lakes of coffee a cup at a time

from Larry McMurtry, Moving On (1970)

. . . it was a relief to go with someone who wasn't eternally bitching about graduate school. Everyone else felt, or at least declared, that graduate school was really no place for them, that the life was unreal, the projects inane, the themes and theses worthless, the professors disagreeable, the social conventions artificial, the competitions silly. Nonetheless, most of them stayed hermetically sealed in the graduate life, wrote the papers, kowtowed to the professors, plodded through the texts, consumed lakes of coffee a cup at a time, griped, whined, exulted over triumphs so minor they would have been unnoticeable in any other context, competed with one another endlessly, and, by the time they had been at it a few months, would scarcely have known what to do in any other world. To go back into what they liked to refer to as 'real life' they would have had to be reconditioned slowly, like divers coming up from the deep.

on academic witing

from Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (2003)

Should writing intended for academics in the humanities be readable for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--be at no disadvantage compared with someone who has read widely in previous discussions of the issue? When the charge of bad writing comes from journalists, it is hard to avoid the feeling that some hostility to the very idea of scholarly humanistic disciplines is involved.

her majesty's a pretty nice girl

from Simon Forman, Diary (1597)

Dreamt that I was with the Queen [Elizabeth], and that she was a little elderly woman in a coarse white petticoat all unready. She and I walked up and down through lanes and closes, talking and reasoning. At last we came over a great close where were many people, and there were two men at hard words. One of them was a weaver, a tall man with a reddish beard, distract of his wits. She talked to him and he spoke very merrily unto her, and at last did take her and kiss her. So I took her by the arm still, and then we went through a dirty lane. She had a long white smock very clean and fair, and it trailed in the dirt and her coat behind. I took her coat and did carry it up a good way, and then it hung too low before. Then said I, "I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coat out of the dirt." And so we talked merrily; then she began to lean upon me, when we were past the dirt and to be very familiar with me, and methought she began to love me. When we were along, out of sight, methought she would have kissed me.

the big four

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

God keep me from ever finishing anything. This whole book is but a draught-- nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!

dream made flesh

from Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972)

Now, what Dr Hoffman had done, in the first instance, was this. Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a wilfully organic thing, unfurl like petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter. Dr Hoffman's gigantic generators sent out a series of seismic vibrations which made great cracks in the hitherto immutable surface of the time and space equation we had informally formulated in order to realize our city and, out of these cracks, well - nobody knew what would come next.

A kind of orgiastic panic seized the city. Those bluff, complaisant avenues and piazzas were suddenly as fertile in metamorphoses as a  magic forest. Whether the apparitions were shades of the dead, synthetic reconstructions of the living or in no way replicas of anything we knew, they inhabited the same dimension as the living for Dr Hoffman had enormously extended the limits of this dimension. The very stones were mouths which spoke. I myself decided the revenants were objects - perhaps personified ideas - which could think but did not exist. This seemed the only hypothesis which might explain my own case for I acknowledged them - I saw them; they screamed and whickered at me - and yet I did not believe in them.

This phantasmagoric redefinition of a city was constantly fluctuating for it was now the kingdom of the instantaneous.

Cloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity. A group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, painted kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream.

delight at the top of the pole

from Larry McMurtry, "Eros in Archer County," in In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968)

My own first brush with small-town restrictions on frankness followed almost immediately upon the realization that sex was something worth being frank about. I was eight or nine years old, as I recall, and was climbing a street-sign pole. When I started up the pole I had no purpose in mind but casual exercise, but about the time I got to the top, the flexing activity that pole-climbing involves produced what I learned years later was an orgasm. I had not been expecting anything so delightful to happen at the top of that pole, and I hung for a moment in amazement before sliding down. A lady of my acquaintance happened to be standing nearby, so I hurried over and gave her an ecstatic report on the event. My description was probably rather vague, but I was able to pinpoint the area that felt so good, and that was enough for the lady. "Ssh," she said, looking apprehensively about. "Just don't tell anybody."

the romance of the half-hidden hangover

from L. Rust Hills, "How to Cut Down Drinking and Smoking Quite So Much," in How to Do Things Right: The Memoirs of a Fussy Man (1972)

[...] But the real reason you drink and smoke so much is that you still have the idea, formed somewhere way back when, that smoking and drinking is really a very romantic thing to do. It seems very grown-up to you if you are young, and it seems very youthful to you if you are old.

