Status Updates From Mao II

His freedom is tied to the public announcement of his freedom.

This is one of many things Beirut has learned from the West. Beirut is tragic but still breathing. London is the true rubble. I’ve studied here and taught here and every time I return I see the damage more clearly.”

U have a twisted sense of the writer’s place in society U think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things In Ctrl America, writers carry guns They have to And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be The state should want to kill all writers Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere

How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hard-line positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities?

Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can’t survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can.

The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark.

“The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger.

Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation.”

“I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone—standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up.

People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.

What makes NYC different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board.

“By compressing a million moments of love and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you’re saying that life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone to hurrying its own transformation, or what’s the point? You take marriage, the faith of the species, the means of continuation, and you turn it into catastrophe, a total implosion of the future.

This guy is a genius.

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.