Robbie Bruens > Recent Status Updates

"After our ninth date, Leroy, having exhausted his questions about selling coke in Brooklyn, searches the Japanese bathrobes in his closet for a rose yukata illustrated in white lilies that he puts on in time for me to disrobe, a blank page for him to write upon, a New York gangster in his bed, if that's his pleasure. The pause when he looks at me confirms, from his caring demeanor, that he pities me."

"Marketing is a tool of both capital and the state that intersects with the formation of publics structured by categories of multicultural recognition. Multiple publics organized around music, taste, or identity help create the audience as the public of the city at the same time as they have their own organizing principles that can be discursive or practical, with different demands of interaction and 'publicness.'"

"Lightning-shaped blood crept toward the gas flames of her irises, and Spike, filled with sewage to witness her pleasure, wanted to squat over her fake dyke face and shit down her shameless throat, even as she masturbated, hemorrhaging love. Tif rolled bonelessly in a circle until she came to face Spike with her breasts smashed flat, her pelvis raised for the next boy."

"...the ideologies, the programs even the methods and forms of organization which inspired the emancipation of dependent countries...were Western: liberal; socialist; communist and/or nationalist; secular and suspicious of cleric[s]; using the devices developed for....public life in bourgeois societies: press, public meetings...even when the discourse adopted was...in the religious vocabulary used by the masses."

It's so much better than the movie it's quite embarrassing for Blake Edwards honestly

"Then every leaf, flower, and blade of grass screamed at me in a worldless, idiot cacophony that scarred my brain meat with endless fields under endless stars. I grasped for the white hem of Jesus but each time his name stumbled from my spit-clotted lips, the plants mocked me. This is not hell. You will never see hell. Around me materialized beings whose bodies made no sense, shaped like a mad god had gifted..."

"Outside the Western Hemisphere, the fingers of two hands are enough to count the few states of the world that have not gone through some combination of revolution, civil war, resistance to and liberation from foreign occupation, or the prophylactic decolonization by empires doomed in an era of world revolution."

"Standing on a chair, a woman hangs her coat in empty space."

“[I] catch the whiff of another unwashed man hanging in the salt air...feel the heat of that body, let it warm me. Like whiskey to the heart it lets me know who I am and where I’m going and the answer is it doesn’t matter at all, it’s nothing, it’s empty air and just right and the wind picks up and we’re on, fast, sun behind us, everywhere...The ground is still. So I open my eyes. I’m in jail.”

"'Do you see the river flowing in that chair' Mr. Q asked the physical therapist...Brains can be magnificently poetic when broken."

“Poverty had its limitations, but if you had nothing, there was nothing to be stolen.”

"I've seen him both today and yesterday but I don't feel that bigness in my heart anymore. I feel numb, dead, and he's yammering on..."

"Villiam felt very happy. Of all those at the manor, he was the only one to appreciate that the horse had found its way home without sight. That was loyalty. Forget Dibra. She, like Luka, would get what she deserved. Villiam would not lament his wife's disappearance. No, he would celebrate. Something good was coming. Villiam believed this in his heart as much as he believed himself to be at the heart of all things."

"Villiam had spent the rest of the evening asking Klarek over and over to do the comic trick of crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue. Each time, Villiam laughed so hard that the wine spurted from his nose, and he'd need a long moment to recover before he'd ask Klarek to do it again. They stayed up until dawn just horsing around."

"Even the winners can't stop the train, even when their own kids are in the rain."

"...first generation country nice, white trash would-be artists and musicians, emo Basques from Elko with radio shows and columns in the paper, snow bros whose parent insisted on college so they'd picked the one closest to Tahoe, metalhead dropouts who liked the pole and the hole, self described alkies in combustible codependent relationships incinerated at every house show..."

"...early investors were not too worried about how web start-ups were going to eventually make profits; it was a land rush, so they pushed in and kept their eyes fixed on the IPO horizon. Established banks were happy to play along, especially considering the inflated fees they could charge players in the frothy sector. Remember that people were doing a lot of cocaine."

"I'm taking you because you don't know nothing and you ain't got nothing. I can put ideas in your head. I can teach you and send you out. I and you gonna be together till one of us dies."

"According to Sharpton, Brown met President Richard Nixon with his trusty .38 in his coat pocket." James Brown had the chance to do the funniest thing of all time. Alas, he didn't take it.

"After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. 'Procreation," I thought. 'The circle of life." During the blow job scene, I got up and peed. During the pussy-eating scene, Reva got up and puked..."

"The cries of the onlookers were like compressed reverberations, filing the sky over his head with great black wings. He felt as if the wings were his own. He could feel the breathless villagers looking down from the top of the cliff, so clearly they could have been himself. They were a part of him, their viscid, drooling saliva was his own desire."

"He recalled that someone had said that there was nothing that tasted so good as one's own ear wax, that it was better than real cheese. Even if it weren't that bad, there were all kinds of fascinating things one never tired of smelling...like the stink of a decaying tooth."

"Supposing they were sound waves, what kind of music would they give? Maybe even a human being could sing such a song...if tongs were driven into his nose and slimy blood stopped up his ears...if his teeth were broken one by one with hammer blows, and splinters jammed into his urethra...if a vulva were cut away and sewn onto his eyelids. It might resemble cruelty, then again it might be a little different."

"At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about without the frustrating contrivance of the novel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters."

"At Kenyon, Wallace saw a chance to set out the things he cared about without the frustrating contrivance of the novel. He could just tell the audience to be mindful instead of trying to orchestrate it through his characters."

"Wallace was not under the illusion that his investigation would change anyone's behavior (it did not change his own - at the festival one evening, Green remembers, he enjoyed two lobsters for dinner), but there was pleasure in and of itself in expanding the fight against American complacency."