Austin Meakim’s Reviews > Mao II > Status Update

the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.”

The messiah is here on earth.”
“He’s here on earth, I’m up there in the sky,”

“The novel used to feed our search for meaning.

our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel.

“I’ll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump.”

Old books haunt the blood.”

“Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.”

It’s a master collapse. It’s a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle.”

He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed… brandies and …pills/placed the nozzle of a revolver… behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.

“Someday, go walk those streets,” she said. “Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?”

News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know.

There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film.

Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura.

“Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it. Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don’t take my picture. I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I’m sick of it finally. ”