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[03 Oct 2007|04:15am] |
Ida (1941) by Gertrude Stein
She liked to talk and to sing songs and she liked to change places. Wherever she was she always liked to change places. Otherwise there was nothing to do all day. Of course she went to bed early but even so she always could say, what shall I do now, now what shall I do (8).
She heard about religion but she never really did happen to have any. One day, it was summer, she was in another place and she saw a lot of people under the trees and she went too. They were there and some one was moving around among them, they were all sitting and kneeling, not all of them but most of them and in the middle there was one slowly walking and her arms were slowly moving and everybody was following and some when their arms were started moving could not stop their arms from going on moving. Ida stayed as long as she could and then she went away. She always stayed as long as she could (18).
What is it that you like better than anything else, he asked and she said. I like being where I am. Oh said he excitedly, and where are you. I am not here, she said, I am very careful about that. No I am not here, she said, it is very pleasant, she added and she turned slightly away, very pleasant indeed not to be here (29).
He said. Do you know the last time I was anywhere I was with my mother and everybody was good enough to tell me to come again. That was all long ago. Everybody was crying because I went away, but I was not crying. That is what makes anybody a king that everybody cries but he does not (40).
It was funny the way Ida could go to sleep and the way she could cry and the way she could be alone and the way she could lie down and the way anybody knew what she did and what she did not do.
Ida thought she would go somewhere else but then she knew that she would look at everybody and everything and she knew it would not be interesting.
She was interesting.
She remembered everything and she remembered everybody but she never talked to any of them, she was always talking to herself.
She said to herself. How old are you, and that made her cry. Then she went to sleep and oh it was so hard not to cry. So hard (44).
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[30 Sep 2007|03:02am] |
The Woman Who Rode Away by D.H. Lawrence
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[14 Sep 2007|04:35am] |
Break of Dawn by Colette
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[08 Sep 2007|03:41am] |
If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) by Chester Himes
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[06 Sep 2007|03:34am] |
Cakes and Ale: Or the Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) by W. Somerset Maugham
I have noticed that when someone asks for you on the telephone and, finding you out, leaves a message begging you to call him up the moment you come in, as it's important, the matter is more often important to him than to you. When it comes to making you a present or doing you a favor most people are able to hold their impatience within reasonable bounds (9).
I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Thomas Carlyle in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady's paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle (11).
Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practiced at spare moments; it is a whole-time job. It needs also a cynical humor... (18).
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[31 Aug 2007|02:11am] |
Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991) by Mary Gaitskill
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[16 Aug 2007|01:49am] |
Veronica (2005) by Mary Gaitskill
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[28 Jun 2007|01:02am] |
Things by D.H. Lawrence
Yet it seems as if human beings must set their claws in something. To be "free," to be "living a full and beautiful life," you must, alas, be attached to something. A "full and beautiful life" means a tight attachment to something--at least, it is so for all idealists--or else a certain boredom supervenes; there is a certain waving of loose ends upon the air, like the waving, yearning tendrils of the vine that spread and rotate, seeking something to clutch, something up which to climb towards the necessary sun. Finding nothing, the vine can only trail, half fulfilled, upon the ground. Such is freedom!--a clutching of the right pole. And human beings are all vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.
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[12 Jun 2007|12:18am] |
The Captive (1913) by Colette
He must lean his head against her and close his eyes so as to hide two things, a flicker of emotion and the perverse pleasure of lying without saying a word, the pleasure all men savor when they subtly deceive us at the moment they are most passionately embracing us.
There I am, off again. Guessing or inventing (8).
I ought not to have done it. But it's so utterly unimportant! (10)
It is true that a woman who obstinately refuses to sleep with anyone always seems miserly, whatever she does (11).
But gaiety is not a perpetual fidgeting that betrays a lack of security, it is not chatter full of recriminations, nor is it a craving for everything that intoxicates. Gaiety, it seems to me, is something calmer, something healthier, something more serious (26).
May is unhappy. I would have gladly dispensed with knowing this but a 'real character', a 'child of nature' prides herself on her frankness and regards the pouring out of the most embarrassing confidences as simple honesty (30).
