you’re tacky and i hate you.
Mixes | Buddies | Literature | Dictionary
Overheard | Questions of the Week
Mixes | Buddies | Literature | Dictionary
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BookmarksOverheard | Questions of the Week
Literature
Generation A
2009
I lay there on the bed, attempting not to panic by concentrating on remembering the names of color samples from a series of old Martha Stewart brochures Hemesh had forced us all to study. (The contract went instead to some company in Tasmania that became our bitter rival, but that is another story.) In any event, I find that when you think of a color, the chattering part of your brain turns off and you are calmed. I recommend this technique to anybody in need of peace.
(152)
I asked Serge, “Can you tell us why it’s so weird and so difficult to invent a story? How difficult it can be? And yet it is very difficult.”
Serge said, “Stories come from a part ofyou that only gets visited rarely—sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince theimselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways of ordering the world.”
Serge said, “Stories come from a part ofyou that only gets visited rarely—sometimes never at all. I think most people spend so much time trying to convince theimselves that their lives are stories that the actual story-creating part of their brains hardens and dies. People forget that there are other ways of ordering the world.”
(169)
Waking up, Serge realized he’d miscalculated badly. “So I’m now your prisoner?”
“You are.”
“That was brilliant," said Sam, “making a dash for the front door.”
“I think you’d better release me. You all think you know the truth, but you don’t.”
“You mean the truth that lies on the other side of the front door? Were you running to fetch it for us?”
“You are.”
“That was brilliant," said Sam, “making a dash for the front door.”
“I think you’d better release me. You all think you know the truth, but you don’t.”
“You mean the truth that lies on the other side of the front door? Were you running to fetch it for us?”
(260)
Infinite Jest
1996
But so some E.T.A.s — not just Hal Incandenza by any means — are involved with recreational substances, is the point. Like who isn’t, at some life-stage, in the U.S.A. and Interdependent regions, in these troubled times, for the most part. Though a decent percentage of E.T.A. students aren’t at all. I.e. involved. Some persons can give themselves away to an ambitious pursuit and have that be all the giving-themselves-away-to-something they need to do. Though sometimes this changes as the players get older and the pursuit more stress-fraught. American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
(53)
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to then he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
(54)
Hal on the whole rather likes being a Big B[uddy]. He likes being there to come to, and likes delivering little unpretentious minilectures on tennis theory and E.T.A. pedagogy and tradition, and getting to be kind in a way that costs him nothing. Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.
(99)
Don Gately’s developed the habit of staring coolly at Ewell until the little attorney shuts up, though this is partly to disguise the fact that Gately usually can’t follow what Ewell’s saying and is unsure whether this is because he’s not smart or educated enough to understand Ewell or because Ewell is simply out of his fucking mind.
(210)
Though Schacht buys quarterly urine like the rest of them, it seems to Pemulis that Schacht ingests the occasional chemical that way grownups who sometimes forget to finish their cocktails drink liquor: to make a tense but fundamentally OK interior life interestingly different but no more, no element of relief; a kind of tourism… He’s one of those people who don’t need much, much less much more.
(267-268)
Schacht deep down believes that the substance-compulsion’s strange apparent contribution to Hal’s erumpent explosion up the rankings has got to be a temporary thing, that there’s like a psychic credit-card bill for Hal in the mail, somewhere, coming, and is sad for him in advance about whatever’s surely got to give, eventually.
(270)
It’s clearly carnage up there on Show Courts 1 and 2. Dr. Tavis will be irrepressible. The gallery is barely even applauding Wayne and Incandenza anymore; at a certain point it becomes like Romans applauding lions.
(270)
Charles Tavis … said 3½ years later that he’d never really expected a Thank-You from Orin anyway, for liaisoning with the B.U. tennis apparatus, that he wasn’t in this for the Thank-Yous, that a person who did a service for somebody’s gratitude was more like a 2-D cutout image of a person than a bona fide person…
(286)
What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
(291)
Joelle housekeeps like a fiend. The place is always sterile. The resemblance to the Moms’s housekeeping he finds a bit creepy. Except Joelle doesn’t mind a mess or give anybody the creeps worrying about hiding that she minds it so nobody’s feelings will be hurt. With Joelle the mess just disappears sometime during the night and you wake up and the place is sterile. It’s like elves.
(298)
Pemulis rages along the East Courts’ western fence. The combination of several Tenuate spansules plus Eschaton-adrenaline bring his blue-collar Irish right out. … Hal leans to spit and watches him pace like a caged thing as Lord works feverishly over EndStat’s peace-terms decision-matrix. Hal wonders, not for the first time, whether he might deep down be a secret snob about collar-color issues and Pemulis, then whether the fact that he’s capable of wondering whether he’s a snob attenuates the possibility that he’s really a snob. Though Hal hasn’t had more than four or five total very small hits off the very public duBois, this is a prime example of what’s sometimes called ‘marijuana thinking.’ You can tell because Hal’s leaned way over to spit but has gotten lost in a paralytic thought-helix and hasn’t yet spit, even though he’s right in bombing-position over the NASA glass.
(334-335)
He likes that Erdedy, sitting, looks right up at him and cocks his head slightly to let Gately know he’s got his full attention. Gately doesn’t know that this is a requisite for a white-collar job where you have to show you’re attending fully to clients who are paying major sums and get to expect an overt display of full attention. Gately is still not yet a good judge of anything about upscale people except where they tend to hide their valuables.
(362)
Lyle has a way of sucking on the insides of his cheek as he listens. … Like all good listeners, he has a way of attending that is at once intense and assuasive: the supplicant feels both nakedly revealed and sheltered, somehow, from all possible judgment. It’s like he’s working as hard as you. You both of you, briefly, feel unalone.
(388)
‘Imagine there arises a situation in which your deprivation or pain is merely the consequence, the price, of my own pleasure.’
‘You’re talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.’
‘But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.’ Marathe’s eyes momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘Suppose that you and I, we both wish to enjoy a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois. … In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. But there is one can only, of the small and well-known Single-Serving Size.’ …
Steeply stood with weight on one leg. ‘Example’s a bit oversimplified. We bid on the soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we can divide the soup.’
‘No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl’s serving. Half the bowl would only torment this craving I have.’
‘You’re talking a tough-choices, limited-resources-type situation.’
‘But in the simplest of examples. The most child-like case.’ Marathe’s eyes momentarily gleamed with enthusiasm. ‘Suppose that you and I, we both wish to enjoy a hot bowl of the Habitant soupe aux pois. … In this case imagining both you and I are in the worst way craving for Habitant Soup. But there is one can only, of the small and well-known Single-Serving Size.’ …
Steeply stood with weight on one leg. ‘Example’s a bit oversimplified. We bid on the soup, maybe. We negotiate. Maybe we can divide the soup.’
‘No, for the ingenious Single-Serving Size of serving is notoriously for only one, and we are both large and vigorous U.S.A. individuals who have spent the afternoon watching huge men in pads and helmets hurl themselves at one another in the High Definition of InterLace, and we are both ravenous for the satiation of a complete hot bowl’s serving. Half the bowl would only torment this craving I have.’
(425)
E.T.A.’s staff counselor is the bird-of-prey-faced Dr. Dolores Rusk, M.S., Ph.D., and she’s regarded by the kids as whatever’s just slightly worse than useless. You go in there with an Issue and all she’ll do is make a cage of her hands and look abstractly over the cage at you and take the last dependent clause of whatever you say and repeat it back at you with an interrogative lilt — ‘Possibly homosexual attraction to your doubles partner?’ ‘Whole sense of yourself as a purposive male athlete messed with?’ ‘Uncontrolled boner during semis at Cleveland?’ ‘Drives you bats when people just parrot you instead of responding?’ ‘Having trouble keeping from twisting my twittery head off like a game-hen’s?’ — all with an expression she probably thinks looks blandly deep but which really looks exactly the way a girl’s face looks when she’s dancing with you but would really rather be dancing with just about anyone else in the room.
(437)
After the Our Father, as Gately and the other White Flag speakers are clustered smoking outside the door to the church basement, the sound of high-cc. hawgs being kick-started is enough to rattle your fillings. Gately can’t even start to guess what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It’s like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.
(444)
None of the younger E.T.A. boys — who have the same post-latency fetish for vermin they have about subterranean access and exclusive Clubs — none of them has ever once gotten to see or trap a rat or roach or even so much as a lousy silverfish anyplace around here. So the unspoken consensus is that a hamster’d be optimal but they’d settle for a rat. Just one lousy rat could give the whole Club a legit raison, an explicable reason for congregating underground — all of them are a bit uneasy about liking to congregate underground for no good or clear reason.
(671)
This narratively prolix and tangled stuff all gets explicated at near-Kabuki volume during an appalling free-for-all in the office of the Mother Superior who hadn’t saved the Vice-M.S. who’d saved the Blood Sister, with the two senior nuns — who’d been tough and unsaved back in the Ontarian days when men were men and so were drug-addicted bike-chicks — teaming up and kicking Blood Sister’s ass, the fight-scene a blur of swirling habitements and serious martial arts against the spot-lit backdrop of the wall’s huge decorative mahogany crucifix…
(712)
The North American Collegiate Dictionary claimed that any ‘very heavy’ snowstorm with ‘high winds’ qualified as a blizzard. … The condensed O.E.D., in a rare bit of florid imprecision, defined blizzard as ‘A furious blast of frost-wind and blinding snow in which man and beast frequently perish’… If you want real prescriptive specificity you go to a hard-ass: Sitney’s and Schneewind’s Dictionary of Environmental Sciences required 12 cm./hour of continuous snowfall, minimum winds of 60 kph., and visibility of less than 500 metres; and only if these conditions were observed for more than three hours was it a blizzard; less than three hours was ‘C-IV Squall.’ The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about.
(899-900)
Kite had called his Quaalude-isotopes ‘QuoVadis,’ and they were a great favorite for 13—15-year-old Bimmy G. and the slouched sharp-haired sinister set he dropped Ludes and QuoVadises with, washing them down with Hefenreffers, resulting in a kind of mnemonic brown-out where the entire two-year interval … became in Gately’s sober memory just the vague era of The Attack of the Killer Sidewalks. Quaaludes and 16-oz. Hefenreffers awakened Gately and his new droogs to the usually-dormant-but-apparently-ever-lurking ill will of innocent-seeming public sidewalks everywhere. You didn’t have to be brainy Trent Kite to figure out the equation (Quaaludes) + (not even that many beers) = getting whapped by the nearest sidewalk — as in you’re walking innocently along down a sidewalk and out of nowhere the sidewalk comes rushing up to meet you: WHAP. Happened time after fucking time. It made the whole crew resent having to walk anywhere on QuoVadises because of not having driver’s licenses yet, which gives you some idea of the sum-total I.Q. brought to bear on the problem of the Attacks. A tiny permanent cast in his left eye and what looks like a chin-dimple are Gately’s legacy from the period before moving up to Percocets, which one advantage of the move deeper into oral narcs was that Percocets + Hefenreffers didn’t allow you even enough upright mobility to make you vulnerable to sidewalks’ ever-lurking ill will.
(904-905)
Possible Side Effects
2006
“But Bentley is perfect. There will never be another Bentley.”
I couldn’t argue this point. So I would have to change strategies. Instead of positioning this as more of a good thing, I would position a potential second dog as a support dog. Not an addition for us. But support for Bentley. An accessory, something to make his life easier. Like parents who have a second baby to supply bone marrow to the first, favorite baby.
I couldn’t argue this point. So I would have to change strategies. Instead of positioning this as more of a good thing, I would position a potential second dog as a support dog. Not an addition for us. But support for Bentley. An accessory, something to make his life easier. Like parents who have a second baby to supply bone marrow to the first, favorite baby.
(24)
This is the most pristine New England geography you can possibly imagine. And then, it’s an island. For someone like me, someone who has large vacant holes where character should be, the island filled me with a profound need.
(73)
Christy even suggested that her future mate might “…enjoy the color blue as much as I do. And if you’re like me, you probably don’t care for green at all, which I consider to be blue poisoned by yellow.”
(90)
When I heard this, I had to get up and go to my computer, so I could write. Because I was overwhelmed with the truth of that statement. And the fact that I’d never think of such a thing. I thought, there is a complexity to life that I often overlook. There is a depth of thinking, there is a richness. I am skating on the surface.
(120)
I found myself sitting next to him on the sofa. Sitting so close our knees touched. “This is nice, isn’t it?” he said, smiling in a wretched, aren’t-I-adorable? fashion. He glanced at our legs, first mine, then his. “It’s nice to touch,” he said.
I hated him. I hated all people who assumed immediate intimacy.
I hated him. I hated all people who assumed immediate intimacy.
(125)
Where had the men come from? What was the white canvas log? Why were they throwing it into the water? And most importantly, how could I manipulate the situation for personal gain?
(266)
“If you’re not busy, and it doesn’t appear that you are, we could use your help,” Larry said. He winked.
I have always responded to people who winked. My Uncle Mercer winked at my constantly and I loved him for it. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned he was schizophrenic and his wink was really a twitch, caused by neurological damage.
I have always responded to people who winked. My Uncle Mercer winked at my constantly and I loved him for it. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned he was schizophrenic and his wink was really a twitch, caused by neurological damage.
(270)
Indecision
2005
“Glad to be back on the ground, huh?” said the besuited dude in the seat beside me.
We would never meet again so I felt I could talk freely. “Actually I hate indeterminate places.” I’d meant to say intermediate but hadn’t used words all day.
We would never meet again so I felt I could talk freely. “Actually I hate indeterminate places.” I’d meant to say intermediate but hadn’t used words all day.
(7-8)
We were both in agreement that contemporary courtship was too far accelerated these days. That was how Vaneetha explained why she’d had so few partners, and how I explained why I’d had seventeen or more. Nevertheless it eventually became up-in-the-air and unspoken whether we were sleeping together brother-sister style and mostly refraining from outright sex except when drunk because a) we weren’t courting each other or b) we were, only slowly, just as these things should be done and never are.
(15-16)
I felt more slow than stupid, and suspected it had always been thus with me. Maybe my slow temporal metabolism wasn’t equipped for the efficient digestion of modern — or postmodern life, as it had apparently already been for some time. Sometimes I felt like I’d never catch up with even the little that had happened to me. There had already been too many people and places, and the creaking stagecoach journey or straggling canoe ride by which one location might observe, in olden times, how it became the next … had been supplanted by the sleight of hand of subways and airplanes, always popping you out in unexpected places.
