reminders
“I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible,” he said. “Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a... See more
Fred Moten’s Radical Critique of the Present
ANNIHILATE THE SELF, we wrote to one another. I don’t know how many times. Annihilate the self. It wasn’t about death, mysticism, or equilibrium, it was about reinventing oneself as a writer. Withdrawal was chrysalis. How to grow a completely different lung, for another breath.
Sofia Samatar • Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life
Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of the story and from language.
Italo Calvino • Six Memos for the Next Millennium
I soon realized that the gap between the realities of life that were supposed to be my raw materials and the sharp, darting nimbleness that I wanted to animate my writing was becoming harder and harder for me to bridge.
Italo Calvino • Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Indeed, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem heavy and opaque.
Italo Calvino • Six Memos for the Next Millennium
purpose as an invention
Adam Phillips • On Getting Better
Beckett’s plays (and maybe even his novels) come out of a private kind of dialogue (or monologue);
Fredric Jameson • Inventions of A Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization
“THIS IS WHAT is diabolical about prose, it is never finished,” said Flaubert, cooling his cheeks with the palms of his hands, then cooling his hands against the iron knobs of the tall andirons.