Michael > Recent Status Updates

“Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.”

“But even more than at the diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully catalogued every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.”

“Evenings in the park, from spring into autumn, tens and hundreds of couples walked hand in hand. It was a park with few lamps and many shadowy trees.”

‘I don’t know how birds sleep and die.
Whether their breaths are snuffed out when what remaining light vanishes.
Or whether their lives go on flowing, like electricity, into the early hours of dawn.’

“There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

“James Joyce says that future events cast a shadow on the present. A past that might have happened throws a similar shadow on what came after. That is where the ghosts live, in that bit of conjectural space-time, their blurred faces peering from behind a curtain, moving incognito through the places where they might have lived.”

“The fleeting nature of a mirage does not degrade its beauty. But the most precious spell is one that grows and is sustained by both physical attraction and impassioned talk, weaving together instinct and reason. The moment when you fall in love shines with complete clarity, as does the mystery of a lasting desire. When you saw her the first time, you instantly felt you had known her forever.”

“Literary wanderers make a living as best they can by writing for the newspapers. They have no other job. They have no private means, or they lost them if they ever had them. No patron to protect and support them. They give up the rights to their work as soon as they accept whatever amount some editor is willing to pay. They earn so little that they must write as fast as possible.”

“Let me repeat. Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are the poor cousins and we don’t get the smartest bunch.”

“—I am a daughter of the earthquake. In the middle of the earthquake, I was reborn. It’s like I told you at the Aquarium. I’m going to become a man. I’m never going to be a woman. When hundreds of people sleep, lying together on concrete, legs touching, without anything to cover up their bodies—then a girl starts to hate becoming a woman.”

“But there is one young girl selling her balls better because of her beauty. A red ribbon droops from her bobbed head, and beneath her short open skirt, her legs (stockings rolled) dance the Charleston—cha cha, cha cha—while through her dark encarmined lips she whistles jazzily along. She keeps time, bouncing that ball like a tambourine or like castanets.”

“‘Oh, husbands, on days of afternoon rain, especially on evenings of late-autumn rain, hurry back to the stations where your wives are waiting. I cannot promise that a woman’s heart, like a woman’s umbrella, will not be handed to another man.’”

“I wish to tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story.”

“My reportage is buttressed by credible hearsay and insider tattle. Massive paper trails provide verification. This book derives from stolen public files and usurped private journals. It is the sum of personal adventure and forty years of scholarship. I am a literary executor and an agent provocateur. I did what I did and saw what I saw and learned my way through to the rest of the story.”

“Envisaging death calmly is valid only if one envisages it alone. Death in the company of the beloved is no death, even for unbelievers. The painful thing is not to leave life, but to leave whatever gives it meaning. When love is one’s life, what is the difference between living together and dying together?”

“I have never been a dreamer. What appears dream to others more credulous than I seems to me to be as real as cheese to the cat—in spite of the glass that covers it. Yet the glass does exist.”

“As death approaches, memory erodes. Recent memories are the first to succumb. Death works its way backward until it reaches memory’s earliest beginnings. Then memory flares up for an instant, just like a flame about to go out. That is the ‘prayer in the mother tongue.’”

“But even now, every time I am completely alone and I have no book that can protect me, no woman to whom I can turn, nor, finally, these smooth pieces of paper on which I write, without turning around or moving I can feel the presence beside me—perhaps near the door, perhaps farther away—of the specter of someone else’s inescapable death.”

“‘Plato, why do you drink?’
He took several paces without replying and then said, ‘Here again, in this instance, the majority of people deal with the problem incorrectly. The truth, the sad nature of which I am not about to try to refute, consists in the following: we are alcoholics not because we drink, no—we drink because we are alcoholics.’”

“I have now conquered my poverty, recognizing among thousands the nine or ten words that get along with my soul; I have already written more than one book in order to write, perhaps, one page. The page that justifies me, that summarizes my destiny, the one that perhaps only the attending angels will hear when Judgment Day arrives.”

(from ‘A Profession of Literary Faith’)

“Increasingly she’s finding it harder to tell ‘real’ NYC from translations like Zigotisopolis… as if she keeps getting caught in a vortex taking her farther each time into the virtual world. Certainly unforeseen in the original business plan, there arises now a possibility that DeepArcher is about to overflow out into the perilous gulf between screen and face.”