(18)
My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence. Often on a midtown street someone’s cell would ring and half a dozen people would check their pockets to see if it was them being called, and I’d glimpse a flash of panic in one or another guy’s eyes. Myself, I kind of felt like I needed my news delivered by hand — to look out the window as some courier appeared in the field, coming from a distance so my feelings had time to discover themselves. But instead people were always calling and asking me to do things, and since only pretty rarely was I really sure I wanted to, my system was to flip a coin. … Heads, I’d accept — whereas tails, I’d claim to have other plans. I was proud of this system. Statistically fair, it also kept my whole easy nature from forcing me to do everyone’s bidding; it ensured a certain scarcity of Dwightness on the market; it contributed the prestige of the inscrutable to my otherwise transparent persona…
(18-19)
“[T]hey should teach people lies. … If we thought people had acted better in the past we would try and maintain that false standard. With only slight deteriorations. It would all be so much better.”
I’d asked how we would then explain the reported widespread contemporary prevalence of things sucking so much for so many people through poverty, nihilism, and other ills. “Blame everything on the immediately-preceding generation. Cast them as evil usurpers of a long-standing righteous regime. Then we kill them.”
“But I like my parents.”
“But you wouldn’t, is the thing.”
I’d asked how we would then explain the reported widespread contemporary prevalence of things sucking so much for so many people through poverty, nihilism, and other ills. “Blame everything on the immediately-preceding generation. Cast them as evil usurpers of a long-standing righteous regime. Then we kill them.”
“But I like my parents.”
“But you wouldn’t, is the thing.”
(30)
I instructed myself to tell the truth to Vaneetha, because she would never buy it that I was going without any reason or Spanish to spend ten days in Ecuador by myself. Maybe I could just request that she not feel threatened by Natasha. After all I did feel vaguely committed to her (Vaneetha), and possibly I wouldn’t so much as touch Natasha even if she (Natasha) encouraged me to. Or else I could just leave the facts bare, letting Vaneetha take offense and dump me. Or maybe I could somehow imply by a rare suave tone of voice that I was only behaving in the way of all sophisticated people who always leave their romantico-sexual arrangements undefined. Moreover, presenting this third option casually, as a matter of course, might force or otherwise encourage semisnobbish Vaneetha to go along.
(65)
[W]hen I was a kid we had another dog: a large fit golden retriever named Mister, very regal in the face, with a pale coat flaring in cowlicks all across his back and an attitude of stoical sadness that only being played with or petted could placate for a while. Mom and dad were physically shy with me and Alice except when spanking us, and we were also shy with each other, unless sumo wrestling or playing karate, so that all of us showed Mister an affection that was plainer and more extravagant than anything that passed between us actual humans except in times of crisis. Yet this attention to Mister seemed also to be the emblem of our basic mutual filial thing, implying as it did what large volumes of love-grade emotion must get trafficked invisibly between us if this was how we treated … our dog.
(75)
“Well marijuana is not exactly a performance-enhancer. I trust you’re not still using that stuff.”
“Very rarely.” We went off to the rough to fetch my ball. “It can be pleasant and relaxing.” The phrase enjoyed a certain currency in our family. When mom had come into my adolescent bedroom one night to tell me what sex was, and how it would be okay if eventually I had it with someone I loved and even, when desperate, with myself, she let me know that it could be pleasant and relaxing. This was the same phrase with which dad had defended himself against Alice’s accusations of excessive drinking. And even Alice herself, during the great Lesbianism Scare of 1992, had suggested with heavy sarcasm that the girl-on-girl lifestyle could likewise be pleasant and relaxing.
“Very rarely.” We went off to the rough to fetch my ball. “It can be pleasant and relaxing.” The phrase enjoyed a certain currency in our family. When mom had come into my adolescent bedroom one night to tell me what sex was, and how it would be okay if eventually I had it with someone I loved and even, when desperate, with myself, she let me know that it could be pleasant and relaxing. This was the same phrase with which dad had defended himself against Alice’s accusations of excessive drinking. And even Alice herself, during the great Lesbianism Scare of 1992, had suggested with heavy sarcasm that the girl-on-girl lifestyle could likewise be pleasant and relaxing.
(80)
I wasn’t getting through. A lot of times it seemed like I’d been well enough educated to be considered a decent audience for dad, but not a qualified interlocutor. If I brought up something he hadn’t thought of before, he ignored me. But if I said something he already knew, he’d say, “Sure. I know.” Like many men, he was impregnable.
(81)
Sleep is so nice, I thought. Otherwise things would just add up.
(103)
Bridget struck me as a very attractive being even in the ways that she wasn’t yet. And where she wasn’t yet beautiful, maybe she would become more so once her life was more consistently brightened by my consistently more enlightened company.
(217)
Before sitting down I raised my voice a final time and addressed the crowd: “I want to conclude with some vacuous statement we can all agree on. Whether or not we are jingoistic shouters who respond to the promise of democratic socialism with patriotic non sequiturs. Well anyway, thank you all for coming! You’re all beautiful! Maybe not morally. But mostly so well groomed!”
(234)
I don’t mean to bring you down as a reader, and one main effort of my life is to try not to spoil my own mood. Currently the party line I give myself, and do in part believe, is that what’s happiest is just to be alive and sensitive when it comes to feeling the world, and if what your senses, honed beyond usefulness, end up registering is so much suffering out there that you become light-headed with it at times — well, those senses can still be used for extracting pleasures from fruits, nuts, beverages of all kinds, words on a page, a loved mammal in your arms, music (including sad kinds), and anyway this is only the tip of a list anyone could assemble. I know my list is basic but maybe to utter banalities is a type of solidarity in these lonelifying times?
(237)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
2000
Early the next morning, Josef and Kornblum met in the kitchen of Apartment 42. Here they were served coffee in scalloped Herend cups by Trudi, the youngest of the three prostitutes. She was an ample girl, plain and intelligent, studying to be a nurse. After relieving Josef of the burden of his innocence the previous night, in a procedure that required less time than it now took her to brew a pot of coffee, Trudi had now pulled on her cherry-pink kimono and gone out to the parlor to study a text on phlebotomoy…
(47)
“What if someone notices?” Josef said after he had finished inspecting Kornblum’s work.
This gave rise to another of Kornblum’s impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. “People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”
This gave rise to another of Kornblum’s impromptu and slightly cynical maxims. “People notice only what you tell them to notice,” he said. “And then only if you remind them.”
(60)
Because he had prospered, in a Kramler Building kind of way, more easily than Anapol, he had not been forced to develop the older man’s rumpled salesman’s charm, but he shared Anapol’s avidity for unburdening America’s youth of the oppressive national mantle of tedium, ten cents at a time.
(86)
“All right, all right,” said Jerry at last, waving his hands in surrender. “You already took over the whole damned Pit anyway.” He started back down the stairs. “I’ll make us some coffee.” He turned back and pointed a finger at Joe. “But stay away from my food. That’s my chicken.”
“And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.
“And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.
“We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”
“Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.
“And they can’t sleep here, either,” said Marty Gold.
“And you have to tell us how’s come if you’re from Japan, you could be Sammy’s cousin and look like such a Jew,” Davy O’Dowd said.
“We’re in Japan,” Sammy said. “We’re everywhere.”
“Jujitsu,” Joe reminded him.
(143)
“Thank you, Mrs. Clay,” said Bacon.
Sammy winced.
“That isn’t my name,” Ethel said, but not unkindly. She looked at Sammy. “I never cared for that name. Well, come in, sit down, I made too much, oh well. Dinner was ready once already, and you missed the candles, I’m sorry to say, but we can’t postpone sundown even for big-shot comic book writers.”
“I heard they changed that rule,” said Sammy.
“You smell like Sen-Sen.”
“I had a little drink,” he said.
“Oh, you had a drink. That’s good.”
“What? I can have a drink if I want.”
“Of course you can have a drink. I have a bottle of slivovitz someplace. Would you like me to get it out? You can drink the whole bottle if you want.”
Sammy winced.
“That isn’t my name,” Ethel said, but not unkindly. She looked at Sammy. “I never cared for that name. Well, come in, sit down, I made too much, oh well. Dinner was ready once already, and you missed the candles, I’m sorry to say, but we can’t postpone sundown even for big-shot comic book writers.”
“I heard they changed that rule,” said Sammy.
“You smell like Sen-Sen.”
“I had a little drink,” he said.
“Oh, you had a drink. That’s good.”
“What? I can have a drink if I want.”
“Of course you can have a drink. I have a bottle of slivovitz someplace. Would you like me to get it out? You can drink the whole bottle if you want.”
(308)
Every golden age is as much a matter of disregard as of felicity.
(325)
Rosa’s brush caught the rime of ash on his lapel, the missed button of his waistcoat, the tender, impatient, defiant expression in his eyes by means of which he is clearly trying to convey to the artist, telepathically, that he intends, in an hour or so, to fuck her.
(387)
Her thoughts were Nancy’s thoughts. Her own fingers turned white at the knuckles when Nancy learned that Lowell had lied to her again. And little by little, as she peopled and developed the world she was building out of rows and columns and blocks on sheets of eleven-by-fifteen Bristol board, Nancy’s past was transformed into her own. The velvet tongues of tame Maine deer that had once licked her childish palms. The smoke from burning piles of autumn leaves, fireflies writing alphabets against the summer night sky, the sweet jets of salt steam escaping from baked clams, the creaking of winter ice on tree limbs, all of these sensations wracked Rosa’s heart with an almost unbearable nostalgia as, contemplating the horrific red bloom of the bomb that had become her Other Woman, she considered the possible destruction of everything she had ever known, from kindly Miss Pratt in the old island schoolhouse to the sight of her father’s old dory among the lobster boats returning in the evening with the day’s catch.
(550-551)
“Good point,” Sammy said, sounding profoundly uninterested in the question. He worked his legs up toward his chest and laid the legal pad against them. The pencil began to scratch. He was through with this conversation. As a rule, they tended to avoid questions like “How sane are we?” and “Do our lives have meaning?” The need for avoidance was acute and apparent to both of them.
(563)
Joe and Rosa bundled him up, in a kidnapperly combination of their overcoats and bunched newspapers, and hustled him out of Courtroom 11. They dragged him past the television cameramen and newspaper photographers, down the stairs, across Foley Square, into a nearby chophouse, up to the bar, where they arranged him with the care of florists in front of a glass of bourbon and ice, all as if according to some long-established set of protocols, known to any civilized person, to be followed in the event of a family member’s being publicly identified as a lifelong homosexual, on television, by members of the United States Senate.
(617)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
2003
I’m sure people did question whether Italian printers were quite the right people to legislate on the meaning of everything; but on the other hand, resistance was obviously useless against a family that could invent italics.
(78)
The first rule of bracketing commas is that you use them to mark both ends of a “weak interruption” to a sentence — or a piece of “additional information.” The commas mark the places where the reader can — as it were — place an elegant two-pronged fork and cleanly lift out a section of the sentence, leaving no obvious damage to the whole. Thus:
John Keats, who never did any harm to anyone, is often invoked by grammarians.
I am, of course, going steadily nuts.
John Keats, who never did any harm to anyone, is often invoked by grammarians.
I am, of course, going steadily nuts.
(90-91)
There are two dangers, however, associated with this quell-the-rampant-comma use. One is that, having embarked on a series of clarifying semicolons, the writer loses interest, or forgets, and lapses into a comma (ho ho). The other danger is that weak-charactered writers will be encouraged to ignore the rule that only full sentences should be joined by the semicolon. Sometimes — and I’ve never admitted this to anyone before — I adopt a kind of stream-of-consciousness sentence structure; somewhat like Virginia Woolf; without full sentences; but it feels OK to do this; rather worrying.
(126)
Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because, even when we try to muffle it with brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practices the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.
(138)
All Families Are Psychotic
2001
In Las Vegas, through a friend, he’d quickly landed a job as a hockey player in a trashy casino. He was paid more to fight with the other players than he was to play hockey, and as the coach handed him his thousand-dollar signing bonus, he’d said to Wade, “A good rink is a red rink. Nothing ever makes guys double up on bets more than blood. Not even tits. If you have a freaky blood type like Rh-negative, I’d advise you to stock up on a bit of it beforehand. The people who sell blood in this city — you don’t want to know. And hands off the waitresses. I don’t need you jerk-offs in the Hamburger League spreading broken hearts and the clap. Be back on Monday night. Seven o’clock. No helmet.”
(23)
Ted poured generous drinks for them. He’d obviously been to a gym and somebody hip was shopping for his wardrobe. And then Wade saw a flash in his father’s eyes. The flash said, It’s all shit, Wade, just don’t say the words out loud, because then even the shit goes away and we’re left with nothing.
(29)
Around three, he woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He went out onto the balcony, swaddled in the bored, muggy remains of a Gulf wind. He looked up at the moon, either full or nearly full. If human beings had never happened, that same moon would still have been in that very same position, and nothing about it would be different than it is now. Wade tried to imagine Florida before the advent of man, but couldn’t. The landscape seemed too thoroughly colonized — the trailers, factory outlets and cocktail shacks of the world below. He decided that if human beings took over the moon, they’d probably just turn it into Florida. It was probably for the best it was so far away, unreachable.
(69)
“Everything in this restaurant has meat in it,” said Shw, wiping her nose — a cold in a formative stage.
“You vegetarians are just a bunch of control freaks,” Nickie said. “Order a frigging fruit plate.”
“They probably cut up the fruit on the butcher block right after they cut up some cow.”
“In a place like this,” Nickie said, “your fruit plate would have been manufactured last February in a fruit plate laboratory in Tennessee.”
“You vegetarians are just a bunch of control freaks,” Nickie said. “Order a frigging fruit plate.”
“They probably cut up the fruit on the butcher block right after they cut up some cow.”
“In a place like this,” Nickie said, “your fruit plate would have been manufactured last February in a fruit plate laboratory in Tennessee.”
(83)
Back at the house, Wade went to Sarah’s bedroom. “Hey, Omar, time for your delicious mousy treat.”
From behind him, Janet said, “No. Let him build up his appetite so when Sarah feeds him, he jumps on it.”
