BIG OTHER

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The premise of this essay is that criticism needs to play a central role in the revival of literature.

-Anis Shivani, “What Should be the Function of Criticism Today? Subtropics

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Here are a few of the many facts strangers can learn from reading Lin’s blogs and comments on blogs: His penis measures five inches when erect, and he last had sex in December 2009; he regularly blends smoothies and is obsessed with hamsters.

-Joshua Cohen, Bookforum review of Richard Yates

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You know when you’re at a party and there’s exactly one person you know there? So you talk to that person until you run out of things to talk about, and then, if you’re as uninteresting as I am, that person looks for the nearest other person he or she knows and leaves you standing there? (Is that just me?) What if there was no one else there that person knew? And what if you both had to stand there, blathering on at each other until you both just wanted to off yourselves? (And you wonder why I never say much in conversation.) That’s what it feels like to me, the big book.

-Gabriel Blackwell – “Your Basic Bore, or ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’”

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In Scrabble, I’d know a man was the one for me if he ever spelled…
A two-letter word that got him over 40 points. Because I’ve done it, okay? If you use “qi” (that’s technically a word in Scrabble, which is insane) and you can put it on the triple-letter and have it going across and down—bam, you’re done. You’ve just won that game. You’ve won the game, and you’ve won the girl.

-Hannah Simone, Men’s Health March 2012

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Christopher Nolan is a different animal entirely. I think he wants to be an artist—I believe he really does aspire to make today’s Godfather: Part II—and he even has some decent innovations (e.g., “tell the story backward”), although they’re never as defamiliarizing as he seems to think they are.

-A.D Jameson – “Viktor Shklovsky wants to make you a better writer, part 1: device & defamiliarization”

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I detect a strain of embarrassment in some of the more hostile reactions to The Tree of Life.

-Kent Jones, Film Comment review of The Tree of Life

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To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one’s own.

-Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew

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Ford’s language is of the cracked, open spaces and their corresponding places within. A certain musicality and alertness is required of the reader; one has to hear it instinctively and rhythmically.

[Example:]In the night when I got up to use the toilet, I found my father alone at the card table with his Niagara Falls puzzle spread out like a meal in front of him.

-Lorrie Moore (and Richard Ford) “Canada Dry” New Yorker May 21, 2012

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You finally discover that even the author you return to pads his sentences, hoards pages and collapses on an idea in order to flatten it, to stretch it out…The writer…always says more than he has to say: he swells his thought and swathes it with words…Let us write…, let us dupe each other.

-E.M. Cioran “Some Blinds Alleys: A Letter”

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Teaching writing is a hustle.

-Cormac McCarthy “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction” NYTimes

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The writers whose work is published are all writers who can somehow manage NOT to write for months, even years. There may be writers who HAVE to write, but if there are we never see their books: no agent would touch them. Mainstream publishers only accept submissions from agents. Indie publishers don’t pay the kind of money that would enable a writer to do nothing but write. Mainstream publishers pay money that could buy time, but won’t let the writer use the time. So the system selects for the writer who doesn’t HAVE to write.

-Helen DeWitt – Comment on The Paris Review Blog

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Conscience is the bite of things known together, in remorse and in incentive; conscience is that unification of the sense of things which is moral beauty; conscience comes at many moments but especially, in James, in those deeply arrested moments when the will is united with the imagination in withdrawal.

-R.P. Blackmur “The Loose and Baggy Monsters of Henry James”

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Hope you get this on time, sorry I didn’t inform you about my trip to Spain for a program. I am having some difficulty here because i misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel which contained some cash, credit cards and some other valuable things. I am so confused right now.

-Spam email from Uncle Tom

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I’m sure Henry James is a genius and all, but untangling his prose is like trying to talk to a verbose, over-educated person who’s drunk off his ass but refuses to pass out…The other problem with the book is that it was written in a time when Americans had a hard time believing anybody on Earth was actually fucking, since nobody in America was.

-Elizabeth Urello, Goodreads review of The Ambassadors

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Beckett will not hear of being interviewed, whether orally or in writing. I fear that on this he is not to be budged. He gives his work, his role stops there. He cannot talk about it. That is his attitude.

-Suzanne Dumesnil, Letter to Jerome Lindon April 24, 1951, The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956

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$10 IS NOT SO MUCH when you consider that each year Narrative publishes more fiction and poetry than any other literary magazine—more than 350 authors and artists last year alone. How do we manage to give our content away for free while paying writers well?

-email from Narrative Magazine May 21, 2012

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