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[30 May 2007|03:23am] |
"The Square" (1959) by Marguerite Duras
"But between the things that happened to you a long time ago and now, wasn't there time for you to change—almost every day in fact—and start liking things? Anything?"
"I suppose so. I don't deny it. For some people life must be like that and then again for others it is not. Some people must get used to the idea of never changing and I think that really is true of me. So I expect I will just go on as I am." (16)
"Yes, you think that nothing happens, and yet, don't you see, it seems to me that the most important thing that has happened to you is precisely your will not to live yet."
"I understand you, I really do, but you must also try and understand me. Even if the most important part of my life is over, I can't know it as yet and I haven't the time to understand it. I hope one day I will know, as you did with your journey, and that when I look back everything behind me will be clear and fall into place. But now, at this moment, I am too involved to be able even to guess at what I might feel one day."
"I know. And I know that probably it is impossible for you to understand things you have not yet felt, but all the same it is hard for me not to try and explain them to you." (40)
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[30 Jun 2006|08:37pm] |
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
"Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn’t matter. And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something—a scrap of paper—something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish..."
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| c'est peu de chose |
[04 Sep 2005|09:39am] |
DH Lawrence's The Rainbow
What was memory after all, but the recording of a number of possibilities which had never been fulfilled? (91)
The girl was at once shy and wild. She had a curious contempt for ordinary people, a benevolent superiority. She was very shy, and tortured with misery when people did not like her. On the other hand, she cared very little for anybody save her mother, whom she still rather resentfully worshipped, and her father, whom she loved and patronised, but upon whom she depended. These two, her mother and father, held her still in fee. But she was free of other people, towards whom, on the whole, she took the benevolent attitude. She deeply hated ugliness or intrusion or arrogance, however. As a child, she was as proud and shadowy as a tiger, and as aloof. She could confer favours, but, save from her mother and father, she could receive none. She hated people who came too near to her. Like a wild thing, she wanted her distance. She mistrusted intimacy (93).
She had a curious shrinking from commonplace people, and particularly from the young lady of her day. She would not go into company because of the ill-at-ease feeling other people brought upon her. And she never could decide whether it were her fault or theirs. She half respected these other people, and continuous disillusion maddened her. She wanted to respect them. Still she thought the people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that irritated her beyond bearing. She would rather stay at home and avoid the rest of the world, leaving it illusory (96).
"The men will do no more, -- they have lost the capacity for doing," said the elder girl. "They fuss and talk, but they are really inane. They make everything fit into an old, inert idea. Love is a dead idea to them. They don't come to one and love one, they come to an idea, and they say 'You are my idea,' so they embrace themselves. As if I were any man's idea! As if I exist because a man has an idea of me! As if I will be betrayed by him, lend him my body as an instrument for his idea, to be a mere apparatus of his dead theory. But they are too fussy to be able to act; they are all impotent, they can't take a woman. They come to their own idea every time, and take that. They are like serpents trying to swallow themselves because they are hungry (342)".
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| huntsman in spirit |
[14 Aug 2005|11:25am] |
Excerpted from DH Lawrence's short story The Fox:
He scarcely admitted his intention even to himself. He kept it as a secret even from himself. It was all too uncertain as yet. He would have to see how things went. Yes, he would have to see how things went. If he wasn't careful, she would just simply mock at the idea. He knew, sly and subtle as he was, that if he went to her plainly and said: "Miss March, I love you and want you to marry me," her inevitable answer would be: "Get out. I don't want any of that tomfoolery." This was her attitude to men and their 'tomfoolery'. If he was not careful, she would turn round on him with her savage, sardonic ridicule, and dismiss him from the farm and from her own mind for ever. He would have to go gently. He would have to catch her as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting. It's no good walking out into the forest and saying to the deer: "Please fall to my gun." No, it is a slow, subtle battle. When you really go out to get a deer, you gather yourself together, you coil yourself inside yourself, and you advance secretly, before dawn, into the mountains. It is not so much what you do, when you go out hunting, as how you feel. You have to be subtle and cunning and absolutely fatally ready. It becomes like a fate. Your own fate overtakes and determines the fate of the deer you are hunting. First of all, even before you come in sight of your quarry, there is a strange battle, like mesmerism. Your own soul, as a hunter, has gone out to fasten on the soul of the deer, even before you see any deer. And the soul of the deer fights to escape. Even before the deer has any wind of you, it is so. It is a subtle, profound battle of wills which takes place in the invisible and it is a battle never finished till your bullet goes home.When you are really worked up to the true pitch, and you come at last into range, you don't then aim as you do when you are firing at a bottle. It is your own will which carries the bullet into the heart of your quarry. The bullet's flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer. It happens like a supreme wish, a supreme act of volition, not as a dodge of cleverness.