“Mom, you have a twisted side.”
“Wade, any mother will give you the same answer. Why do you think we always eat so late in this house? I want the food I serve you to be eaten.”
From behind him, Janet said, “No. Let him build up his appetite so when Sarah feeds him, he jumps on it.”
“Mom, you have a twisted side.”
“Wade, any mother will give you the same answer. Why do you think we always eat so late in this house? I want the food I serve you to be eaten.”
(140)
The library’s insides were cool and normal-seeming, a place visited by people whose lives contained no randomness, whose families gave one another CD box sets and novelty sweaters for Christmas, and who never forged each others’ signatures or had affairs with pool boys named Jamie or girls in payroll named Nicole.
(174)
“I feel like we’re at the end of Our Town, where the people of Grover’s Corner are talking to one another from inside their graves.”
“Huh.”
“That’s what I always thought death would be like,” Janet said. “Me — next to you — together — quietly talking. Maybe forever.”
“That play always scared me crapless.”
“Oh, I know. Me too. The play should come with a warning label.”
“Huh.”
“That’s what I always thought death would be like,” Janet said. “Me — next to you — together — quietly talking. Maybe forever.”
“That play always scared me crapless.”
“Oh, I know. Me too. The play should come with a warning label.”
(180-181)
Little Children
2004
Smiling politely to mask a familiar feeling of desperation, Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist. I’m a researcher studying the behavior of boring suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.
(3)
“Helloo?” Jean called out in a warbly singsong. “Is there a cute little girl in the house?”
“She’s a terror tonight,” Sarah warned her. “I couldn’t get her to nap again.”
“Oh dear.” Jean couldn’t have looked more sympathetic if she’d just found out that Lucy needed a kidney transplant. “Poor thing.”
“Poor Mommy,” Sarah corrected her. “I’m the one who suffers. She’s completely unhinged. Like a character out of Dostoevsky.”
“She’s a terror tonight,” Sarah warned her. “I couldn’t get her to nap again.”
“Oh dear.” Jean couldn’t have looked more sympathetic if she’d just found out that Lucy needed a kidney transplant. “Poor thing.”
“Poor Mommy,” Sarah corrected her. “I’m the one who suffers. She’s completely unhinged. Like a character out of Dostoevsky.”
(76)
Sarah always felt extremely self-conscious in flowered clothing, as though she were surrounded by quotation marks. Hello, I’m wearing “flowers.”
(88)
In grad school, Sarah had written a paper criticizing Camille Paglia as a “false feminist” for celebrating the sexual power of a few extraordinary women instead of focusing on the patriarchal oppression of women in general. She was especially irritated by Paglia’s worshipful take on Madonna. What did ordinary women—secretaries, waitresses, housewives, prostitutes—have to learn from a rich, famous, beautiful egomaniac who’d gotten everything she ever wanted?
But lately Sarah had come to the conclusion that they—or at least she—had a lot to learn. Madonna didn’t say, Oh no, I couldn’t possibly wear those cones on my chest. Oh no, I couldn’t pose as a nude hitchhiker. She just said yes to everything. Cowboy hats—sure! Sex with Jesus—why not?
But lately Sarah had come to the conclusion that they—or at least she—had a lot to learn. Madonna didn’t say, Oh no, I couldn’t possibly wear those cones on my chest. Oh no, I couldn’t pose as a nude hitchhiker. She just said yes to everything. Cowboy hats—sure! Sex with Jesus—why not?
(88-89)
Memory has a way of distorting the past, of making certain events seem larger and more significant in retrospect than they ever could have been at the time they occurred. This was certainly the case with the silent communication that passed between Todd and Kathy in sociology class on that dreary March afternoon. The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds, during which Kathy was aware of nothing more than a pleasant sense of possibility, the beginning of an unexpected flirtation. Ten years later, however, as she lay in bed beside her sleeping son, it seemed to her that everything that had happened afterward—the whole course of their lives—had been contained in that single charged moment, Todd’s hand in the air, his eyes on Kathy, almost as if he were volunteering to be her husband.
(173)
Kathy had never been one of those women with a thing for older men. She’d always been a little grossed-out when one of her girlfriends confessed to a crush on a gray-haired professor, or an affair with a “senior colleague.” … The thing that really gave her the willies… was the idea of the guy having a massive heart attack in the middle of sex, Nelson Rockefeller-style, dying while he was still inside you. Everybody thought about it from the man’s perspective, like it was some kind of triumphant exit (What a way to go, they’d sigh. At least he died happy). Did anybody consider the poor woman? Could there be anything more horrible? It would probably take a few minutes for you to even realize what had happened—you might just think he’d had an especially intense orgasm or something—and the whole time you’d be lying there, hugging an old man’s corpse, talking dirty into its waxy ear. Just the thought of it was enough to make you start sleeping with teenagers again.
(260-261)
There was a slightly awkward pause after the toast, a moment of collective floundering they masked with tentative, encouraging smiles.
(266)
Once she became aware of the connection between them, it seemed impossible that she’d missed it before. Todd and Sarah didn’t even need to look at each other. There was just this quick fog surrounding them, engulfing the table, the mini-climate generated by two people sharing a powerful physical and emotional bond, a force field that turned everyone else into outsiders—mere footnotes—even their lawful spouses.
(270-271)
A Boy’s Own Story
1982
Kevin was the sort of son who would have pleased my father more than I did. He was captain of his Little League baseball team. On the surface he had good manners, but they were born of training, not timidity. No irony, no superior smirks, no fits of longing or flights of fancy removed him from the present. He hadn’t invented another life; this one seemed good enough.
(9-10)
The dinner had left me bleak with rage. Something (books, perhaps) had given me a quite different idea of how people should talk and feel. I entertained fancy idea about elegant behavior and cuisine and friendship. When I grew up I would always be frank, loving and generous. We’d feast on iced grapes and wine; we’d talk till dawn about the heart and listen to music. I don’t belong here, I shouted at them silently.
(27)
I was always reading and often writing but both were passionately abstract activities. … I thought that to write of my own experiences would require a translation out of the crude patois of actual slow suffering—mean, scattered thoughts and transfusion-slow boredom—into the tidy couplets of brisk, beautiful sentiment, a way of at once elevating and lending momentum to what I felt.
(41)
Dad had a friend of sorts—to him possibly a very minor business associate—whom my sister and I worshipped because he gave us money. “Dollar Bill,” we called him, since he was William and always gave us a dollar each. Though we wanted for nothing and dimly sensed that our way of living cost many, many dollars, this unseen cash meant nothing to us compared to the actual loot Dollar Bill handed over. …
In a sense all of our daddy’s dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly; every dollar was assigned a function and kept out of sight. Dollar Bill, however, liberated two dollars a week from invisible utility. We loved him more than anyone we knew.
In a sense all of our daddy’s dollars were casters on which the furniture of our lives glided noiselessly; every dollar was assigned a function and kept out of sight. Dollar Bill, however, liberated two dollars a week from invisible utility. We loved him more than anyone we knew.
(66-67)
Since everything she did was theatrical, “listening” also had to be pantomimed: she stood like a schoolgirl and her hands, pointing down, were pressed together in inverted prayer. Her mouth was pursed, her head lowered; at a certain moment in Fred’s mutterings her head would start to bob wildly and those strange tones of assent that can only be transcribed as “Mmnn” would issue forth from her throat… None of this was subtle. It was really quite ridiculously overdone—or would have been had Marilyn been concerned at all with the impression she was making on other people. As it happened, she wanted only to conform to a role that she was simultaneously writing and reciting.
(87)
I was wearing a Brooks Brothers sack suit of black and brown twill that ran on the diagonal and a soft felt fedora from Paris, and this getup, which seemed so stylish to me, cast our conversation into the light of an excited urbanity, as did the cocktails, no doubt.
(89)
In our imaginations the adults of our childhood extreme, essential—we might say radical since they are the roots that feed luxuriant later systems.
(92)
I set my sights on the most popular boy in the whole school. I figured that if I could hoodwink him into being my friend, people would have to accept me. I think my strategy, on the whole, was sound. Since I wasn’t athletic, I had nothing to offer other people beside the flattering nature of my attention, a service that suited my sweet, devious nature.
(112)
“Maybe,” I said suavely, “because we’re not religious, we’ve made our friendship into our religion.” I loved ringing these changes in our theme, which was ourselves, our love; to keep the subject going I could relate it to our atheism, which we’d just discovered, or to dozens of other favorite themes.
(117)
It seemed to me then that beauty is the highest good, the one thing we all want to be or have or, failing that, destroy, and that all the world’s virtues are nothing but the world’s spleen and deceit. The ugly, the old, the rich and the accomplished speak of invisible virtues—of character and wisdom and power and skill—because they lack the visible ones, that ridiculous down under the lower lip that can’t decide to be a beard, those prehensile bare feet racing down the sleek deck, big hands too heavy for slender arms, the sweep of lashes over faded lapis-lazuli eyes, lips deep red, the windblown hair intricate as Velázquez’s rendering of lace.
(124)
As long as I remained unpopular I belonged wholely to my mother. I might fight with her, insult her, sneer at her, ignore her, but I was still hers. She knew that. She even had a way of swaggering around me. There was a coarseness in the speculations she made about me to my face, the way an owner might talk about a horse in its stall. At times she insisted that I had a great future ahead of me, by which she meant a job and a salary, but just as often she’d look at me and ask, “Do you think you’re really bright?” Quick smile. “Of course you are. You’re very very bright.” Pause. “But I wonder. We think you are. But shouldn’t we have a second opinion? One that’s more objective?”
(128)
Once I accepted my extravagant mendicancy I stumbled upon the sober, intelligent little boy I had once been. This was the kid with the sweet smile and in interest in all sorts of things, the boy with brushed hair and cloudless eyes, the child so whole he could forget himself: the birthday boy. Tonight as I sat cross-legged on my cot I could see shining out from within me that boy who’d been entranced by the marionette show: his smaller, sweeter body burned through this neglected exile I’d become. Or was I simply at fifteen learning to love myself at four as now so many years later I like the fifteen-year-old (even desire him), self-approval never accompanying but always trailing experience, retrospection three parts sentimental and one part erotic?
(158)
For the real moments of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object.
(175)
I’d never believed, or only in fleeting reverie, in a warm, concerned, touchy Christian God, who seemed all too obviously a conflation of what people wanted and feared. … Of course I responded to the appeal of divine hydraulics, this system of souls damned or crowned or destroyed or held in suspense, these pulleys and platforms sinking and lifting on the great stage, and I recognized that my view of things seemed by contrast impoverished, lacking in degree and incident. But the charming intricacy of a myth is not sufficient to compel belief. I found no good reason to assume that the ultimate nature of reality happens to resemble the backstage of an opera house.
(203-204)
Generation X
1991
From inside my little bungalow I hear a cupboard door slam. My friend Dag, probably fetching my other friend Claire a starchy snack or a sugary treat. Or even more likely, if I know them, a wee gin and tonic. They have habits.
(4)
“I firmly believe,” Dag once said at the beginning, months ago, “that everybody on earth has a deep, dark secret that they’ll never tell another soul as long as they live. Their wife, their husband, their lover, or their priest. Never.
“I have my secret. You have yours. Yes, you do—I can see you smiling. You’re thinking about your secret right now. Come on: spill it out. What is it? Diddle your sister? Circle jerk? Eat your poo to check the taste? Go with a stranger and you’d go with more? Betray a friend? Just tell me. You may be able to help me and not even know it.”
“I have my secret. You have yours. Yes, you do—I can see you smiling. You’re thinking about your secret right now. Come on: spill it out. What is it? Diddle your sister? Circle jerk? Eat your poo to check the taste? Go with a stranger and you’d go with more? Betray a friend? Just tell me. You may be able to help me and not even know it.”
(14)
“I don’t think I was a likable guy. I was actually one of those putzes you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head, cocksure and pleased with how frisky and complete he looks. I was both thrilled and flattered and achieved no small thrill of power to think that most manufacturers of life-style accessories in the Western world considered me their most desirable target market.”
(19)
EMOTIONAL KETCHUP BURST: The bottling up of opinions and emotions inside oneself so that they explosively burst forth all at once, shocking and confusing employers and friends—most of whom thought things were fine.
(21)
OVERBOARDING: Overcompensating for fears about the future by plunging headlong into a job or life-style seemingly unrelated to one’s previous life interests; i.e., Amway sales, aerobics, the Republican party, a career in law, cults, McJobs…
(26)
BAMBIFICATION: The mental conversion of flesh and blood living creatures into cartoon characters possessing bourgeois Judeo-Christian attitudes and morals.
(48)
Our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.
(68)
“Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ’Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
(79)
He yanks her crotch toward his, and I am just too embarrassed for words. “Hey, Candy—looks like she’s getting uppity. What do you say—should I impregnate her?”
At this point Claire’s face indicates that she is well aware of feminist rhetoric and dialectic but is beyond being able to extract an appropriate quote. She actually giggles, realizing as she does so that that giggle will be used against her in some future, more lucid, less hormonal moment.
At this point Claire’s face indicates that she is well aware of feminist rhetoric and dialectic but is beyond being able to extract an appropriate quote. She actually giggles, realizing as she does so that that giggle will be used against her in some future, more lucid, less hormonal moment.
(82)
RECREATIONAL SLUMMING: The practice of participating in recreational activities of a class one perceives as lower than one’s own: ”Karen! Donald! Let’s go bowling tonight! And don’t worry about shoes… apparently you can rent them.”
(113)
NUTRITIONAL SLUMMING: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packing semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion.
(120)
American Psycho
1991
“Anyway, so we’re back at my place and listen to this.” He moves in closer to the table. “She’s had enough champagne by now to get a fucking rhino tipsy, and get this—“
“She let you fuck her without a condom?” one of us asks.
McDermott rolls his eyes up. “This is a Vassar girl. She’s not from Queens.”
Price taps me on the shoulder. "What does that mean?"
“She let you fuck her without a condom?” one of us asks.
McDermott rolls his eyes up. “This is a Vassar girl. She’s not from Queens.”
Price taps me on the shoulder. "What does that mean?"
(33)
My secretary, Jean, who is in love with me and who I will probably end up marrying, sits at her desk and this morning, to get my attention as usual, is wearing something improbably expensive and completely inappropriate.
