Christina > Recent Status Updates

'He wondered if all the machines at the works, all the furnaces and hooks and belts, mutely admired their men, as horses admired their masters. He wondered if they waited with their immense patience for the moment their men would lose track of themselves, let their caution lapse so the machines could take their hands with loving firmness and pull them in.'

'Somebody finally came and, as Lucille had expected, it was not Colonel Willis but Agent Martin Bellamy. He came through the gate in something that was partly a run and partly a walk. As always, he was wearing his suit, but his tie was missing. A sure sign, Lucille thought, that the whole situation was doomed.'

'She half listened as she went on with her writing. There was nothing new happening anywhere. More Returned were returning. No one knew how or why. The detention centers were growing larger and larger. Entire towns were being taken over, and no longer in just rural areas such as Arcadia, but in larger cities. The True Living were being usurped, or so one of the announcers said.'

'He got out of his truck, clutching his picket sign. He was starting the day in a bad mood. It had been another night of restlessness for him and, as is often the case with certain types of men, he'd decided that being angry in general was the best way to deal with whatever was going on in his heart that he didn't understand.'

"But they didn't understand. I did have to be the one to take him out of that river. I had to be the one to feel how cold and unnatural he was. I had to be the one to know—to be genuinely and truly sure—that he was dead. And that he wasn't ever coming back. We buried him. Because that's what you do to people when they die. You bury them."

'For the past twenty years or more Harold had been the one to do all the driving, and now Lucille was rusty behind the wheel and she didn't trust herself to drive up and down the road to deliver three hot meals. So breakfast she ate alone, with only the empty house to sit and watch her. Only the sound of her own voice to speak back to her.
   "What's the world coming to?" she asked the empty house.'

'They sat in silence, listening to Lucille's breath find itself. She was an old woman now, in spite of being a mother of an eight-year-old. She tired easily.'

Some time after arriving in New York Harbor in 1774, the husband of Shaker founder Ann Lee left her and the group.

'Lee was alone in New York City unemployed, penniless, and living in a small, cold room. A single line from the Shaker chronicle conveys her situation: "She sat down upon the stone, without any fire, sipped her vinegar and wept." (Why she kept rocks for furniture and vinegar for drink is not clear.)'

'H.H. [Hodgkin] has always been a difficult interviewee, not least because he doesn't want to talk about his own pictures, let alone "explain" them. In later years, his refusal to play the game has become extreme. Interviewers have received monosyllabic answers and long pauses; there was a famous onstage disaster with Simon Schama at a literary festival.'

'Then there are the exterior nudes [of Vallotton]: female bathers up to the knee and thigh in the sea; a chunky Europa hitching a ride in the shallows from a very farmyard bull; a modern Andromeda with a blonde bob tied by the wrists to a rock and responding to her predicament as if it is all terribly, terribly inconvenient...'

'He could understand Schneider's impatience–he knew of Schneider's simple desire to fill his belly with civilized food, to surround his body with the softness of a clean bed, and to empty his gathered lust into the body of any waiting woman. But his own desire, though it may have included in some way all of those, was at once more intense and more vague. To what did he wish to return?'

'The first time I visited the Phillips Collection in Washington I saw a painting which instantly entered my top ten and has remained there ever since. (In fact, I saw several others that did the same—a Courbet, a Degas and a Bonnard—but then I've never counted up my top ten, which runs to well over a hundred by now.)'

'"You sons-of-bitches can go to hell." ... He spat meagerly on the snow in front of him. "Up to now, I've done what you said. I went with you when I didn't want to go, I turned away from water when I knew they was water behind me, I stayed up here with you when I knew I hadn't ought to stay. Well, from now on in, I don't want to have nothing to do with you. ... From here on in, I take care of myself."'

'At night the men were so exhausted that they hardly spoke. They wolfed the food that Charley Hoge prepared for them, drained the great smoked coffeepot, and fell exhausted upon their bedrolls. In their increasing exhaustion, to which Miller drove them with his inexorable pursuit, their food and their sleep came to be the only things that had much meaning for them.'

