Mala > Recent Status Updates

"Mental illness is social protest." (382)

"Don't get a dirty mouth. I told you f*** is a dirty word because it's all climax. F***! Pouff! It's over. The word for f*** should be longer and more lyrical and gripping and undulating and then boom. Can you think of a word?" (372)

"…You know what happened to Paul Douglas, the movie star? He was touring the South in a play and he attacked the idea of segregated audiences. Robert Frost came down here to read his poetry and didn't make a stink. Douglas became a controversial figure and Frost became our national poet." (283)

The affectionate couple left him dazed. He had the uncomfortable feeling of falling through a hole in his life. There should be a law. Middle-aged couples should never kiss lovingly in public. They can make the most prosperous life look like spilled milk. (238)

Benefit audiences helped the producer and drove the stars nuts. The audience paid such a higher premium for charity tickets that they sat on their hands. Tallulah Bankhead said that you can't thaw a benefit audience out with an acetylene torch. (200)

He was a firm believer that his wife stood behind his success. She gave him extra edge over his competitors because he came to work with her teeth in him. What dejected him was that his competitors had far worse wives. They put Bigger teeth into them. He would sometimes think of a mistress except that Stew set such a bad example for the erotic life. Everywhere there's erotica, but it's only to fill up boredom. (187)

Where Newton elevated man by coming up with first principles that revealed the innards of the universe, Ziggy's discoveries about human nature were sad to contemplate. He would ask himself, What good is experience, if in the final moment it left him abject? Of course,abjectness is one principle of success.The trick is not to fall asleep being abject.To be abject hypocritically—that was the first principle of success.

"Sometimes," Ziggy said, tongue in cheek, "when you accurately describe a system it sounds like you are attacking it." (173)

"You're always upholding tradition? This time the casting couch." (156)

Few people in show business have the instinct and the courage to notice—and be certain of—a performer's talent unless she has been noticed somewhere else. The average buyer of talent, even if he has the instinct, doesn't have the guts of a fungus. (123)

"I envy that kind of personality that can wear corruption like a suntan." (60)

"Where does a sex symbol like Siam come in when the sex act means so little today? A woman couldn't give less away. Yet, here we are, trying to give it a value so people will pay good money just for a mystical sniff." (52)

"Make sure she takes these. Vitamin A because she doesn't drink milk. Vitamin C because she doesn't eat vegetables. Vitamin B complex to make sure she shits. She doesn't do that either." (40)
Hmm I had no idea being a road man to a talented but struggling singer is such a tough job!

To eat regularly you must lead a boring life. The life that gives you food is without heart. The life that would fulfill the inner man is not part of any country's riches. To tap this zest, this wholeness, this pursuit of happiness, a man has to take on the strain of a double life.

…the initial response to The Tunnel has spoken of my narrator as a man so monstrous as to bear no resemblance to anyone they know, only to Nazis and other ancient historical figures. When he invents a political group… which he calls the Party of Disappointed People, his creation is taken as a sign of his crazed and cranky condition. And my precursors in the growing of sour grapes are said to be (Contd.)

When I am owned by an ideology, I am going to favor its defense as if I were being defended, because that's what will be happening. The free mind can open its fingers and let fall ill-favored fruit. Other ideas are always welcome. What are not welcome are views which hinder sight, which are themselves fists,which possess our souls like a disease, which say—as Satan did to Faust after their bargain—"Now you are mine!"

The only holy word is the free word. May they all be pronounced from every peak and steeple. The democracy of the word requires that all words be deemed equal. In any language, in any dialect, in any argot, in any slur or drawl or stammer. Good manners may suggest that in place of saying to a lady of doubtful character, "I see you are a slut," you should say," I see you have a free and easy spirit."(contd.)

Tribalism, Identity, and Ideology:
Everyone who thinks as I do, feeds as I do, whistles the same tunes as I do, drives what I do, kneels as I do, hats his or her head as I do, votes or dances or loves as I do, confirms my mode of existence, validates the mess I have made of my life and makes it seem sensible and of value. (174)

The Tests of Time — the kind of essay that would provide NR material for status posts for months on end!
"There can be no doubt that some works are felt to have stood the Test of Time better than others. The Test of Time is not simply pass/fail. One of the severest examiners is Time itself." (102)

Among the more admirable kinds of lists is the menu, and among the many memorable moments in Robert Coover's novel Pinocchio in Venice is the meal which Professor Pinocchio nibbles at on the first evening of his arrival in Venice.
(97)
In The Sot-Weed Factor, when the whores go at it, two hundred twenty-nine nasty names are traded—English answered by French in increasingly hoarse howls. (99)

The list is the fundamental rhetorical form for creating a sense of abundance, overflow, excess. We find it so used in writers with an appetite for life from Rabelais and Cervantes, or from Burton and Browne, to Barth and Elkin.(…) Desire is never dampened by its dampening, but only grows greater, and its object is not consumed by its consumption but is multiplied, and pleasure is not lessened by its (contd)

Listing is a fundamental literary strategy. It occurs constantly, and only occasionally draws attention to itself. It can be so so brief as almost not to be there. "Alex went to the bank, to the casino, and to the dogs in one day." It can be so prominent it proclaims itself as some fictional reality's single ordering device. (92)

'I've Got a Little List'— we all know who is a sucker for lists on GR ;)
Here are two examples: Roberta Coughlin's book The Gardener's Companion, which contains more than three hundred and fifty lists of practical and cultural information, and Juan Goytisolo's extraordinary novel, a novel made of lists, The Virtues of the Solitary Bird.

Ah, we do like to fancy our books are bombs, but bombs, we need to remember, in order to make a great show—to do their damage, prove a point, teach some slow wit a lesson—have to blow themselves to bits and pieces first. (34)

Anywhere but Kansas essay: Gass doesn't seem to be too fond of metafiction... Wasn't it Gass who gave us that term?!
"There is something to be said for just getting away from it all. Writers begin as readers of driven and desperate kind."
(32)

"Make it new," Ezra Pound commanded, and "innovative" is a good name for some kinds of fiction; most newness is new in all the same old ways: falsely, as products are said to be new by virtue of minuscule and trivial additions; or vapidly, when the touted differences are pointless; or opportunistically, when alterations are made simply in order to profit from imaginary improvement; or differentially (contd in comment

Most of the essays here have been published elsewhere too but now:
"Each piece has suffered second thoughts, had cuts restored, Tactlessness and injudiciousness rejoined, caution, like a scoutmasters hat, once more thrown to the winds."
How I missed you, Bill !!!

Our desire, like a butterfly, is alluring only while it eludes. Captured, it is a dead thing through which we stick a pin. We multiply our wants because each possession in turn disappoints us, yet we lack the courage to admit the futility of the chase. (249)

It is remarkably easy to gain a theoretical triumph over an imaginary temptation. So easy, in fact, that our speculations as to what we should do, or should not do, in any given circumstances are not worth anything at all. Ordeal by experience is the only test. (238)