(64)
“You know,” I mention, “Tim was going to break it off with her. Call it quits.”
”Why, for god’s sake?” Evelyn asks, surprised, intrigued. “They had that fabulous place in the Hamptons.”
“I remember him telling me that he was sick to death of watching her do nothing but her nails all weekend.”
“Oh my god,” Evelyn says, and then, genuinely confused, “You mean… wait, she didn’t have someone do them for her?”
”Why, for god’s sake?” Evelyn asks, surprised, intrigued. “They had that fabulous place in the Hamptons.”
“I remember him telling me that he was sick to death of watching her do nothing but her nails all weekend.”
“Oh my god,” Evelyn says, and then, genuinely confused, “You mean… wait, she didn’t have someone do them for her?”
(119-20)
“I’d want a zydeco band, Patrick. That’s what I’d want. A zydeco band,” she gushes breathlessly. “Or mariachi. Or reggae. Something ethnic to shock Daddy. Oh I can’t decide.”
“I’d want to bring a Harrison AK-47 assault rifle to the ceremony,” I say, bored, in a rush, “…though personally I don’t like to use anything the Soviets designed, I don’t know, the Harrison somehow reminds me of…” Stopping, confused, inspecting yesterday’s manicure, I look back at Evelyn. “Stoli?”
”Oh, and lots of chocolate truffles. Godiva. And oysters. Oysters on the half shell. Marzipan. Pink tents. Hundreds, thousands of roses. Photographers. Annie Leibovitz. We’ll get Annie Liebovitz,” she says excitedly. “And we’ll hire someone to videotape it!”
”Or an AR-15. You’d like it, Evelyn: it’s the most expensive of guns, but worth every penny.” I wink at her.
“I’d want to bring a Harrison AK-47 assault rifle to the ceremony,” I say, bored, in a rush, “…though personally I don’t like to use anything the Soviets designed, I don’t know, the Harrison somehow reminds me of…” Stopping, confused, inspecting yesterday’s manicure, I look back at Evelyn. “Stoli?”
”Oh, and lots of chocolate truffles. Godiva. And oysters. Oysters on the half shell. Marzipan. Pink tents. Hundreds, thousands of roses. Photographers. Annie Leibovitz. We’ll get Annie Liebovitz,” she says excitedly. “And we’ll hire someone to videotape it!”
”Or an AR-15. You’d like it, Evelyn: it’s the most expensive of guns, but worth every penny.” I wink at her.
(124)
After the office I worked out at Xclusive and once home made obscene phone calls to young Dalton girls, the numbers I chose coming from the register I stole a copy of from the administration office when I broke in last Thursday night. “I’m a corporate raider,” I whispered lasciviously into the cordless phone. “I orchestrate hostile takeovers. What do you think of that? … Huh, bitch?” Most of the time I could tell they were frightened and this pleased me greatly, enabled me to maintain a strong, pulsing erection for the duration of the phone calls, until one of the girls, Hilary Wallace, asked, unfazed, “Dad, is that you?” and whatever enthusiasm I’d built up plummeted.
(162)
The bill, which I pay for with my platinum American Express card, comes to over three hundred dollars. Courtney looks okay in a Donna Karan wool jacket, silk blouse and cashmere woll skirt. I’m wearing a tuxedo for no apparent reason. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about a new sport called Dwarf Tossing.
(167)
I open the cartons of Japanese food and dump their contents over him, but to my surprise instead of sushi and teriyaki and hand rolls and soba noodles, chicken with cashew nuts falls all over his gasping bloodied face and beef chow mein and shrimp fried rice and moo shu pork splatter onto his heaving chest, and this irritating setback—accidentally killing the wrong type of Asian—moves me to check where this order was going…
(181)
“So!” I say, clapping my hands together, trying to seem alert. “It was hot out today. No?”
“Where did Greg go?” Libby asks, noticing McDermott’s absence.
“Well, Gorbachev is downstairs,” I tell her. “McDermott, Greg, is going to sign a peace treaty with him, between the United States and Russia.” I pause, trying to gauge her reaction, before adding, “McDermott’s the one behind glasnost, you know.”
“Where did Greg go?” Libby asks, noticing McDermott’s absence.
“Well, Gorbachev is downstairs,” I tell her. “McDermott, Greg, is going to sign a peace treaty with him, between the United States and Russia.” I pause, trying to gauge her reaction, before adding, “McDermott’s the one behind glasnost, you know.”
(201-2)
So we wouldn’t run out of things to talk about over lunch, I tried to read a trendy new short-story collection called Wok that I bought at Barnes & Noble last night and whose young author was recently profiled in the Fast Track section of New York magazine, but every story started off with the line, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie,” and I had to put the slim volume back into my bookshelf and drink a J&B on the rocks, followed by two Xanax, to recover from the effort.
(230)
To catch the rat I buy an extra-large mousetrap at a hardware store on Amsterdam. I also decide to spend the night at my family’s suite in the Carlyle. The only cheese I have in the apartment is a wedge of Brie in the refrigerator and before leaving I place the entire slice—it’s a really big rat—along with a sun-dried tomato and a sprinkling of dill, delicately on the trap, setting it.
(309)
The office Halloween party was at the Royalton last week and I went as a mass murderer, complete with a sign painted on my back that read MASS MURDERER (which was decidedly lighter than the sandwich board I had constructed earlier that day that read DRILLER KILLER), and beneath those two words I had written Yep, that’s me and the suit was also covered with blood, some of it fake, most of it real.
(330)
There has been no word of bodies discovered in any of the city’s four newspapers or on the local news; no hints of even a rumor floating around. I’ve gone so far as to ask people—dates, business acquaintances—over dinners, in the halls of Pierce & Pierce, if anyone has heard about two mutilated prostitutes in Paul Owen’s apartment. But like in some movie, no one has heard anything, has any idea of what I’m talking about.
(366-7)
Naked
1997
My mother was pregnant with her sixth child when we received the news that Ya Ya had been hit by a truck. ... It seems she had been bumped by a pickup as it backed into a parking space. The impact was next to nothing, but she’d broken her hip in the fall.
“That’s a shame,” my mother said, admiring her newly frosted hair in the bathroom mirror. “I guess now they’ll have to shoot her.”
“That’s a shame,” my mother said, admiring her newly frosted hair in the bathroom mirror. “I guess now they’ll have to shoot her.”
(26-7)
“Of course you love Ya Ya,” he would say. “She’s your grandmother.” He stated it as a natural consequence, when to our mind, that was hardly the case. Someone might be your blood relative, but it didn’t mean you had to love her. Our magazine articles and afternoon talk shows were teaching us that people had to earn their love from one day to the next.
(37)
Dressed in a wig and high heels, she passed her late afternoons standing before a blackboard and imitating her teachers. “I’m very sorry, Candice, but I’m going to have to fail you,” she’d say, addressing one of the empty folding chairs arranged before her. “The problem is not that you don’t try. The problem is that you’re stupid. Very, very stupid. Isn’t Candice stupid, class? She’s ugly, too, am I wrong?”
(43)
I saw Europe as an opportunity to re-invent myself. I might still look and speak the same way, but having walked those cobblestone streets, I would be identified as Continental. “He has a passport,” my classmates would whisper. “Quick, let’s run before he judges us!”
(86)
“Are we vexed?” my mother would ask, pulling her station wagon into the parking lot.
“We are indeed,” I answered. “And highly so.”
“Let it go,” she said. “Ten years from now I can guarantee you won’t remember any of these people. Time passes, you’ll see.” She frowned, studying her face in the rearview mirror. “Enough liquor, and people can forget anything. Don’t let it get to you. If nothing else, this has taught you to skim money while buying their drinks.”
I didn’t appreciate her flippant attitude, but the business with the change was insightful.
“We are indeed,” I answered. “And highly so.”
“Let it go,” she said. “Ten years from now I can guarantee you won’t remember any of these people. Time passes, you’ll see.” She frowned, studying her face in the rearview mirror. “Enough liquor, and people can forget anything. Don’t let it get to you. If nothing else, this has taught you to skim money while buying their drinks.”
I didn’t appreciate her flippant attitude, but the business with the change was insightful.
(103)
[M]ost often I found myself fantasizing about a career in television. It was my dream to create and star in a program called Socrates and Company, in which I would travel from place to place accompanied by a brilliant and loyal proboscis monkey. Socrates and I wouldn’t go looking for trouble, but week after week it would manage to find us. “The eyes, Socrates, go for the eyes,” I’d yell during one of our many fight scenes.
(107)
“I said, ‘This baby might be a bastard, but I can guaran-fucking-tee you it won’t be half the bastard its daddy is, you motherfucking bastard, you! You can suck the cream out of my granddaddy’s withered cum-stained cock before I’ll ever, and I mean ever, let you look into this motherfucking baby’s wrinkly-assed face, you stupid fucking shithead.’ That’s exactly what I told him because I don’t give a shit anymore, I really don’t.” ...
She wiped a trace of spittle off her lips and settled back in her seat. The child kicked and shifted in the womb, and she responded, calling out in pain before batting her stomach with the flat end of the brush. “Motherfucker,” she said, “you try that again and I’ll come in there with a fucking coat hanger and fucking give you something to fucking kick about.”
She wiped a trace of spittle off her lips and settled back in her seat. The child kicked and shifted in the womb, and she responded, calling out in pain before batting her stomach with the flat end of the brush. “Motherfucker,” she said, “you try that again and I’ll come in there with a fucking coat hanger and fucking give you something to fucking kick about.”
(154-5)
I would soon be a Teamster, a title guaranteed to cost my father a good three nights’ sleep and to drive my former friends wild with envy. In time, everyone would be affected. ... I had never organized so much as a dinner party, but surely that would change as soon as my fellow workers recognized my way with words and the natural leadership qualities I had suppressed in the name of humility. I’d always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted, empty lives.
(168-9)
Desperate as I was for company, I understood that I was clearly dealing with a loser. Management seemed the perfect career for a person like Curly. I could easily picture him in a short-sleeved shirt, the pocket lined with pens. Someone would ask him to check the time cards and he’d probably say something goofy like, “Okey-dokey, artichokey.” I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.
(174)
“You ever been to Tijuana?” he asked. Most of Dupont’s stories began with a question and ended with an insatiable woman, buck naked and begging for more. In Tijuana it had been the dark-eyed innkeeper’s daughter who reportedly shouted out the words “bueño!” and “grande!” as he took her from behind. Afterwards he had visited a nightclub where, for no cover charge and a two-drink minimum, he had witnessed a prostitute get it on with a braying donkey. “For real. After the show the club owner offered me the girl for free, but I said no because she was all stretched out. Say, you ever put a saddle on a fat girl’s back and ride her until she drops?”
(217)
Marriage meant a great deal to our neighbors, and we saw that as another good reason to avoid it. “Well, we finally got Kim married off.” This was always said with such a sense of relief, you’d think the Kim in question was not a twenty-year-old girl but the last remaining puppy of an unwanted litter. Our mother couldn’t make it to the grocery store and back without having to examine wallet-size photos of someone’s dribbling, popeyed grandbaby.
“Now that’s different,” she’d say. “A living baby. All my grandchildren have been ground up for fertilizer or whatever it is they do with the aborted fetuses. It puts them under my feet but keeps them out of my hair, which is just the way I like it. Here’s your picture back. You tell that daughter of yours to keep up the good work.”
“Now that’s different,” she’d say. “A living baby. All my grandchildren have been ground up for fertilizer or whatever it is they do with the aborted fetuses. It puts them under my feet but keeps them out of my hair, which is just the way I like it. Here’s your picture back. You tell that daughter of yours to keep up the good work.”
(235)
“I love you,” I said at the end of one of our late-night phone calls.
“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass. And then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if I had to do it over again, I would probably take it back. Nobody ever spoke that way except Lisa. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed, our mother had taught that when we were no taller than pony kegs.
“I am going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said. I heard a match strike in the background, the tinkling of ice cubes in a raised glass. And then she hung up. I had never said such a thing to my mother, and if I had to do it over again, I would probably take it back. Nobody ever spoke that way except Lisa. It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed, our mother had taught that when we were no taller than pony kegs.
(240)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
2003
Then the police arrived. I like the police. They have uniforms and numbers and you know what they are meant to be doing.
(6)
Mr. Jeavons asked me whether this made me feel safe, having things always in a nice order, and I said it did.
Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.
(25)
Talking to strangers is not something I usually do. I do not like talking to strangers. This is not because of Stranger Danger, which they tell us about at school, which is where a strange man offers you sweets or a ride in his car because he wants to do sex with you.
(34)
I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won’t go to prison.
(44)
[W]hen people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause like on a video recorder, but more like a DVD player because I don’t have to Rewind through everything in between to get to a memory of something a long time ago. And there are no buttons, either, because it is happening in my head.
(76)
[I]t’s best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it’s bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like getting a filling or going to France. But I think it is worse if you don’t know if it is a good thing or a bad thing that is going to happen.
(215)
Running with Scissors
2002
I leaned forward, “Please don’t kill her.”
“Your father isn’t going to kill me,” my mother said, switching on the front burner of the stove, pulling a More from her pack, and leaning over to light it on the heating coil. “He’d rather suffocate me with his horribly oppressive manipulation and then wait for me to cut my own throat.”
“Will you please just shut the hell up, Deirde?” my father said, weary and drunk.
My mother smiled down at him, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.”
I was seized with panic. “Are you going to cut your own throat?” I asked her.
She smiled and held out her arms. “No, of course not. That’s just a figure of speech.” She kissed the top of my head and scratched my back.
“Your father isn’t going to kill me,” my mother said, switching on the front burner of the stove, pulling a More from her pack, and leaning over to light it on the heating coil. “He’d rather suffocate me with his horribly oppressive manipulation and then wait for me to cut my own throat.”
“Will you please just shut the hell up, Deirde?” my father said, weary and drunk.
My mother smiled down at him, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.”
I was seized with panic. “Are you going to cut your own throat?” I asked her.
She smiled and held out her arms. “No, of course not. That’s just a figure of speech.” She kissed the top of my head and scratched my back.
(18-9)
As time went on, my parents’ relationship became worse, not better. My father grew more hostile and remote, taking a particular liking to metallic objects with serrated edges. And my mother began to go crazy.
Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen bright red! sort of crazy. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.
Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen bright red! sort of crazy. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.