In his autobiography, Lincoln Steffens describes his romance with drinking:

Once, for example, as I staggered (a little more than I had to) away from the bar, I overheard one man say to another: "Those boys can carry some liquor, can't they?"

That was great. But better still was the other loafer's reply: "Yes," he said, "but it's tough to see young men setting out on the downgrade to hell that way."

The romantic idea that one has a brilliant future somehow being ruined by drinking is natural to a college sophomore, but it ought to be abandoned in maturity. The trouble is that it remains in the subconscious, sneakily invidious, so that even the ugly hangover becomes glamorous. When I was young and seldom got hangovers, or not bad ones, I'd often pretend to be in a very bad way "the morning after." It made for a lot of companionable talk in college about the "hair of the dog" and "getting a quick one." Drugs - which come complete with that great language about "turning on" and "highs" and "freaking out" and "coming down" and so on - must seem equivalently dangerous and romantic. Years and years later, when stupid pride in a hangover was replaced by sensible shame on a number of occasions, when for various reasons I tried to conceal how my hands were trembling, I remember even then having that invidious secret sense of how romantic it was that I was in such a bad way and actually trying to conceal it.

above and amidst the city

from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) trans. Steven Rendall (1984)

Seeing Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Beneath the haze stirred up by the winds, the urban island, a sea in the middle of the sea, lifts up the skyscrapers over Wall Street, sinks down at Greenwich, then rises again to the crests of the distance beyond Harlem. A wave of verticals. Its agitation is momentarily arrested by vision. The gigantic mass is immobilized before the eyes. It is transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide - extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space. Unlike Rome, New York has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future [...] On this stage of concrete, steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production.

[...]

To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place - an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens' positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere or by dreamed-of places.

the sound of trane

from Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: the story of a sound (2007)

This is a book about jazz as sound. I mean "sound" as it has long functioned among jazz players, as a mystical term of art: as in, every musician finally needs a sound, a full and sensible embodiment of his artistic personality, such that it can be heard, at best, in a single note. Miles Davis's was fragile and pointed. Coleman Hawkins's was ripe and mellow and generous. John Coltrane's was large and dry, slightly undercooked, and urgent.

But I also mean sound as a balanced block of music emanating from a whole band. How important is this? With Coltrane, sound ruled over everything. It eventually superseded composition: his later records present one track after another of increasing similarity, in which the search for sound superseded solos and structure. His authoritative sound, especially as he could handle it in a ballad, was the reason older musicians respected him so--his high-register sound, for example, in "Say It Over and Over Again."

Coltrane loved structure in music, and the science and theory of harmony; one of the ways he is remembered is as the champion student of jazz. But insofar as Coltrane's music has some extraordinary properties--the power to make you change your consciousness a little bit--we ought to widen the focus beyond the constructs of his music, his compositions, and his intellectual conceits. Eventually we can come around to the music's overall sound: first how it feels in the ear and later how it feels in the memory, as mass and metaphor. Musical structure, for instance, can't contain morality. But sound, somehow, can. Coltrane's large, direct, vibratoless sound transmitted his basic desire: "that I'm supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to."

the quest for presence

from John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999)

Odysseus ultimately proved his identity to Penelope by revealing the scar on his thigh and the privileged knowledge of the bed he had once built her. As a message out of the past and arriving from distant places, he faced all the troubles of authentication. Odysseus's testimonies rested in the parts of his person most resistant to fabrication: scar, personal history, knowledge of intimate places outside circulation. He offered not tropes but trophies.

To view communication as the marriage of true minds underestimates the holiness of the body. Being there still matters, even in an age of full-body simulations. Touch, being the most archaic of all our senses and perhaps the hardest to fake, means that all things being equal, people who care for each other will seek each other's presence. The quest for presence might not give better access to the other's soul, per se, but it does to their body. And the bodies of friends and kin matter deeply. The face, voice, and skin have a contagious charisma. There is nothing so electric or unmanageable as touch: we feast our eyes on each other, kiss, shake hands, and embrace. Whether any of these gestures is a token of affection or constitutes harassment is a matter of interpretation subject to all the same problems as any other signifying act. Touch is no cure for communication trouble: it is more primal, but equally intractable. With his war on "the metaphysics of presence," Derrida is right to combat the philosophical principle that behind every word is a voice and behind every voice an intending soul that gives it meaning. But to think of the longing for the presence of other people as a kind of metaphysical mistake is nuts.

