W.D. Clarke > Recent Status Updates

“Well, you could have steered this all toward some kind of revolt against us, the cronies, the owners, the masters, the oligarchs, whatever term is current in your whiny world. But you kept it apolitical. So I figured you wanted to taste the cake. Now I’m not so sure.”

“It was never about politics.”

“It’s always about politics. By which I mean economics. That’s where me and my lefty profs at Berkeley agree.”

DNF here

“In my day, [$] was a strike against you. In my day what mattered was something they used to call soul”

“That was a dumb fucking day, bro"

“Don’t you ever say ‘bro’ at my table again.”

“But is it really your table? Didn’t Grandma gift it to us when she got a new one?”

“Gift it to us? Gift it? I hate that. Where did you get that? School? What’s wrong with ‘give’? ‘Give’ isn’t good enough? Everyone has to gift?

At the marriage counselor:

“I really feel like we’re making progress,” Tovah said.

“Progress is a dangerous concept at the center of a bankrupt form of humanism.”

"Of course."

The names of her children sometimes embarrass Tovah. They were Fraz’s idea. He had declared himself the creative one, which is how people (men) describe themselves when they aren’t the competent ones.

“Canadian podcasters with precious art. There are worse neigh-
bors to have.”
“No,” Baruch said. “Neighbors like these are the worst kind.”

Literature & Class at 30,000 ft:

...his progress through the plane described a diagonal of shocking decline. In Coach the laptop literature was pluralistic, liberal, and humane: Daniel Deronda, trigonometry, Lebanon, World War I, Homer, Diderot, Anna Karenina. As for Business World, it wasn't...

[cont'd]

On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others [for the boy], there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew’s lover’s guardian’s brother’s youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean...

People who look at dictionaries all day keep seeing words at the top of the page—words they don’t like seeing. Syzygy, crapulent, posterity, smegma, toiletry, dystopia, dentrifrice, bastinado, ferae naturae.

Oops looks like I started again

Taking a well-earned slightly longer pause, after these first two of three volumes—just as I have somewhat more briefly paused, to refresh & take sustenance, after each of the, so far, 7 of 13 graphomaniacal "Letters"

Justine had just awakened in the hellish but reassuringly familiar suburb of Hangover.

“I thought you were fine never knowing.”
“I didn’t realize how much there was not to know.”

“Activists have vociferously opposed us at every turn. It takes guts to stand up to the homeless-industrial complex.”

“Why is there such a negative reaction from some about AfD?” Musk asked Naomi Seibt, a right-wing German activist and influencer in her early twenties. “They keep saying ‘far right’, but the policies of AfD that I’ve read about don’t sound extremist. Maybe I’m missing something.”

The flipside to the fickleness of children was their ability to transcend grudge, adjust to new conditions. Innocence, cruelty, rubbery limbs, amnesia, successful nations were erected on these qualities.

I>...although this wasn’t what Arendt had meant when she coined “the banality of evil,” Jacob was, in fact, alarmed by a powerful man who was fussy about his [Birkenstock] sandals.

I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be working with him on this tremendously exciting project. I used all the dead language. Dead language would keep me alive.

He pushed his glass an inch or two across the table, the universal sign that the convivial portion of the evening was over, although maybe it wasn’t universal. I hadn’t traveled much beyond Europe, and Canada didn’t count.

STEVEN MORRIS (New Order drummer): We used to check out the clubs in New York.... We didn’t dance, though, didn’t dance! It takes Ecstasy to make a white man dance.

Kids in Deere Parke didn’t hang out on the street, at least not 13-year-olds, so Justine...drifted into a pleasant world of television and magazines which led, to her surprise, to reading books. Each book was an invisible tunnel leading to a phantom world that existed silently parallel to real life, into which one could vanish then emerge without anyone knowing. Hardy, Dickens, Poe, Chekhov—she could barely...

Pub quiz night! Q: who is this “We”?

‘We wanted to look like we came from Vegas, so we went to Carnaby Street and hired this very camp tailor who used to make clothes for Marc Bolan [...] ‘It’s 1982, so he probably hadn’t been asked to make a gold lamé suit for nearly a decade.’

I read 1984, by George Orwell. I read it voluptuously, loving the pitiless description of a panicked fat man weeping as he vainly tried to escape machine-gun fire, of a terrified woman trying to protect a doomed child with her body, of the toothless old whore that Winston had mistaken for a pretty child-harlot. It wasn’t the brutality I loved, it was [...]

[cont'd]

“Jacob,” she said, “how did I find myself in a Dostoevsky novel?”

... a painting occurred at the intersection of different gazes, or converging intimacies. The tensions, the energy, the sensuality of a work caught like a message on an electric wire, between who was seeing whom and how...

[...] behave yourselves, don’t go anywhere, and remember, compliance is the price of liberty.

Perhaps the perfect synopsis of the novel thus far

Seems like the chief topic of supper conversation is going to be Adolf Hitler, children present or not.

Chapter 1

So began Skeet’s pinsetting career, which would before long come to be described all over town as “illustrious.” A tough monkey with a number of speeds to his gearbox, Skeet quickly learned his way around a bowling environment unforgiving as any on the planet.

Here we go...woo-hooooo!