(28)
When I was sitting in school, surrounded by all those painfully normal, Cabbage Patch-owning kids, all I could think about was Bookman. Kissing him, touching him, hearing him say to me, “God, you’re becoming my whole world.”
How could I just sit there obediently pinning a butterfly’s wings to a lab tray or memorizing prepositional phrases? When the other boys in the locker room were showering and talking about their weekends playing soccer, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”
How could I just sit there obediently pinning a butterfly’s wings to a lab tray or memorizing prepositional phrases? When the other boys in the locker room were showering and talking about their weekends playing soccer, what was I supposed to say? “Oh, I had a great time. My thirty-three-year-old boyfriend said he wished they could package my cum like ice cream so he could eat it all day.”
(125)
Last year, Natalie and Terrance broke up, to borrow a phrase from mainstream society.
(140)
I was planning to open my own chain of shops around the world and also have my own line of haircare products. I even wanted to have a line of products marketed exclusively to the trade because I was convinced that the perms on the market were too damaging to the hair shaft. I didn’t know how to make them any less damaging, but I did have some packaging ideas that would give the impression of harmlessness.
(153)
Soon they were inseparable. And, I thought, extremely compatible.
If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, “Let’s listen to it on forty-five!”
(203-4)
“You know what we need? We need to get jobs, get the fuck out of that crazy house,” Natalie said, dipping a McNugget into her sauce.
“Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics.”
She laughed. “How pathetic and true. But seriously, we should walk around today and look for work.”
“Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics.”
She laughed. “How pathetic and true. But seriously, we should walk around today and look for work.”
(217-8)
Microserfs
1995
Bug is here in the living room watching “Casper the Friendly Ghost” cartoons on the VCR, “looking for subtext.” I can’t believe it, but I’m getting into it, too. (“Wait, Bug—rewind that back a few seconds—wasn’t that a Masonic compass?”)
(48)
Everybody agreed in principle, but nobody knows any other languages besides computer languages, except Anatole, but he’s like the wacky upstairs neighbor from a sitcom, and not a part of our core team, so the idea died.
(127)
Worked until 3:30 am. Breezy night. Went for a walk down La Cretsa Drive. So quiet. I got to feeling meditative. I felt as though my inner self was much closer to the surface than it usually gets. It’s a nice feeling. It takes quiet to get there.
(137)
And then I simply held him. And then we both fell asleep, and that was six hours ago. And I have been thinking about it, and I realize that Ethan has fallen prey to The Vacuum. He mistakes the reward for the goal; he does not realize that there is a deeper aim and an altruistic realm of technology’s desire. He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality. I feel it is up to me to help him become found. It is my work, it is my task; it is my burden.
(170)
Bug’s right. We are all starting to unravel. Or sprout. Or whatever. I remember back in grade school, VCR documentaries on embryology, and the way all mammals look the same up until a certain point in their embryological development, and then they start to differentiate and become what they’re going to become. I think we’re at that point now.
(194)
Stocking stuffers: I bought these red “panic buttons” at Weird Stuff, the computer surplus store across from Fry’s on Kern Street in Sunnyvale. It’s a fake IBM button with adhesive tape on the back that you’re supposed to tape on to your board and push whenever you’re feeling “wacky.”
I felt really sad for the panic buttons, because panic seems like such an outdated, corny reaction to all of the change in the world. I mean if you have to be negative, there’s a reasonable enough menu of options available—disengagement—atomization—torpor—but panic? Corrrrrrny.
I felt really sad for the panic buttons, because panic seems like such an outdated, corny reaction to all of the change in the world. I mean if you have to be negative, there’s a reasonable enough menu of options available—disengagement—atomization—torpor—but panic? Corrrrrrny.
(198)
“I have noticed that people are generally quite thrilled to have change enter their lives—disasters are weathered by people with a sturdiness that is often unlike their day-to-day personality.”
(203)
Ethan got through to his parents on a cellular phone around sunset; he learned they were having the grandest of times, barbecuing burgers and corn on the front lawn, and meeting their neighbors for the first time in years. “Mom said the Ronald Reagan Library was untouched. Like I care.”
I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the receiver held up to her ear by his father.
I think he wanted more drama. I think he would have been happier to hear that his mother was pinioned beneath a collapsed chimney, trickling blood into the receiver held up to her ear by his father.
(227)
Susan came storming into the office late in the afternoon, having just visited a Toys-R-Us store in pursuit of a present for her niece. Susan was furious about Mattel products, too—in particular about Barbie dolls. As I was the only person in the office, I received the entirety of her postfeminist critique.
“The aisle—it was pink—I mean, the entire aisle was this shocking, moist, Las Vegas labia pink color, and it was a big aisle, Dan. Tens of thousands of Barbies gazing vapidly at me—this wall of mall hair—the aisle haunted with the ghostly sound of purged vomit yet to come—of unsustainable desire. Their necks thicker than their waists; sparkles; an incitement to eating disorders—”
“The aisle—it was pink—I mean, the entire aisle was this shocking, moist, Las Vegas labia pink color, and it was a big aisle, Dan. Tens of thousands of Barbies gazing vapidly at me—this wall of mall hair—the aisle haunted with the ghostly sound of purged vomit yet to come—of unsustainable desire. Their necks thicker than their waists; sparkles; an incitement to eating disorders—”
(237)
Karla asked Dusty what she thought of Lego, and this triggered a mega-rant:
“What do I think of Lego? Lego is, like, Satan’s playtoy. These seemingly ’educational’ little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular—populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles. ... Lego is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them—their lawns...you know what I mean. Lego promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered, is rilly, rilly impossible to surrender.”
“What do I think of Lego? Lego is, like, Satan’s playtoy. These seemingly ’educational’ little blocks of connectable fun and happiness have irrevocably brainwashed entire generations of youth from the information-dense industrialized nations into developing mind-sets that view the world as unitized, sterile, inorganic, and interchangeably modular—populated by bland limbless creatures with cultishly sweet smiles. ... Lego is directly or indirectly responsible for everything from postmodern architecture (a crime) to middle class anal behavior over the perfect lawn. You worked at Microsoft, Dan, you know them—their lawns...you know what I mean. Lego promotes an overly mechanical worldview which once engendered, is rilly, rilly impossible to surrender.”
(257)
Todd called me “decadent” today... [h]e said I was decadent because I was eating Lucky Charms. He said they were “symptomatic of a culture in decline—sucrose hysteria, you know.”
I said, “But Todd, Lucky Charms were invented during the Johnson Administration. Society couldn’t have been more anti-decline than it was then. Guns and butter... I can’t believe I’m even talking to you seriously about this.”
I said, “But Todd, Lucky Charms were invented during the Johnson Administration. Society couldn’t have been more anti-decline than it was then. Guns and butter... I can’t believe I’m even talking to you seriously about this.”
(265)
Then Amy said in a loud and unbelievably embarrassing voice, “What the fuck is with this place? Every single chick here is named Lisa.”
Michael swam in to smooth things over: “She’s from Canada.”
Michael swam in to smooth things over: “She’s from Canada.”
(345)
[I]t really seemed like one of those foreign movies that you rent and return half-wound because they’re too contrived to be believed, and then real-life happens, andyou wonder if the Europeans understood everything all along.
(353)
Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, “Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to declassify complex systems.”
“Huh?”
“Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself—which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species—food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy; animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers.”
“Oh.”
“Huh?”
“Las Vegas was once seedy, but it has now evolved into a Disney version of itself—which is probably less fun, but certainly more lucrative, and certainly necessary for the city to survive as an entity in the 1990s. Disneyland presupposes a universe of noncompetitive species—food chains hypersimplified into sterility by a middle-class fear of entropy; animals who will not eat each other and who irrationally enjoy human company; plant life consisting of lawns sprinkled on the fringes with colorful, sterile flowers.”
“Oh.”
(358)
Sometimes we all forget that the world itself is paradise, and there has been much of late to encourage that amnesia.
(366)
The Corrections
2001
Enid lagged behind, intent on the pain in her hip. She’d put on weight and maybe lost a little height since Chip
had last seen her. She’d always been a pretty woman, but to Chip she was so much a personality and so little
anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.
(18)
[N]early a week had gone by without his seeing Julia or speaking to her directly. In response to the many
nervous messages he’d left on her voice mail in the last forty-eight hours, asking her to meet him and his
parents and Denise at his apartment at noon on Saturday and also, please, if possible, not to mention to his
parents that she was married to someone else, Julia had maintained a total phone and e-mail silence from which
even a more stable man than Chip might have drawn disturbing conclusions.
(19-20)
“A dollar is still a lot of money,” Alfred said.
“Fifteen percent if the service is exceptional, really exceptional.”
“I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”
“Fifteen percent if the service is exceptional, really exceptional.”
“I’m wondering why we’re having this particular conversation,” Chip said to his mother. “Why this conversation and not some other conversation.”
(21)
“Do you live in the city?” Enid said. (You’re not cohabitating with our son, are you?) “And you work in the city, too?” (You are gainfully employed? You’re not from an alien, snobbish, moneyed eastern family?)
“Did you grow up here?” (Or do you come from a trans-Appalachian state where people are warmhearted
and down-to-earth and unlikely to be Jewish?)
(23)
He went to his office in Wroth Hall and graded papers. He wrote in a margin: Cressida’s character may inform Toyota’s choice of product name; that Toyota’s Cressida informs the Shakespearean text requires more
argument than you present here. He added an exclamation point to soften his criticism. Sometimes, when
ripping apart especially feeble student work, he drew smiley faces.
(47-8)
He folded the Times and dropped it on top of his heaping trash can.
“ ‘I never had sexual relations with that woman,’ ” he said.
“You know I’m judgmental about a lot of things,” Denise said, “but not about things like this.”
“I said I didn’t sleep with her.”
“I’m stressing, though,” Denise said, “that this is one area where absolutely anything you say to me will fall on sympathetic ears.”
“ ‘I never had sexual relations with that woman,’ ” he said.
“You know I’m judgmental about a lot of things,” Denise said, “but not about things like this.”
“I said I didn’t sleep with her.”
“I’m stressing, though,” Denise said, “that this is one area where absolutely anything you say to me will fall on sympathetic ears.”
(78)
Doug, who was younger and shorter than Chip, so persistently claimed to be in awe of Chip’s intellect and so consistently tested free of any irony or condescension that Chip had finally accepted that Doug really did admire him. This admiration was more grueling than belittlement.
(95)
Chip considered the mess of green on Eden’s desk. Something was giving him a hard-on, possibly the cash, possibly the vision of corrupt and sumptuous nineteen-year-olds, or maybe just the prospect of getting on a plane and putting five thousand miles between himself and the nightmare of his life in New York City. What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be the other. Years after he’d figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.
(116)
Gary had been worrying a lot about his mental health, but on that particular afternoon, as he left his big schist-sheathed house on Seminole Street and crossed his big back yard and climbed the outside stairs of his big garage, the weather in his brain was as warm and bright as the weather in northwest Philadelphia. … [H]e estimated that hs levels of Neurofactor 3 (i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g., his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.
(137-8)
“I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”
“And I have no respect for that.”
“Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.”
It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.
“And I have no respect for that.”
“Well, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.”
It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.
(175)
What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! … They didn’t jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he’d drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered around and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick.
(175-6)
[He’d] always loved how tough she was, how unlike a Lambert, how fundamentally unsympathetic to his family. Over the years he’d collected certain remarks of hers into a kind of personal Decalogue, an All-Time Caroline Ten to which he privately referred for strength and sustenance:
1. You’re nothing at all like your father.
2. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW.
3. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom.
4. I love the taste of your come.
5. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.
6. Let’s buy both!
7. Your family has a diseased relationship with food.
8. You’re an incredibly good-looking man.
9. Denise is jealous of what you have.
10. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.
1. You’re nothing at all like your father.
2. You don’t have to apologize for buying the BMW.
3. Your dad emotionally abuses your mom.
4. I love the taste of your come.
5. Work was the drug that ruined your father’s life.
6. Let’s buy both!
7. Your family has a diseased relationship with food.
8. You’re an incredibly good-looking man.
9. Denise is jealous of what you have.
10. There’s absolutely nothing useful about suffering.
(182)
Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary… There were furthermore tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. … Who would perform the thankless work being comparatively uncool?
Well, there was still the citizenry of America’s heartland: St. Judean minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair. But Gary in recent years had observed, with plate-tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts. … Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—
Well, there was still the citizenry of America’s heartland: St. Judean minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair. But Gary in recent years had observed, with plate-tectonically cumulative anxiety, that population was continuing to flow out of the Midwest and toward the cooler coasts. … Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—
(194-5)
Because Caroline and Caleb paid no attention to him when he made the first martini, he now made a second, for energy and general bolsterment, and officially considered it his first. Battling the vitreous lensing effects of a vodka buzz, he went out and threw meat on the grill. Again the weariness, again the deficit of every friendly neurofactor overtook. In plain view of his entire family he made a third (officially: a second) martini and drank it down. Through the window he observed that the grill was in flames.
(226)
The gentle blow, the almost stingless brush or bump, that he then delivered to the meaty palm part of his right thumb proved, on inspection, to have made a deep and heavily bleeding hole that in the best of all possible worlds an emergency physician would have looked at. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. He knew he was too drunk to drive himself to Chestnut Hill Hospital, and he couldn’t ask Caroline to drive him there without raising awkward questions regarding his decision to climb a ladder and operate a power tool while intoxicated, which would collaterally entail admitting how much vodka he’d drunk before dinner and in general paint the opposite of the picture of Good Mental Health that he’d intended to create…
(228-9)
He was afraid of meeting somebody in the hallway, Caleb or Caroline certainly, but especially Aaron, because Aaron had asked him if he was feeling all right, and Aaron had not been able to lie to him, and these small demonstrations of Aaron’s love were in a way the scariest part of the whole evening.
(231)
“And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.”
(302)
“It’s so neat you’re here!” Cindy cried. She snapped her fingers frantically, and a maid hurried in through a side door. “Mirjana, hun,” Cindy said in a more babyish voice, “remember I said use the rye bread, not the white bread?”
“Yis, madam,” the middle-aged Mirjana said.
“So it’s sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you’d take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!” Cindy explained to Denise: “She’s so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren’t you, Mirjana? Aren’t you a silly thing?”
