritic truth. Of these, DeLillo is a master. That's one of those sentences that never change. Say it three thousand times and the fact still remains: DeLillo is a master. That's that. He's another one of those writers whose every single sentence electrifies everything about the entire reading experience and gives me over to another desire to go write. Similar to Bolaño, DeLillo is one of those writers who seems to have such a stringent, keen grasp on the world, like he has access to some photo negative of this world the rest of us can't quite see, as he subverts it and then reformulates it back to us like some mirror fun-house image of the same very world in which we live so that what we end up with is something truer than what we might actually find when we leave our homes in the morning. This is one particular passage from his novel Mao II which depicts all that I've mentioned. Whichever political direction you swing, your interpretation of this could arguably be appropriate. You could say this sums of some of the left's pre-election fervor with Obama and his Arthurian protectorship; or you could rightfully drop this right on Tea Partiers and most of the right and the way they lift up their leaders in the same manner; or those rallying behind populist voice's like Beck's or whichever seething pundit you prefer to get your grayscale opinions from. Whatever the case, DeLillo seems to have been right in pointing out, is there is at this current moment a sad desperation out there. So many tired people, so many broken people, so many people without much belief left in anything, are taking every last ounce of lifeblood they have and offering it to someone from whom they expect everything in return. 

"When the Old God leaves the world what happens to all the unexpended faith? He looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong, darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fueled by credulousness. They speak a half language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of the mechanical routine played out with live figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love and sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. He keeps the glasses trained, feeling a slight desperation now, a need to find her and remind himself who she is. Healthy, intelligent, twenty-one, serious-sided, possessed of a selfness, a teeming soul, nuance and shadow, grids of pinpoint singularities they will never drill out of her. Or so he hopes and prays, wondering about the power of their own massed prayer. When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops. The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought."

DeLillo, Mao II

Insights From the Dead

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza is a reluctant teenage tennis wunderkind at the very academy built by his father, whom killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave after realizing the limits of potential. In an order dictated by the fervid sweep of my ballpoint pen, these are some of Hal's and his brother's rules for survival, written, filmed, and recorded aloud in the mentally, muscularly, and osseously assaultive youth-camp training facility which can alternately pass for a grueling playground on which civic morale is generated and where good Americans are either broken into shards or made whole; they are snippets of insider advice that can pass for ways to succeed or stay alive in the self-sabotaging realms of, but not limited to: tennis, writing, or life in general for anyone for whom pressure and expectations (or in particular, living up to those social weights) have played a significant role, which is just about everyone. Pull from them what you will. Infinite Jest is about 1,000 plus pages of essential, fire-cracking wisdom, one phoneme after the other. 

"Here is how you handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how you handle being seeded at tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed.'

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.

Here is how to sweat.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.
It is easier than you think.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This is tricky.

Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always."

Oh, Neil

"I know that the molecules in my body are traceable to phenomena in the cosmos. That makes me want to grab people in the street and say, "Have you heard this?" Neil deGrasse Tyson, oft-known planetary murderer of Pluto and brilliantly charming and wise astrophysicist. 

I could listen to Neil wax scientifically for hours and, in fact, have done just that on numerous occasions. He coined the word Manhattanhenge. He's a notable speaker on The Universe series and is now the host and brainchild behind PBS' NOVA scienceNOW. The work he's doing, not just for actual scientific development and research, but for making science exciting (which it always has been) and approachable to laymen is extraordinary. The sheer beauty and ingenuity of someone like deGrasse Tyson is that he seems equally at home on the Colbert Report trading jocular barbs with Colbert as he does on The Science Channel, discussing the unfathomable intricacies of string theory; it is this duality of his that makes him such a consummate scientist. He breaks barriers. Also, you listen to this guy talk about his work and it's just infectious; this is a man who truly loves this world, this life, this planet, this everything, and if we can obtain even a small fraction of his enthusiasm and hope for this world and our species, we're all better off. 

To simply keep up with the prolific dude, who seems to work just about as constantly as the same universe to which he devotes himself: Tyson Explains Life & the Universe

The Witness in the Noosphere

Sometimes disappointment is informed by a wealth of pure pleasure. For instance, I was all set to copy down a few of the more meaningful and illuminating quotes and passages from Camus' last written full novel The Fall, which is nothing but a 148 page monologue between the narrator and the nameless listener or witness to whom he's delivering said monologue, when I took a look at my book and realized I wasn't going to be able to: there's no quotes to find because nearly the entire book I've underlined! Every page is a mess of black or blue ink. Almost every sentence in this seminal book on the conscience of modern man in the face of unspeakable evils is worthy of a quote, and I can't bring myself to reduce this (already pithy) novel to a few lines. So the only quote I can put down is this, my own crude words:

"Read the fucking book."

Better yet, read Camus' entire oeuvre. Read his letters. Read his essays. Read Camus. Read Camus. And when you've finished reading Camus, read him again.

On Marriage:

Oh, Ambrose Bierce: your wit, your snark (and truth) is missed:
 
"Wedding: A ceremony at which two persons undertake to become one, one undertakes to become nothing, and nothing undertakes to become supportable."

It's Friday night in the city: windows are open, voices are loud, music is blaring, and the city smells and tastes of springtime and momentary bouts of joy. Cheers. And by "cheers" I mean I'm doing work, listening to all of the aforementioned.