Kaplan > Recent Status Updates

Iris Murdoch summer continues. This one is on up there with The Sea, the Sea & thankfully washes off the residual icky feeling from The Italian Girl. It’s too early to weigh in, but I think my favorites will be her long 1st person novels from the 1970s that skewer their narcissistic middle-aged narrators.

“Of course it’s a muddle, but it’s my muddle, it’s where I live and what I am. I can’t run out of it and leave it behind all jagged and loose like a broken shell.”

“The tears of age are not the tears of youth.”

“Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.”

“The interval between possession and hell was short though I admit it was wonderful.”

“In a report sponsored by the AEI in 1981, the public health theorists & former New Left activists Lowell Levin & Ellen Idler identified ‘self-care’ as an ideal alternative to the welfare state…For them, the burdens of care engendered by the deinstitutionalization of public hospital patients called for a simultaneous reinstitutionalization of the private family, church, & charity as natural conduits for self-care.”

Audiobook on bleak winter runs of late. A deeply harrowing encounter.

“If neoliberals were adamant that the economic obligations of family should be enforced even when the legal and affective bonds of kinship had broken down, social conservatives were intent on actively rekindling the family as a moral institution based on the unpaid labor of love. Both agreed, however, that the private family (rather than the state) should serve as the primary source of economic security.”

“I am blind,” the Mole said, “but I wear a star from the firmament on my nose.”

“People want to die of loving you as much as they want to identify with those who will never love you.”

“That people kill themselves because of my books won’t stop me from writing. If people turned into reactionaries, political assholes after reading me, yes, that would stop me from writing, but not if they killed themselves.”

“Now the last remnants fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult.”

“‘My father was a scoundrel and a drunkard,’ she says, ‘but at least he wasn’t a socialist’”