Touch and time, the two nonreproducible things we can share, are our only guarantees of sincerity. To echo Robert Merton, the only refuge we have against communication fraud is the propaganda of the deed. No profession of love is as convincing as a lifetime of fidelity.

rum that warms you all through body and spirit

from Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write. I was writing about up in Michigan and since it was a wild, cold, blowing day it was that sort of day in the story. I had already seen the end of fall come through boyhood, youth and young manhood, and in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself, I thought, and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things. But in the story the boys were drinking rum St. James. This tasted wonderful on the cold day and I kept on writing, feeling very well and feeling the good Martinique rum warm me all through my body and my spirit.

A girl came in the cafe and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair was black as a crow's wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.
. . .
[He intermittently stares at the girl while writing a story, probably "The Three-Day Blow."] I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love, and I was sure this was a very good story although I would not know truly how good until I read it over the next day.

As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

winter's greatest hits in bachelard...

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958) trans. Maria Jolas (1964)

...snow especially reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily. It gives a single color to the entire universe which, with the one word, snow, is both expressed and nullified for those who have found shelter...

In any case, outside the occupied house, the winter cosmos is a simplified cosmos. It is a non-house in the same way that metaphysicians speak of a non-I, and between the house and the non-house it is easy to establish all sorts of contradictions. Inside the house, everything may be differentiated and multiplied. The house derives reserves and refinements of intimacy from winter; while in the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action. The dreamer of houses knows and senses this, and because of the diminished entity of the outside world, experiences all the qualities of intimacy with increased intensity.

II

Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is old. It is as though it were living in the past of centuries gone by.

he was an undergraduate

from Herman Melville, Moby Dick
[Ishmael describes his bedmate for the night, the "cannibal" Queequeg]:

But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition stage-- neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just enough civilised to show off his outlandishnes in the strangest possible manner. His education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate.

metaphor vs. image

from Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958) trans. Maria Jolas (1964)

Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express. Metaphor is related to a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination. Later when I plan to go more deeply into the comparison between metaphor and image, we shall see that metaphor could not be studied phenomenologically, and that in fact, it is not worth the trouble, since it has no phenomenological value. At the most, it is a fabricated image, without deep, true, genuine roots. It is an ephemeral expression. It is, or should be, one that is used only once, in passing. We must be careful, therefore, not to give it too much thought; nor should the reader think too much about it. And yet, what a success the drawer metaphor has had with Bergson's followers!

Contrary to metaphor, we can devote our reading being to an image since it confers being upon us. In fact, the image, which is the pure product of absolute imagination, is a phenomenon of being; it is also one of the specific phenomena of the speaking creature.

god is a brainless dad

from George Saunders, "The 400-Pound CEO":

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a barinless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

what is in the work

from Andre Dubus, Finding a Girl in America (1980)

Typed on a sheet of paper, thumbtacked to the wall over his desk, was this from Heart of Darkness:

No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

A woman had to know that: simply know it, that was all. He did not need praise from her, he rarely liked to talk about his work, and he had no delusions about it: he liked most novels he read better than he liked his own. But the work was his, and its final quality did not matter so much as the hours it demanded from him. It made the passage of time concrete, measurable. It gave him confidence, not in the work itself, but in Hank Allison: after a morning at the desk, he had earned his day on earth. When he did not work, except by choice, he disliked himself. If these days occurred in succession because of school work, hangovers, lack of will, sickness, he lost touch with himself, felt vague and abstract, felt himself becoming whomever he was with.

the heathen land of texas

from John Graves, Goodbye to a River (1959)

[Describes local atrocities near the Brazos of waged by settlers versus non-Comanche natives]. It is unlikely that his little ugliness lighted the fuse to the main powder keg, because the main powder keg was labeled "Comanche," and he hadn't ventured to touch them. But he set a pattern for other settlers like him, and it seems that more were like him than were like, say, Robert Neighbors. Many more . . . And The People themselves were getting restive, resentful of the white encroachment on so much good land and grass and water, and covetous of the big, fast, American riding stock. That was the year they massacred the Cambren and Mason families in Jack County just to the north, the first real bloodiness of its kind in the area. Companies of white Rangers, official and otherwise, were organized and began vengefully to track war parties and stolen stock across the wild prairies.

