Status Updates From Mao II

the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.”

I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold.”

The messiah is here on earth.”
“He’s here on earth, I’m up there in the sky,”

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning.

our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel.

“I’ll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump.”

Old books haunt the blood.”

“Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.”

It’s a master collapse. It’s a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle.”

He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed… brandies and …pills/placed the nozzle of a revolver… behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.

“Someday, go walk those streets,” she said. “Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?”

News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know.

There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film.

Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura.

“Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it. Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don’t take my picture. I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I’m sick of it finally. ”

I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself.”

“Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

“Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”

“Do people tell you they like your work? They come up to you at parties in New York and say, ‘I just wanted to tell you.’ Or, ‘You don’t know me but I just wanted.’ Or, ‘I really have to tell you this and I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.’ Then you look at them and smile like shyly.”

“I haven’t known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?”

A great man’s face shows the beauty of his work.

He gets it…

She sees the fence up close and they stop the film and it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church, it is composed and balanced and filled with people suffering

words that were part of some synthetic mass language

When there is enough out-of-placeness in the world, nothing is out of place.

The city is a device for measuring time.

“No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself certain complicated things that are probably very simple. You reach a certain age, isn’t that the way it works? Then you know what you want to do at last.”

Babylon is every town