“Yis, madam.”
“Yis, madam,” the middle-aged Mirjana said.
“So it’s sort of too late now, because I meant this white bread for later, but I really wish you’d take this back and bring us the rye bread instead! And then maybe send someone out for more white bread for later!” Cindy explained to Denise: “She’s so so sweet, but so so silly. Aren’t you, Mirjana? Aren’t you a silly thing?”
“Yis, madam.”
(390-1)
“Can you help me?” came the cry.
“Gary, go see what he wants.”
Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”
Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around.
“Gary, go see what he wants.”
Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”
Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around.
(475)
“So lightweight, practically indestructible,” she said. “Is it for your mom or your dad?”
Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.
“Our older folks get shaky in the shower at a certain point. Guess it happens to us all, eventually.” The young philosopher swiped Gary’s AmEx through a groove. “You home for the holidays, helpin’ out a little bit?”
“You know what these stools would really be good for,” Gary said, “would be to hang yourself. Don’t you think?”
Gary resented invasions of his privacy and refused the girl the satisfaction of an answer. He did, however, nod.
“Our older folks get shaky in the shower at a certain point. Guess it happens to us all, eventually.” The young philosopher swiped Gary’s AmEx through a groove. “You home for the holidays, helpin’ out a little bit?”
“You know what these stools would really be good for,” Gary said, “would be to hang yourself. Don’t you think?”
(482-3)
“Does Mom know you took it?”
“Not yet. I don’t even know what this stuff does.”
Denise reached over with her smoky fingers and put a pill near his mouth. “Try one.”
Gary jerked his head away. His sister seemed to be on some drug herself, something stronger than nicotine. She was greatly happy or greatly unhappy or a dangerous combination of the two.
“Not yet. I don’t even know what this stuff does.”
Denise reached over with her smoky fingers and put a pill near his mouth. “Try one.”
Gary jerked his head away. His sister seemed to be on some drug herself, something stronger than nicotine. She was greatly happy or greatly unhappy or a dangerous combination of the two.
(488)
Enid returned to hovering by the dining-room windows. “I’m worried that he isn’t calling,” she said.
Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.
“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”
“Well, what’s your point,” said Enid.
“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”
Gary joined her by the window, his glial cells purring with the first sweet lubrication of his drink. He asked if she was familiar with Occam’s razor.
“Occam’s razor,” he said with cocktail sententiousness, “invites us to choose the simpler of two explanations for a phenomenon.”
“Well, what’s your point,” said Enid.
“My point,” he said, “is that it’s possible that Chip hasn’t called you because of something complicated that we know nothing about. Or it could be because of something very simple and well known to us, namely, his incredible irresponsibility.”
(494-5)
A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn’t see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.
(536)
At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might have well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite, every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.
I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.
I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.
(544)
Angels in America
Part One: Millenium Approaches
Part One: Millenium Approaches
1992
JOE: Mom, did Dad love me?
HANNAH: What?
JOE: Did he?
HANNAH: You ought to go home and call from there.
JOE: Answer.
HANNAH: Oh now really. This is maudlin. I don’t like this conversation.
JOE: Yeah, well, it gets worse from here on.
HANNAH: What?
JOE: Did he?
HANNAH: You ought to go home and call from there.
JOE: Answer.
HANNAH: Oh now really. This is maudlin. I don’t like this conversation.
JOE: Yeah, well, it gets worse from here on.
(75)
LOUIS: I am not a racist!
BELIZE: Oh come on…
LOUIS: So maybe I am a racist but…
BELIZE: Oh I really hate that! It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.
BELIZE: Oh come on…
LOUIS: So maybe I am a racist but…
BELIZE: Oh I really hate that! It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish.
(93)
BELIZE: You hate me because you hate black people.
LOUIS: I do not. But I do think most black people are anti-Semitic.
BELIZE: “Most black people.” That’s racist, Louis, and I think most Jews…
LOUIS: Louis Farrakhan.
BELIZE: Ed Koch.
LOUIS: Jesse Jackson.
BELIZE: Jackson. Oh really, Louis, this is…
LOUIS: Hymietown! Hymietown!
BELIZE: Louis, you voted for Jesse Jackson. You send checks to the Rainbow Coalition.
LOUIS: I’m ambivalent. The checks bounced.
LOUIS: I do not. But I do think most black people are anti-Semitic.
BELIZE: “Most black people.” That’s racist, Louis, and I think most Jews…
LOUIS: Louis Farrakhan.
BELIZE: Ed Koch.
LOUIS: Jesse Jackson.
BELIZE: Jackson. Oh really, Louis, this is…
LOUIS: Hymietown! Hymietown!
BELIZE: Louis, you voted for Jesse Jackson. You send checks to the Rainbow Coalition.
LOUIS: I’m ambivalent. The checks bounced.
(95)
Angels in America
Part Two: Perestroika
Part Two: Perestroika
1992
JOE: You have a good heart and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind always but it’s not always kind to be gentle and soft, there’s a genuine violence softness and weakness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.
(73)
PRIOR: I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile. Life is confusing enough.
(102)
PRIOR: I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.
I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much worse, but… You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but… Bless me anyway. I want more life.
I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much worse, but… You see them living anyway. When they’re more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they’re burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don’t know if that’s just the animal. I don’t know if it’s not braver to die. But I recognize the habit. The addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but… Bless me anyway. I want more life.
(133)
PRIOR: The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
(146)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
1967
GUIL: You said something—about getting caught up in the action—
PLAYER: I did!—I did!... Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of The Rape of the Sabine Women—or rather woman, or rather Alfred—Get your skirt on, Alfred—
The BOY starts struggling into a female robe.
PLAYER: I did!—I did!... Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of The Rape of the Sabine Women—or rather woman, or rather Alfred—Get your skirt on, Alfred—
The BOY starts struggling into a female robe.
(26)
ROS: Shouldn’t we be doing something—constructive?
GUIL: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid…?
GUIL: What did you have in mind? A short, blunt human pyramid…?
(41)
ROS: Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one, a moment, in childhood when it first occurred to you that you don’t go on for ever. It must have been shattering—stamped into one’s memory. And yet I can’t remember.
(71-2)
PLAYER-KING: Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart—
PLAYER jumps up angrily.
PLAYER: No, no, no! Dumbshow first, your confounded majesty! (To Ros and Guil:) They’re a bit out of practice, but they always pick up wonderfully for the deaths—it brings out the poetry in them.
GUIL: How nice.
PLAYER jumps up angrily.
PLAYER: No, no, no! Dumbshow first, your confounded majesty! (To Ros and Guil:) They’re a bit out of practice, but they always pick up wonderfully for the deaths—it brings out the poetry in them.
GUIL: How nice.
(76-7)
PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds—if it was a bet you wouldn’t even take it.
(115)
ROS: That’s it, then, isn’t it? The sun’s going down. Or the earth’s coming up, as the fashionable theory has it.
(125)
The Invention of Love
1997
Three men in a boat row into view, small dog yapping. Housman in the bow (holding the dog), Jackson rowing, Pollard in the stern. The dog is played realistically by a toy (stuffed) dog.
(4)
HOUSMAN: I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way. Betrayal is no sin if it’s whimsical.
(11)
AEH: Most German scholars I would put up for the Institute of Mechanics; the remainder, the Institute of Statisticians. Except for Wilamowitz who is the greatest European scholar since Richard Bentley. There are people who say that I am but they would not know it if I were. Wilamowitz, I should add, is dead. Or will be. Or will have been dead. I think it must be time for my tablet, it orders my tenses.
(39)
AEH: We’re always living in someone’s golden age, it turns out.
(44)
CHAMBERLAIN: Thanks, Housman. I’ll see you on Monday.
HOUSMAN: I’m sorry you have to go. Thank you.
CHAMBERLAIN: Wouldn’t have missed it.
POLLARD: Nor I.
CHAMBERLAIN: But you did.
POLLARD: Oh, that.
HOUSMAN: I’m sorry you have to go. Thank you.
CHAMBERLAIN: Wouldn’t have missed it.
POLLARD: Nor I.
CHAMBERLAIN: But you did.
POLLARD: Oh, that.
(68-9)
AEH: The width and variety of Francken’s ignorance are wonderful. For stupidity of plan and slovenliness of execution, his apparatus criticus is worse than Breiter’s apparatus to Manilus, and I never saw another of which that could be said.
CHAIRMAN: Is he well liked?
AEH: Confronted with two manuscripts of equal merit, he is like a donkey between two bundles of hay, and confusedly imagines that if one bundle were removed he would cease to be a donkey.
CHAIRMAN: Is he well liked?
AEH: Confronted with two manuscripts of equal merit, he is like a donkey between two bundles of hay, and confusedly imagines that if one bundle were removed he would cease to be a donkey.
(78-9)
AEH: I’m very sorry. Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error. The choice was not always between renunciation and folly. You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity…and not now!—when disavowal and endurance are in honour, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument.
(96)
Arcadia
1993
HANNAH: Did he ever speak?
VALENTINE: Oh yes. Until he was five. You’ve never asked about him. You get high marks for good breeding.
HANNAH: Yes, I know. I’ve always been given credit for my unconcern.
VALENTINE: Oh yes. Until he was five. You’ve never asked about him. You get high marks for good breeding.
HANNAH: Yes, I know. I’ve always been given credit for my unconcern.
(49)
SEPTIMUS: The dawn, you know. Unexpectedly lively… If only it did not occur so early in the day.
(67)
VALENTINE: Oh, the grouse. The damned grouse.
HANNAH: You mustn’t give up.
VALENTINE: Why? Didn’t you agree with Bernard?
HANNAH: Oh, that. It’s all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us better. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.
HANNAH: You mustn’t give up.
VALENTINE: Why? Didn’t you agree with Bernard?
HANNAH: Oh, that. It’s all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, Bernard’s Byron. Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us better. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.
(75)
The English Patient
1992
Moments before sleep are when she feels most alive, leaping across fragments of the day, bringing each moment into the bed with her like a child with schoolbooks and pencils. The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.
(35-6)
“Tell me, is it impossible to love someone who is not as smart as you are? … Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you. But isn’t it important to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? … Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into corners. We want more than anything to grow and change. Brave new world.”
(120-1)
When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with out name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.
(141-2)
He kept everything back from the surface of his emotions during the night drive. To keep his mind clear, they still had to be alive. Miss Morden drinking one large and stiff whisky before she got to the sherry. In this way she would be able to drink more slowly, appear more ladylike for the rest of the evening. “You don’t drink, Mr. Singh, but if you did, you’d do what I do. One full whisky and then you can sip away like a good courtier.”
(191)
“Yes, I have heard the song,” said Kip, and he attempted a version of it. “No, you have to sing it out,” said Hana, “you have to sing it standing up!”
She stood up, pulled her tennis shoes off and climbed onto the table. There were four snail lights flickering, almost dying, on the table beside her bare feet.
“This is for you. This his how you must learn to sing it, Kip. This is for you.”
She stood up, pulled her tennis shoes off and climbed onto the table. There were four snail lights flickering, almost dying, on the table beside her bare feet.
“This is for you. This his how you must learn to sing it, Kip. This is for you.”
(269)
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
2003
There are many mornings when… I wake up, I feel the inescapable oppression of the sunlight pouring through my bedroom window, and I am struck by the fact that I am alone. And that everyone is alone. And that everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.
(i)
Whether it’s Jerry Maguire or Sixteen Candles or Who’s the Boss…, we are constantly reminded that the unattainable icons of perfection we lust after can never fulfill us like the platonic allies who have been there all along. If we all took media messages at their absolute face value, we’d all be sleeping with our best friends. And that does happen, sometimes.*
* “Sometimes” meaning “during college.”
* “Sometimes” meaning “during college.”
(6)
I’ve never met anyone I’d classify as self-aware… People just have no clue about their genuine nature. I have countless friends who describe themselves as “cynical,” and they’re all wrong. True cynics would never classify themselves as such, because it would mean that they know their view of the world is unjustly negative; despite their best efforts at being grumpy, a self-described cynic is secretly optimistic about normal human nature. Individuals who are truly cynical will always insist they’re pragmatic. The same goes for anyone who claims to be “creative.” If you define your personality as creative, it only means you understand what is perceived to be creative by the world at large, so you’re really just following a rote creative template. That’s the opposite of creativity. Everybody is wrong about everything, just about all of the time.
(14)
There are no “fashion don’ts” inside the Mainstreet Bar & Grill in downtown Harrisonburg. You want to inexplicably wear a headband? Fine. You want to wear a FUBU sweatshirt with a baseball hat that features the Confederate flag? No problem. This is the kind of place where you will see a college girl attempting to buy a $2.25 glass of Natural Light on tap with her credit card—and have her card denied.
(67)
You don’t need to side with the Boston Celtics to be a good person. But you should definitely side with somebody. Either you’re with us or you’re against us, and both of those options is better than living without a soul.
(107)
Despite our initial differences, I struck up an amicable relationship with Mr. Smokey; whenever I saw him, I would scratch his kitty ears and his kitty tummy, much to his kitty delight.
Or so it seemed.
Evidence began to mount that Mr. Smokey was using this weekly exchange as a diversion to steal my socks, one at a time. It’s still not clear why he wanted my socks, since it had always been my assumption that kittens wanted mittens (in order to acquire pie).
Or so it seemed.
Evidence began to mount that Mr. Smokey was using this weekly exchange as a diversion to steal my socks, one at a time. It’s still not clear why he wanted my socks, since it had always been my assumption that kittens wanted mittens (in order to acquire pie).
(118)
An even sadder illustration of cereal segregation is Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, arguably the most tortured member of the advertising community. Sonny is plagued with self-loathing; though outspokenly otaku for Cocoa Puffs, he doesn’t feel he deserves to consume them… To make matters worse, he is bombarded by temptation: Random children endlessly taunt him with heaping bowls of C-Puffs, almost like street junkies waving heroin needles in the face of William S. Burroughs. The kids have cereal, and Sonny does not. Translation: The kids are cool, and Sonny’s an extremist and a failure. And as long as they possess what he does not, Sonny shall remain a second-class phoenix, doomed by his own maniacal ambition for breakfast.
(121)
Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).