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[30 Jun 2005|10:22pm] |
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
"I" is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping (4-5).
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| and others |
[16 Jun 2005|05:45pm] |
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
"Ah! again!" said Rodolphe. "Always 'duty.' I am sick of the word. They are a lot of old blockheads in flannel vests and of old women with foot-warmers and rosaries who constantly drone into our ears 'Duty, duty!' Ah! by Jove! one's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and not accept all the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us."
"Yet--yet----" objected Madame Bovary.
"No, no! Why cry out against the passions? Are they not the one beautiful thing on the earth, the source of heroism, of enthusiasm, of poetry, music, the arts, of everything, in a word?"
"But one must," said Emma, "to some extent bow to the opinion of the world and accept its moral code" (166-167).
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Le Livre Blanc by Jean Cocteau
Nothing embarrasses me when talking about sexual relationships, but modesty holds me back when I come to describing the tortures which I am capable of suffering. So I will describe them in a few lines and not mention them again. Love breaks me in two. Even when I'm calm I live in constant fear that this calm might cease and this anxiety prevents me from enjoying its pleasure. The slightest setback ruins everything. I find it impossible not to see the worst side of things. Nothing prevents me from losing my foothold, even if I have only slipped. Waiting is one form of torture; possession is another, through fear of losing what I possess (65).
I woke up. I was still laughing and this laughter seemed to me a good omen. If the situation were serious, I thought, I wouldn't have had such a ridiculous dream. I had forgotten that the exhaustion of grief sometimes does produce ridiculous dreams (68).
... in exiling myself I am not exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a mistake.
Instead of adopting Rimbaud's gospel, The time of the assassins has come, young people would do better to remember the phrase Love must be reinvented. The world accepts dangerous experiments in the realm of art because it does not take art seriously; but it condemns them in life (75).
L'Avventura
Antonioni elaborated on the notion of a "shared pity" in an interview with a French critic:
These are men and women who, without being normal themselves, try to lead their lives and their loves in a normal manner. But during the story they encounter so many difficulties that they are unable to avoid the final catastrophe. They are rescued to the extent that between them a hyphen based on reciprocal pity, on understanding, can be established, a resignation which is not weakness, but the sole force allowing them to remain together, to be linked to life, to be opposed to catastrophe... They have recourse to this because both of them want to live and do not want to die. So they grab whatever life they can find. (Les lettres francaises, no. 826, May 26, 1960; quoted in Joelle Mayet Giaume, Michelangelo Antonioni: Le fil interieur [Crisne, Belgium: Editions Yellow Now, 1990], p. 124)
( Fassbinder )
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[18 Nov 2004|09:09am] |
The Immoralist by Andre Gide
"If only these people around us could be convinced. But most of them believe they get nothing good out of themselves except by constraint; they're only pleased with themselves when they're under duress. If there's one thing each of them claims not to resemble it's. . . himself. Instead he sets up a model, then imitates it; he doesn't even choose the model--he accepts it ready-made. Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not--they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry--I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate all this moral agoraphobia--it's the worst kind of cowardice.You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life" (104).
And I don't know which was the greater triumph of my madness: to pursue a stupid mystery which forever receded before me, or perhaps to invent the mystery out of my own curiosity (132).
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