'Listening to what the poem or song was telling them was another way of describing how they listened to themselves... And this attending was really, I realized, at the heart of the project of this book. That's what the exhibits they shared are about. The studies, notes, doodles—they are all ways the artists have of talking to themselves.'

Suzan-Lori Parks: 'In rewrite, I'm envisioning the audience. But where's the leap? When do you move from complete absorption into the recognition of an audience? ... That's when it's art. That feeling—that there are actually people who I might want to share this with, when that happens, then you might look at it in an architectural way. ... But when did that happen here? I really don't know.'

'GEORGE SAUNDERS: It's interesting. I play music and I cannot get to the point in music that I have in writing. I can't break away from the stuff I'm imitating. I just can't do it. I'm a good guitar player. And I'm not a bad lyricist. But the result isn't very interesting.'

David Simon on The Wire:
"I thought, Well, that's kind of how I read books. The first three chapters of Moby-Dick, you know he goes to town, there's a maritime sermon, he shares a bed with this guy with a lot of tattoos, you don't get to see the white whale. But that's not American television. So, like, I don't give a shit. This is how I know how to tell a story."

'Adam Moss: I know you say you're never going to do the full twenty-four hours again, but are there things in the show you would want to keep futzing with?
Taylor Mac: No.
Machine Dazzle: Always.'

'Why does the "art world," whatever it means to those who fear its judgment, have such a hold on artists, no matter how experienced they are? It feels medieval. Every field has its gatekeepers—its guild—but for art especially, its perceived power is mythic and heavily influences how artists work and what they make. Art-world approval has huge financial stakes; it also builds and (mostly) breaks spirits.'

"The idea that readers are thick and you know, they need help," he [Max Porter] said, "I think it's bullshit. The last thing you want when you open a book is someone explaining." But at the same time, he continued, "I don't want experimentalism for experimentalism's sake. Because that excludes the reader. Being on soggy ground is only worthwhile if you land on firm ground."

'Courbet—who was born in Ornans in 1819, came to Paris at the age of twenty and had his first picture accepted by the Salon five years later—created, or adapted to his use, the persona of the boisterous, belligerent, subversive, shit-kicking provincial; then, like some contemporary TV personality, he found that this public image had become indistinguishable from his true nature.'

Will Andrews gets altitude sickness for the first time.

"Don't be angry," she said. "I'm glad you're young. I want you to be young. All of the men here are old and hard. I want you to be soft, while you can be. . . . When will you go with Miller and the others?"
"Three or four days," Andrews said. "But we will be back within the month. And then–"
Francine shook her head, though she continued smiling. "Yes, you'll be back; but you won't be the same."

'They're expected to muddle through by themselves. Nature is supposed to take over, like the automatic pilot on an aeroplane. Yet Nature, on to whom we pitch responsibility for all we cannot understand, isn't very good when set to automatic.'

'All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. When tempted by didacticism, the writer should imagine a spruce sea-captain eyeing the storm ahead, bustling from instrument to instrument in a Catherine wheel of gold braid, expelling crisp orders down the speaking tube. But there is nobody below decks; the engine-room was never installed, and the rudder broke off centuries ago.'

So far, there are repeated themes of unfortunate sea voyages involving unbalanced people, with repeated appearances of woodboring beetles.

'A tolerance for tedium has to be one of the least celebrated and most important traits of a successful artist.'

Amy Sillman, painter: "The great challenge and reason and beauty of trying to be a painter is the impossibility of it, which is similar to the impossibility of a novelist or a poet, which is to manifest something or shape it from God-knows-what scraps and build a thing into a thing that has not been there before. You have no idea what it is. The journey is blind."

'She must have seen them first on a Christmas card. Six, eight, ten of them, harnessed side by side. She always imagined that each pair was man and wife, a happy couple, like the animals that went into the Ark. ... But her Dad said you could tell from the antlers that the reindeer pulling the sleigh were stags. ... Father Christmas ran an all-male team. Typical. Absolutely bloody typical, she thought.'