Careers

From My Dinner with Andre (1981):

This incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way.

La maturité

From Vivre sa vie (1962):

Quand vous avez vingt ans, vous ne savez pas ce que vous aimez. Vous savez des bribes ; vous attrapez, par exemple, votre expérience. Vous dites, j'aime ceci. C'est souvent mélangé. Mais pour arriver à vous constituer entièrement avec simplement ce que vous aimez, il faut la maturité.

Link to A Better Queue

Almost a year ago, I posted a link to a website called Streaming Criterions (http://streamingcriterions.com/), which uses Netflix APIs and the Criterion website to display all the Criterion titles that are available for Watch Instantly.

A Rails programmer in Cambridge, MA just posted a site called A Better Queue (http://abetterqueue.com/), which links Netflix and Rotten Tomatoes APIs to filter for (ostensibly) better movies.

Check it out—it's pretty neat. The browsing on Netflix is limited to their short, sideways lists. From this site, I just found out that Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion and D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers were turned into films—which you can stream now.

Readers of Life

James Wood, How Fiction Works, pp. 65-66:

Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life. And so on and on. You have only to teach literature to realize that most young readers are poor noticers. I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated twenty years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that strike me now as commonplace, while serenely missing things that now seem wonderful. We grow, as readers, and twenty-year-olds are relative virgins. They have not yet read enough literature to be taught by it how to read it.

Essays by James Wood

From "Hysterical Realism":

Which way will the ambitious contemporary novel go? Will it dare a picture of life, or just shout a spectacle? (193)

From "Jonathan Franzen and the 'Social Novel'":

Dr. Johnson suggested that a hundred years' survival might be the test of a book's aesthetic power. Aesthetic success is measured in leagues of posterity. (199)

Franzen's Harper's essay proposed, in effect, a softened DeLilloism. What is retained from DeLillo is the tentacular ambition, the effort to pin down an entire writhing culture. The DeLilloian idea of the novelist as a kind of Frankfurt School entertainer, fighting the culture with dialectical devilry, has been woefully influential, and will take some time to die; nowadays, anyone in possession of a laptop is thought to be a brilliance on the move. (201)

Quoting from two paragraphs:

In particular, we see that the Lambert children, despite their successful and free lives as adults, are unfree, because they are still above all parented. All decisions, consciously or not, are routed via the parental desk—and so the Lambert children, like many of us, are really only honorary adults, ex officio. 

Family is the great determinism. One of the subtlest and most moving aspects of Franzen's often distinguished book is the way he develops the idea of "correction" as a doomed struggle against this determinism. (203)

Wood, James. The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Vineland

Vineland, p. 349:

Hector, it's probably old news to you, but since I went under I've been all across the USA, Waco, Fort Smith, Muskogee too, rode up and down every Interstate in the land, some don't even have numbers, sweated my ass off in Corpus Christi, froze it in Rock Springs and fucking Butte ...

Allons!

From "Song of the Open Road," Leaves of Grass, p. 131:

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
Traveling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons! we must not stop here,

However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,

However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,

However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

Text:
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. Edited by Michael Moon. New York: Norton, 2002.