(161-2)
Obviously, we’re all used to seeing thousands of adolescent females at Britney Spears and ‘NSYNC concerts, but those shows have nothing to do with music; those are just virgin-filled Pepsi commercials. It’s a teenage girl’s job to like that shit. But the Dixie Chicks aren’t part of that marketing scheme; there was one stunning moment in the middle of the evening’s festivities where Martie Siedel shredded on her fiddle like she was trying to start a California brushfire, and the foggy arena air tasted exactly like the omnipresent ozone from every pre-grunge, big-hair heavy metal show I attended in the late eighties. I looked around the building and saw all my old friends from high school, only now they had breasts and were named Phoebe. And that’s when I realized that teenage girls are the new teenage boys, which is why the Dixie Chicks are the new Van Halen, which is why country music is awesome.
(166-7)
Dry: A Memoir
2003
Rick is a Mormon and although this is not a reason to hate him, I hate all Mormons as a result of knowing Rick.
(21)
“That wuss,” Jim says.
“Yeah, he is.” But I feel a little bad saying this. And also, I can’t explain Pighead to Jim. But I also can’t ever have any of my friends meet each other. I have to keep them all separate. And they all think this is a little strange, but for some reason it’s normal to me.
“Pighead is a stick in the mud if you ask me,” Jim says, sliding his empty glass forward toward the bartender to make room for the fresh drink. “So un-fun.”
I can’t really tell Jim that I like that about Pighead, I like his un-fun-ness. I can’t say it’s comforting. “Yeah, I guess,” I say flatly.
“Yeah, he is.” But I feel a little bad saying this. And also, I can’t explain Pighead to Jim. But I also can’t ever have any of my friends meet each other. I have to keep them all separate. And they all think this is a little strange, but for some reason it’s normal to me.
“Pighead is a stick in the mud if you ask me,” Jim says, sliding his empty glass forward toward the bartender to make room for the fresh drink. “So un-fun.”
I can’t really tell Jim that I like that about Pighead, I like his un-fun-ness. I can’t say it’s comforting. “Yeah, I guess,” I say flatly.
(27)
I spend the next forty minutes on the phone with someone from the rehab hospital and my enthusiasm withers. I answer a litany of questions: How much do you drink, how often, have you ever tried to stop before? Blah, blah, blah. I tell them I drink all the time, it’s only recently become a problem and I could probably stop on my own but my office sort of pushed me into this, so that’s why I’m going to rehab instead of those alcoholic meetings.
In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don’t hear the tab of the ale bring popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.
In the middle of the conversation, I open a third ale. I cup my hand over the mouthpiece so they don’t hear the tab of the ale bring popped. It dawns on me that this is a slightly contrary action. Like stopping into Baby Gap before having an abortion.
(28)
Why am I so anxious? And then it hits me. I’m not anxious, I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be so lonely because it seems catastrophic—seeing the car just as it hits you. But then all of a sudden, that feeling is gone and I’m blank. So it’s like a door quickly opened, just a crack, to show me what a mess I was inside. But not enough to really stare for long and absorb all the details. Just enough to know the room needed a major spring cleaning.
(30-1)
I finish signing the forms and stare ahead. My eyes fall on the filing cabinet beneath the window. On top of it is a disposable aluminum cake pan containing the ravages of a supermarket birthday cake. A car-wreck of garish pink and blue frosting, green sprinkles, canary yellow sponge cake. It has been hastily, greedily devoured. As if frantic nurses have made mad dashes into this room between crisis interventions and scooped whole handfuls of the cake into their mouths, desperate for the sugar rush, before running back out to strap somebody into the electroshock therapy gurney, which I am certain is just around the corner, out of view.
(42)
Sober. So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green. It’s no longer really summer but the air is still too warm and heavy to be fall. It’s the season between the seasons. It’s the feeling of something dying.
(74)
“My recommendation is that you continue with therapy on an outpatient basis after you leave here.”
This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It’s another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn’t really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
This sounds fine with me, I like the idea of seeing a shrink once a week as maintenance. It’s another chance to talk about myself without being interrupted. Plus, a shrink doesn’t really know me, so I can present a more balanced picture of who I really am.
(84)
I’ve never seen her look so bizarre. The vein on the side of her forehead actually seems to be pulsating. It’s awkward to be around her, because I feel like she’s walking on eggshells. Like in one of those cheesy interracial movies from the seventies where nobody ever mentions that the white girl’s boyfriend is black, but everyone is highly aware of it. Then somebody says watermelon in a sentence and everyone sort of gasps.
(114)
Meetings are the Hail Marys of alcoholics. You can do or almost do anything, feel anything, commit any number of non-sober atrocities, as long as you follow with an AA chaser.
“After I cut off his penis, I sautéed it in rosemary butter and ate it.”
“But did you go to a meeting afterwards?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, then.”
“After I cut off his penis, I sautéed it in rosemary butter and ate it.”
“But did you go to a meeting afterwards?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, then.”
(140)
Sometimes I actually think Greer is the perfect candidate for complete mental collapse. On Tuesday, I caught her looking into her compact mirror, with both hands pressed against the sides of her head.
“What are you doing, Greer?” I asked.
She didn’t look up, just kind of cocked her head to the side and continued to stare at her reflection in the mirror as she said, “Wouldn’t it be strange if you had no ears?”
“What are you doing, Greer?” I asked.
She didn’t look up, just kind of cocked her head to the side and continued to stare at her reflection in the mirror as she said, “Wouldn’t it be strange if you had no ears?”
(189)
What are the odds of me finding another movie-star handsome, literate, sweet, loyal, masculine, independently wealthy and single guy who seems to be crazy about me? Crack is only five letters, I remind myself.
(195)
“Wait a minute, Foster,” I say. “Are you telling me that you are moving back in with that psycho Brit?”
“It’s just for a while. He’s doing really bad, Auggie.”
And suddenly, I can see it all very clearly. The insanity. The parallel universe of it. How it mimics normal life enough to fool you while you’re in it. But when you step back, wow.
“It’s just for a while. He’s doing really bad, Auggie.”
And suddenly, I can see it all very clearly. The insanity. The parallel universe of it. How it mimics normal life enough to fool you while you’re in it. But when you step back, wow.
(248)
Miss Wyoming
1999
The night he died was to have been a typical Thursday evening. But John woke up around midafternoon feeling achy and nauseous, his thinking foggy, and he mistook this to be a bad reaction to the previous night’s methamphetamine, Serax and bondage. He seemed to recall a rope he pulled too hard.
(26)
His assistant, Jennifer, had quit yesterday when she found the nannycam that Lopez, his security man, had installed in the bathroom’s plug-in deodorizer. (“John, I can’t believe you’d sink to accusing me of stealing your coke.” “But Jennifer, you were stealing my coke.” “Even still, how could you harbor such ugly thoughts about me in your head?”)
(27)
“How do you want us to act, Mr. Johnson?”
“Oh Jesus. How about normal.”
This remark drew a blank.
“Normal?” Cindy asked. “Like housewives? Like people who live in Ohio or something?”
“No. Be yourselves. Talk to me like I’m a person, not a customer.”
“We can do that,” said Krista. “Yes, let’s.”
And so the three of them sipped drinks and watched the city lights for a moment or two.
“My panties feel too tight,” said Cindy.
“And my sweater’s too hot,” added Krista. “I’m so hot. I’m going to have to remove my sweater.”
“Oh Jesus. How about normal.”
This remark drew a blank.
“Normal?” Cindy asked. “Like housewives? Like people who live in Ohio or something?”
“No. Be yourselves. Talk to me like I’m a person, not a customer.”
“We can do that,” said Krista. “Yes, let’s.”
And so the three of them sipped drinks and watched the city lights for a moment or two.
“My panties feel too tight,” said Cindy.
“And my sweater’s too hot,” added Krista. “I’m so hot. I’m going to have to remove my sweater.”
(44-5)
“What is that orangey glop you’re drinking there?” She picked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her to buy the previous week and read the label. “ ‘Tang’—brilliant. I’ll try some with Bombay gin tonight.”
“It’s for astronauts.”
“It’s for astronauts.”
(67)
With John, Doris was quite talkative about her family, its source of wealth and its role in the overall scheme of the world. John would squint and try to envision the Lodge Corporation, and he would briefly gather the impression of a massive diseased creature—a sperm whale in which all cells were infected and doomed.
“Darling, all aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant. Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariably renders their wearers unstylish, lame and beset by fungus infections. Lodge is a goiter on society, draining and taking, pustulant and mute.”
John would egg her on: “What kinds of things does Lodge make, Ma?”
“What doesn’t Lodge make is the better question, darling. Lodge will make anything. Nothing is sacred: children’s cigarettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born time-expired, Vatican City parking spots—just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved penny from somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling, that’s Lodge.”
“Darling, all aspects of the Lodge corporation are malignant. Lodge food products are unnutritious and rot quickly. Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariably renders their wearers unstylish, lame and beset by fungus infections. Lodge is a goiter on society, draining and taking, pustulant and mute.”
John would egg her on: “What kinds of things does Lodge make, Ma?”
“What doesn’t Lodge make is the better question, darling. Lodge will make anything. Nothing is sacred: children’s cigarettes, Holocaust boxcars, dairy products that are born time-expired, Vatican City parking spots—just call Lodge. Each time somebody in America cries or dies, Lodge nabs its shaved penny from somewhere in the proceedings. Well, darling, that’s Lodge.”
(69-70)
If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness and the open discussion of loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.
(114)
Lunch that day was to be shared with a local den of Rotarians. “So we can hook ourselves up with a fuck-buddy,” Susan laughed.
“Susan!” Marilyn slapped her daughter, who smiled, because as with most slappings, it’s the struck who wins the match.
“Classy, Mom. Real swankeroo! I don’t think anybody in the room missed it. There goes my Miss Congeniality trophy.”
“Only losers win Miss Congeniality, Susan. Aim higher.”
“Susan!” Marilyn slapped her daughter, who smiled, because as with most slappings, it’s the struck who wins the match.
“Classy, Mom. Real swankeroo! I don’t think anybody in the room missed it. There goes my Miss Congeniality trophy.”
“Only losers win Miss Congeniality, Susan. Aim higher.”
(183-4)
“Vanessa, honey—you’re not angry or anything, are you?” asked Mrs. Juliard, who, like most of Vanessa’s teachers since kindergarten, trod on eggshells around her. They feared an undetermined future torture that would subtly but irrevocably be dealt them should they in any way displease this brilliant Martian girl.
As for Vanessa, she looked upon high school as a numbing, slow-motion prison, to be endured only because her depressingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make any effort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permit her to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of fun and sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the Coolidge Gators football team. They viewed Vanessa’s intelligence as an act of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only for its students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.
As for Vanessa, she looked upon high school as a numbing, slow-motion prison, to be endured only because her depressingly perky and unimaginative parents refused to make any effort to either enroll her in gifted-student programs or permit her to skip grades, which they worried, ironically, might cripple her socially. Her parents viewed high school as a place of fun and sparkling vigor, where Snapple was drunk by popular crack-free children who deeply loved and supported the Coolidge Gators football team. They viewed Vanessa’s intelligence as an act of willful disobedience against a school that wanted only for its students to have clear skin, pliant demeanors, and no overly inner-city desire for elaborately constructed sports sneakers.
(244)
“I guess the thing about exposing your heart is that people may not even notice it. Like a flop movie. Or they’ll borrow your heart and they’ll forget to return it to you.”
(254)
Ryan fiddled with the rearview mirror outside the passenger door. “You know, John, when you grow up these days, you’re told you’re going to have four or five different careers during your lifetime. But what they don’t tell you is that you’re also going to be four or five different people along the way. In five years, I won’t be me anymore. I’ll be some new Ryan. Probably wiser and more corrupt, and I’ll probably wear black, fly Business Class only, and use words like ‘cassoulet’ or ‘sublime.’ You tell me. You’re already there.”
(256)
“Maybe you ought to be talking to Don Feschuk instead of me, Mom.”
“Don’t be willfully cruel. It’s not becoming.”
“Don’t be willfully cruel. It’s not becoming.”
(268)
Don said that some of the makeup and attire Marilyn made Susan wear was cheap and slutty. She told Don that she’d once read that girls in China have babies at the age of nine, “so it girls can have babies that early, there’s nothing wrong with highlighting that capacity.”
“Marilyn, nine-year-old girls do not wear tittie-bar stilettos.”
“Don’t be so coarse. They’re evening shoes.”
(282)
Police lights erupted behind them, but the police were after another car, not theirs. Susan looked over at John and arched her eyebrows in conspiracy. John watched the pale black road, and he remembered a single moment during his time away in the wilderness. He wished he had told Doris about it—a single moment in Needles, California, months and months ago, facing west in the late afternoon. There had been a heavy rainstorm over just a small, localized patch of the desert, and from the patch beside it, a dust storm blew in. The sun caught the dust and the moisture in a way John had never seen before, and even though he knew it was backward, it seemed to him the sun was radiating black sunbeams down onto the Earth, onto Interstate 40 and the silver river of endless pioneers that flowed from one part of the continent to the other. John felt that he and everybody in the New World was a part of a mixed curse and blessing from God, that they were a race of strangers, perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn, yearning to rise from the charcoal, always newer and more wonderful, always thirsty, always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would mercifully erase the creatures they’d already become as they crawled along the plastic radiant way.
(340-1)
Middlesex
2002
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that these two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?
(173)
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchical is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimation of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
(217)
Until we came to Baker & Inglis my friends and I had always felt completely American. But now the Bracelets’ upturned noses suggested that there was another America to which we could never gain admittance. All of a sudden America wasn’t about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!
(298-9)
“There’s my mom and dad!” Maxine Grossinger shouted. She turned back to us and broke into a big smile. I’d never seen Maxine smile before. … Her unconcealed joy made me understand her. She had a whole other life apart from school. Maxine was happy in her house behind the cypresses.
(337)
“Okay,” I said, after a long while, “my turn.”
But that night was like all the others. She was asleep.
It was never my turn with the Object.
But that night was like all the others. She was asleep.
It was never my turn with the Object.
(348)
“Good morning, dahling,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Feeling a little under the weather, are we?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was pretty drunk last night.”
“You didn’t seem that drunk to me, dahling.”
“Well, I was.”
Jerome now dropped the bit. He flopped back onto the pillows and sipped his coffee and sighed. With one finger he tapped his forehead for awhile. Then he spoke. “Just in case you were having any of the hackneyed worries, you should know that I still respect you and all that shit.”