Things were shaping up. Old Sam Houston the Raven, ally of all Indians by tepee marriage and temperament, hurled objections from the southern seat of government but got nowhere. "I agreed," Austrian George Erath wrote in his memiors--he knew the Brazos country--"I agreed, but I said that no man would dare tell them so unless he wanted to be hanged, and that if he, Houston, went up there preaching peace, they would hang him."

Houston was the one who sadly, somewhere along the line, said there was no solution. He said that if he could build a wall across Texas which would keep all the Indians securely to the west, the God-damned Texans would crawl over it from their side. . . . He was right. The Brazos whites finally organized a full-scale attack on the Lower Reserve, the peaceful Indians. Because of the firmness of the army commander there, and the unexpected backbone of the Indians themselves, it came to nothing; but in 1859, Robert Neighbors had to lead an official removal of all Indians from Texas, farmers and fighters alike, up across the Red and into the Territory. After he had them there, he sent Washington a bitter message:

I have this day crossed all Indians out of the heathen land of Texas and am now out of the land of the Philistines. If you want to have a full description of our exodus, see the Bible where the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea. We have had the same show, only our enemies did not follow us to Red River.

When he returned south, one of the truly decent men of his time and place, he was immediately shotgunned down by a drunken Indian-baiting Irishman, whom he had never before seen, in the street at Fort Belknap up the Brazos. It had something to do with his having spoken out against the murder of some Reserve Indians, or, some say, with his having accused the Irishman's brother-in-law of stealing horses and letting the Indians take the blame. There was a lot of that, then and later. . . .

rilke's angels

from Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy" in Duino Elegies (1923)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
. . .
Oh, and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after
mildly disillusioning presence, by which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breath; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

from Robert Hass, "Looking for Rilke," in Twentieth Century Pleasures

The angels embody the sense of absence which had been at the center of Rilke's willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or rather, absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of intensity, completely outside of us. You feel a sunset open up an emptiness inside you which keeps growing and growing and you want to hold onto that feeling forever; only you want it to be a feeling of power, of completeness, of repose: that is the longing for the angel. You feel a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you dizzy and you would gladly through yourself down the well of that other person, if the long hurtle in the darkness would then be perfect inside you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire, if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those moments, death is what we want, an end to limit, and end to time.

boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience

from Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations

If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places--the activities that are intimately associated with boredom [artisanal forms of labor]--are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of his work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.

crowning his life

from  James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

They lie on their sides. The clock is ticking. The metal of the heater cracks like glass. Downstairs the Corsicans are talking. Their passionate voices echo through the stairwell. The street door closes.

"Wait a minute," he whispers.

She is on top of him.

"I don't have anything."

"It's alright," she says.

"Are you sure?"

She is struggling. He is in agony.

"Anne-Marie?"

"Si!" she insists. He half releases her, half guides.

It begins slowly, his hands on her waist. It seems he is crowning his life.

the dick, like, claimed all of my attention

from "Signifying Nothing" in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Here is a weird one for you. It was a couple of years ago, and I was 19, and getting ready to move out of my folks' house, and get out on my own, and one day as I was getting ready, I suddenly get this memory of my father waggling his dick in my face one time when I was a little kid. The memory comes up out of nowhere, but it is so detailed and solid-seeming, I know it is totally true. I suddenly know it really happened, and was not a dream, even though it had the same kind of bizarre weirdness to it dreams have. Here is the sudden memory. I was around 8 or 9, and I was down in the rec room by myself, after school, watching TV. My father came down and came into the rec room, and was standing in front of me, like between me and the TV, not saying anything, and I didn't say anything. And, without saying anything, he took his dick out, and started kind of waggling it in my face. I remember nobody else was home. I think it was winter, because I remember it was cold down in the rec room, and I had Mom's TV afghan wrapped around me. Part of the total weirdness of the incident was that, the whole time, he did not say anything (I would have remembered it if he said anything), and there was nothing in the memory about what his face looked like, like what his expression looked like. I do not remember if he even looked at me. All I remember was the dick. The dick, like, claimed all of my attention.