Christina > Recent Status Updates

'Peter lets himself into the loft. Quarter past four. He goes to the kitchen counter, puts down the drugstore bag that contains the Excedrin and dental floss he's picked up (why is it so impossible to go out in New York without buying something?), slips off his jacket, hangs it up.'

'...the more technology simplifies things and improves efficiency, the more difficult it is to think because thinking depends on the ability not to react in a knee-jerk manner, to postpone decisions, consult other people, to listen to their experiences and arguments and consider the matter properly.

'When watching The X-Factor and munching popcorn, you experience the taste of the popcorn and the sound of the songs, but it is only once you become aware that you are experiencing these things that you can be said to be starting to think. There may then be a risk of you wondering whether this is a worthwhile use of your time – and that may not be a pleasant experience.'

'When Reagan tapped the 35-year-old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on Conscience of a Conservative, set out to bring Goldwater's dream to life. ...When the computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed that the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues ...and explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers.'

'An implied narrative of the novel's decline maps onto a parallel cultural shift... the transition from the analog or material recording of music on vinyl albums to digital forms. ...Egan has commented that her organization of the novel into two "sides" was intended as an homage to "a form that's sadly gone—the LP, even the CD."'

'McCarthy had shown the Taft wing of the Republican Party how to advance their agenda by exploiting the media. He yelled, made crazy accusations, badgered, and hectored in what was essentially performance art that advanced a simple, almost mythical narrative... He alone was defending America by protecting individualism from an all-pervasive government of godless communists. ...Taft Republicans had found a game plan.'

'...one of the basic (and unusual) structural features of Goon Squad is that we are not guaranteed to "see" any given character again after the chapter in which they feature concludes. The novel emphasizes the minor tragedy of every individual's impermanence: we are all doomed to become simply "a glint in the hazy memories" of others who may struggle even to recall us at all.'

'To rebuild the South, [Andrew] Johnson turned not to the Army, or to the ex-slaves who had supported the Union, but to former Confederates. He offered pardons to all but about 1,500 Confederate leaders... The states...then codified the racial violence that swept across the South in the summer of 1865.'

"A novel reader or critic is also a traveler who leaves behind her own world in order to "dive" headfirst into another, fictional one, a "foreign country." We return from these pilgrimages back into our own world and selves, clutching treasured relics from the territories we've visited."

Kreilkamp reminiscing about the pop music and arts coverage in the Village Voice; "...the vividness of its profane, ridiculously insider debates inextricable from the thick layers of pulpy newsprint pages they spilled out of, the issues bloated by the NYC real estate and massage-parlor ads that subsidized them. (We never realized just how precariously an entire bohemian way of life rested upon...apartment ads"

'Gus pushed his plate of nearly untouched salad to the center and leaned back.
   "I'll tell you one thing, he said. "I don't blame White Buffalo for not trusting the sheriff. What's his name? Fucky?"
   "Gus," Morgan said, "Such language. Why the hell would you say some shit like that?"
   Gus roared. David laughed as well, and that was good to see.'

"Drew," you say.
He's looking at the water with that stoned distraction that makes anything seem worth studying. You laugh, nervous, and he turns. "What?"
"I wish we could live in that cabin. You and me."
"What cabin?"
"The one you built. In Wisconsin." You see confusion in Drew's face, and you add, "If there is a cabin."
"Of course there's a cabin."

Finished! Review to come after my thoughts are done percolating. Hopefully.

'According to Bix, this computer-message-sending is going to be huge—way beyond the telephone. He's big on predicting the future, and you haven't really challenged him—maybe because he's older, maybe because he's black.'

1 0  O C T O B E R
——
On October 10 and 11, 1963, the citizens of France mourned the successive deaths of Édith Piaf and Jean Cocteau.

0 4  M A Y
——
I am grateful for seemingly small things, as my glasses, without which I could not read.

2 3  F E B R U A R Y
———
Rockaway Beach. Restless gulls, restless hearts.

'...I sang the song Louis taught me:
a song to call the deer in Creek, when hunting,
and I am certainly hunting something as magic as deer
in this city far from the hammock of my mother's belly.
It works, of course, and deer came into the room
and wondered at finding themselves
in a house near downtown Denver.'

"I want interviews, features, you name it," Bosco went on. "Fill up my life with that shit. Let's document every fucking humiliation. This is reality, right? You don't look good anymore twenty years later, especially when you've had half your gut removed. Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?"
Jules had drifted over from across the room. "I've never heard that," he said. " 'Time is a goon'?"

'...we all bifurcate ourselves. When I buy Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, the acquisitive part of me is buying it for the deluded part of me that thinks I'll read it one day, while the archivist part of me keeps it on a shelf with all the other books I haven't read, so that one day it can present a logistical problem to those who survive me.'

This is funniest, and most deadpan ironic, "analysis" I've read on a simple, catchy rock anthem ("Don't Stop Believin'") and its overuse in a film (View From the Top) that has no subtext or subtlety. Plus, I can't help but hear Ayoade's distinct voice while reading this.

'...historians may stand, in their relationship to the past, in something like the position states do in their relationship to territory and society. For in "mapping" the past, the historian too is laying down a grid, stifling particularity, privileging legibility, all with a view to making the past accessible for the present and the future.'

'The narrative is the form of representation that most historians use. What narratives do...is to simulate what transpired in the past. They're reconstructions, assembled within the virtual laboratories of our minds, of the processes that produced whatever structure it is we're seeking to explain. ...in all of them, we ask ourselves: "How could this have happened?"

'The first poem I read
was the ragged V scrawled
in a brown sky by gulls
escaping the garbage dump at sunset
cutting under clouds
over the apartment blocks
going to a sea I knew
was there across the city
but never saw.

'To place a novel in this world of obedience, of the mechanical, and of the abstract, where the only human adventure is to move from one office to another, seems to run counter to the very essence of epic poetry. Thus the question: How has Kafka managed to transform such gray, antipoetical material into fascinating novels?'

'In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of a Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas man's physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. Indeed, both the Land-Surveyor K. and the Prague engineer are but the shadows of their file cards; and they are even much less than that: they are the shadows of a mistake in the file, shadows without even the right exist as shadows.'

'For just as the social sciences were attempting to prove their legitimacy by moving toward the predictability that had characterized physics since the days of Isaac Newton—the methods [Henry] Adams had hoped to apply to history— the physicists themselves were moving away from that approach.'

'You know, the novel took the particular historical path it took. It could just as easily have taken a completely different one. The novel form is almost boundless freedom. Throughout its history, the novel hasn't taken much advantage of that. It has missed out on that freedom. It has left unexplored many formal possibilities.'