The Flaming Lips (w Beck) – Lost Cause

from Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife:

He vanishes unwillingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment is slow and transparent as glass. Through each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting.

Foot stamp. Cold. I’m pretending this will be over soon and meanwhile trying not to think about it. Pretending this will be over soon + Not thinking about it = Reading.

from Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum:

For when he steps into my room it is to me as though I am waking on a strange and unlikely margin. As though the ocean is set suddenly before me. Landlocked, you forget. Then all of a sudden you are wading hip-high into the surge of waves. In the moment there is so much meaning, so much hunger in our mouths and skin. I think every time is the last time I will be with him. I am physically amazed. What I like best is the curious, unfolding, confessional quality of sex. How could he lie?

I’ve woken furious and self-berating. I dragged my heart around like an apple on a string. Dangled it, daring some man to take a bite. Now he sinks his teeth into it and I’m terrified to be devoured. I jerk away and swing wildly out of reach.

I stare at his face, all shadows in the silver dark, and the terrible, familiar wish to be nothing, to shatter to dust, moves me. I break along with him and go where he is. We are like feral children with no rules. It seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I’d have to break every single one to let it out.

This is Erdrich’s thing: sex and sadness. Making love on Indian time, she calls it. Gallows humor--how can you have sex without absurdity? impossible.



Cormac McCarthy is a sore spot like Faulkner. Everyone wants to write about the import of him and all that shit. “McCarthy and the Notion of the Border” whatever. Literary criticism is like a condom made by Dunn Tire. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read As I Lay Dying. McCarthy is always compared to Faulkner, who is always sheathed too like that. It bugs me. Dying is a book onto the thicket stomach of which I fall grateful for the familiarity every time I open it, which I have countless times. Back to McCarthy, who isn’t as good but: In Outer Dark, a man goes over a cliff with a stampede and the sentence lasts a paragraph, through which I held my breath then had to turn back and do it again. Child of God. McCarthy’s portraiture of monstrosity stops you up. Because it’s nothing. It’s just a guy, and the world then this and then that and pretty soon you’re there with the character, witnessing and capable of horror by an incremental process you munched grilled cheese through, no problemo. The new one arrived today . . .

From Cormac McCarthy, The Road:

Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with its lamp.

In a pocket of his knapsack he’d found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim.
You promised not to do that, the boy said.
What?
You know what, Papa.
He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy’s cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back.
If you break little promises you’ll break big ones. That’s what you said.
I know. But I won’t

They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body.

He was a big man but he was quick. He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with a knife at his throat. The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handled position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead. The boy was lying in his lap with no expression on his face at all. He shoved the pistol in his belt and slung the knapsack over his shoulder and picked up the boy and turned him around and lifted him up over his head and set him on his shoulders and set off up the old roadway at a dead run, holding the boy’s knees, the boy clutching his forehead, covered with gore and mute as a stone.

Are we still the good guys?, he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.

Thelonius Monk – The Man I Love