“Hi.”
“Feeling a little under the weather, are we?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was pretty drunk last night.”
“You didn’t seem that drunk to me, dahling.”
“Well, I was.”
Jerome now dropped the bit. He flopped back onto the pillows and sipped his coffee and sighed. With one finger he tapped his forehead for awhile. Then he spoke. “Just in case you were having any of the hackneyed worries, you should know that I still respect you and all that shit.”
(379)
The Object slept on her back. She told me once that back-sleepers were the leaders in life, born performers or exhibitionists. Stomach-sleepers like me were in retreat from reality, given to dark perception and the meditative arts. This theory applied in our case.
(382)
The streets were full of trees, bare in winter, so that we could see all the way to the frozen river. I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in the streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death.
(518-9)
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry this happen to you.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, honey mou.”
“I like my life,” I told her. “I’m going to have a good life.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry, honey mou.”
“I like my life,” I told her. “I’m going to have a good life.”
(528)
Moab Is My Washpot: An Autobiography
1999
“Don’t worry,” I said again. “I’ll look after you. Everything will be fine.”
I’ll look after you.
The pleasure of saying those words, the warm wet sea of pleasure. Quite extraordinary. A little pet all to myself.
I’ll look after you.
The pleasure of saying those words, the warm wet sea of pleasure. Quite extraordinary. A little pet all to myself.
(5-6)
Perhaps the boy from Cape Town set the pattern for all the love that lay in store for me. Strange thought. I haven’t ever recalled him to mind before this minute. I hope this book isn’t to become regression therapy. How unpleasant for you.
(22)
I look back now at Stouts Hill, closed during my first term at Cambridge, and I shake my head at the person I was. The child was more malevolent, I think, than the adolescent, because at least the adolescent had love as an excuse. All the child wanted was to tear at sweets with his teeth.
(127)
I am fully aware that my grievances, such as they are, are minor… Middle-class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more or no less than yours or anyone else’s.
(169)
I could spend thousands now on the highest end hi-fi in the world and know that, for all the wattage and purity of signal, the music would never quite touch me again as it did then from that primitive monaural system. But nor could anything else quite touch me now as it did then.
(181)
“Good lad, Jamie!”
Oh, there was always a Jamie, a good-lad-Jamie, a neat, nippy, darty, agile scrum-halfy little Jamie. Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransom hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.
Oh, there was always a Jamie, a good-lad-Jamie, a neat, nippy, darty, agile scrum-halfy little Jamie. Jamie could swarm up ropes like an Arthur Ransom hero, he could fly up window frames, leap vaulting horses, flip elegant underwater turns at the end of each lap of the pool, somersault backwards and forwards off the trapeze and spring back up with his neat little buttocks twinkling and winking with fitness and firmness and cute little Jamieness. Cunt.
(196)
Most juniors hated it when their turn came round, but I counted off the days with mounting excitement. It involved some of the things that I loved best: early mornings, the sound of my own voice, efficient service and a hint of eroticism.
(202)
It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.
(210)
You could tell he was a new boy. Just the way he checked others to see how they left their briefcases, as a shy girl at a disco might check how the other girls are dancing. He found a spot to leave his, brand new it was and of deep tan leather. I suddenly hated mine, which was black. I had thought black was cool, but now I knew I had to get a brown briefcase. I would make a point of wanting one for Christmas.
“But darling, yours is almost brand new! And it cost the earth!”
I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
“But darling, yours is almost brand new! And it cost the earth!”
I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
(229)
Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of all my frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.
(266-7)
It was all that quick and silly… No kissing, but at least plenty of giggling and smiling. Sex without smiling is as sickly and base as vodka and tonic without ice.
(285)
We were up in her room, listening to Don McLean’s American Pie, as one did in those days, marvelling at the poetry of “Vincent” and how it spoke to us, when she remarked that it was odd that we had never screwed. I had told her early on that I was probably homosexual, but she did not see this as any kind of impediment at all.
(311)
Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.
(322-3)
Strange the ways in which loyalty to one’s parents can show itself: never when they are there and when they would cut off a finger to see the tiniest scrap of evidence of filial devotion, but always when they are miles away. I visited a boy’s parents one Sunday for tea when I was eight or nine and saw that they used Domestos in their lavatory, not Harpic which we used a home, and I remember thinking poorly of these people because of it. We were Vim, Persil Fairy Liquid and RAC, other families were Ajax, Omo, Sqweezee and AA and one pitied them and felt slightly repelled: didn’t they realise they had got it all wrong? Fierce pride in one’s parents’ choice of bathroom scourers, withering contempt for their opinions on anything concerning life, the world and oneself.
(340)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
2000
Any resemblance to persons living or dead should be plainly apparent to them and those who know them, especially if the author has been kind enough to have provided their real names and, in some cases, their phone numbers. All events described herein actually happened, though on occasion the author has taken certain, very small, liberties with chronology, because that is his right as an American.
(iv)
There is…no overarching need to read the acknowledgements section. Many early readers of the book (see p. xlv) suggested its curtailment or removal, but they were defied.
(viii)
A NOTE
ABOUT
COLUMBINE
: This book was written, and the dialogue it recounts was spoken, many years before the horrific events at that school and elsewhere. No levity is being attached to such things, intentionally or not.
(xi)
In the end, one’s only logical interpretation of the title’s intent is as a) a cheap kind of joke b) buttressed by an interest in lamely executed titular innovation (employed, one suspects, only to shock) which is c) undermined of course by the cheap joke aspect, and d) confused by the creeping feeling one gets that the author is dead serious in his feeling that the title is an accurate description of the content, intent, and quality of the book. Oh, pshaw—does it even matter now? Hells no. You’re here, you’re in, we’re havin’ a party!
(xxvi)
The author would like to acknowledge that he did, indeed, vote for Ross Perot in 1996, and is not the least ashamed about it, because he is an ardent fan of the rich and insane, particularly when their hearts bleed, which Mr. Perot’s does, it really does.
(xxvii)
One starts to feeling that death is literally around each and every corner—and more specifically, in every elevator; even more literally, that, each and every time an elevator door opens, there will be standing, in a trenchcoat, a man, with a gun, who will fire one bullet, straight into him, killing him instantly, and deservedly, both in keeping with his role as the object of so much wrath in general, and for his innumerable sins, both Catholic and karmic.
(xxxiii-iv)
Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage—oop!—yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It’s fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don’t do that. But you get my meaning.
(xxxiv-v)
We cannot be stopped from looking with pity upon all the world’s sorry inhabitants, they unblessed by our charms, unchallenged by our trials, unscarred and thus weak, gelatinous.
(50)
There are times when I am concerned about Toph’s expression when I’m really singing, with vibrato and all, singing the guitar parts—his expression one that to the untrained eye might look like abject terror, or revulsion—but I know well enough that it is awe. I understand his awe. I deserve his awe. I am an extraordinary singer.
(53)
If she brings Toph something, for instance a pack of new Ping-Pong balls, the need for which she somehow gleamed, then she is a good person, not a bad one, and she is loved unconditionally. If she comes over for dinner and actually eats our version of tacos, without all that ludicrous shit people usually put in them, she is a saint and is welcome anytime. If she recognizes that the way we cut oranges—width-wise, not length-wise—is the only logical way, the only aesthetically pleasing way, and eats the whole slice as opposed to just sucking the juice and leaving that anemone mess, then she is perfect and will be talked about glowingly—remember Susan? We liked Susan—for months to come, even if she is not seen again, because she is otherwise too skinny and nervous-seeming.
(110)
I want to save everything and preserve all this but also want it all gone—can’t decide what’s more romantic, preservation or decay.
(122)
“So, how’s Toph?” he says.
“Fine,” I say.
Pliers, handcuffs—
“Where is he?” he asks.
Paint thinner, Vaseline—
“He’s home. Baby-sitter.”
Other stuff —stuff he bought from Scotland!—
“Oh.”
I change the subject.
“Fine,” I say.
Pliers, handcuffs—
“Where is he?” he asks.
Paint thinner, Vaseline—
“He’s home. Baby-sitter.”
Other stuff —stuff he bought from Scotland!—
“Oh.”
I change the subject.
(132)
This is obscene. How dare we be standing around, talking about nothing, not running in one huge mass of people, running at something, something huge, knocking it over? Why do we all bother coming out, gathering here in numbers like this, without starting fires, tearing things down? How dare we not lock the doors and replace the white bulbs with red and commence with the massive orgy, the joyous mingling of a thousand arms, legs, breasts?
We are wasting this.
We are wasting this.
(134)
[T]hough we can’t accommodate everyone’s talents, proclivities, and agendas—about five different people want to write about the many, many uses of hemp—we know that we have something, have touched a nerve. We want everyone to follow their dreams, their hearts (aren’t they bursting, like ours?); we want them doing things that we will find interesting. Hey Sally, why work at that silly claims adjusting job—didn’t you used to sing? Sing, Sally, sing!
(173)
[M]y feeling is that if you’re not self-obsessed you’re probably boring. Not that you can always tell the self-obsessed. The best sort of self-obsessed person isn’t outwardly so. But they’re doing something more public than not, making sure people know that they’re doing it, or will know about it sooner or later.
(201)
Why do you want to be on The Real World?
Because I want everyone to witness my youth.
Why?
Isn’t it gorgeous?
Because I want everyone to witness my youth.
Why?
Isn’t it gorgeous?
(209)
“It’s Clinton,” he says. “He’s eating at Chez Panisse.”
We run.
Toph and I are among the first there. I am wild with excitement. …I explain to Toph how thrilling this is, that inside this building is the president, and not just any president…but this is a president that, fuck, we have some sort of crush on this man. He speaks like a president, not always authoritative or anything but he can form sentences, complex sentences with beginnings and ends, subordinate clauses—you can hear his semicolons! He knows the answers to questions. He knows acronyms and the names of foreign leaders, their deputies. It is heartening, it makes our country look smart, and this is an important thing, something we have too long been without.
We run.
Toph and I are among the first there. I am wild with excitement. …I explain to Toph how thrilling this is, that inside this building is the president, and not just any president…but this is a president that, fuck, we have some sort of crush on this man. He speaks like a president, not always authoritative or anything but he can form sentences, complex sentences with beginnings and ends, subordinate clauses—you can hear his semicolons! He knows the answers to questions. He knows acronyms and the names of foreign leaders, their deputies. It is heartening, it makes our country look smart, and this is an important thing, something we have too long been without.
(287-8)
We eat the snacks and Toph drinks his root beer, which he’s set on the ground, holding it steady with his feet. He is careful about the things he loves.
(289)
Addressing Toph’s presents is up to me, and the night before, I do everything I can to spruce up the task, to forge new ground. Some I address to fictitious recipients, or to other kids in the neighborhood. Many of Toph’s presents I address to myself. Those that actually bear his name are misspelled. Or else I do what I do when filling out school forms: I get his name wrong, writing “Terry” or “Penelope,” then cross it out and write his real name, smallish, below. I sign a few from “Us,” a few from “Santa,” but prefer this:
FROM
FROM
: God.
He doesn’t know who to thank. He does not want to seem overly cavalier when reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Thank who?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“No, not me. Jesus.”
“Thank you, Jesus?”
“Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”
He doesn’t know who to thank. He does not want to seem overly cavalier when reaping the booty, and we exploit his eagerness to please. A package of colored clay is opened.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Thank who?”
“I don’t know. You?”
“No, not me. Jesus.”
“Thank you, Jesus?”
“Yes, Toph, Jesus died for your Christmas fun.”
(303-4)
Oh but to see her laugh you would say anything, and she so loved a good laugh at someone’s expense—Bill’s, Beth’s, yours, her own, and at that moment everything would be wiped away, all the times you feared her or wanted to run away, or wondered how she lived with him, protected him, you wanted only her laughing like she did when she was on the phone with her friends—Yes! she would shriek, Yes! Exactly!—then afterward she would sigh, breathing heavily and say Oh that’s funny. God that’s funny.
(404-5)
Nothing can be preserved. It’s all on the way out, from the second it appears, and whatever you have always has one eye on the exit, and so screw it. As hideous and uncouth as it is, we have to give it all away, our bodies, our secrets, our money, everything we know: All must be given away, given away every day, because to be human means:
1. To be good
2. To save nothing
1. To be good
2. To save nothing
(a43)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
1999
So, the kids started calling him “Nothing.” And the name just stuck. He was a new kid in the school district at the time because his dad married a new woman in this area. I think I will stop putting quotation marks around Nothing’s name because it is annoying and disrupting my flow. I hope you do not find this difficult to follow. I will make sure to differentiate if something comes up.
(13)
You know…a lot of kids at school hate their parents. Some of them got hit. And some of them got caught in the middle of wrong lives. Some of them were trophies for their parents to show the neighbors like ribbons or gold stars. And some of them just wanted to drink in peace. For me personally, as much as I don’t understand my mom and dad and as much as I feel sorry for them sometimes, I can’t help but love them very much. My mom drives to visit the cemetery of people she loves. My dad cried during M*A*S*H, and trusted me to keep his secret, and let me sit on his lap, and called me “champ.”
(17-8)
Bill smiled and continued asking me questions. Slowly, he got to “problems at home.” And I told him about the boy who makes mix tapes hitting my sister because my sister only told me not to tell mom or dad about it, so I figured I could tell Bill. He got this very serious look on his face after I told him, and he said something to me I don’t think I will forget this semester or ever.
“Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.”
“Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.”
(24)
There is a feeling that I had Friday night after the homecoming came that I don’t know if I will ever be able to describe except to say that it is warm. Sam and Patrick drove me to the party that night, and I sat in the middle of Sam’s pickup truck. Sam loves her pickup truck because I think it reminds her of her dad. The feeling I had happened when Sam told Patrick to find a station on the radio. And he kept getting commercials. And commercials. And a really bad song about love that had the word “baby” in it. And then more commercials. And finally he found this really amazing song about this boy, and we all got quiet.
Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.
“I feel infinite.”
And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest things they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way.
Sam tapped her hand on the steering wheel. Patrick held his hand outside the car and made air waves. And I just sat between them. After the song finished, I said something.
“I feel infinite.”
And Sam and Patrick looked at me like I said the greatest things they ever heard. Because the song was that great and because we all really paid attention to it. Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way.
(32-3)
“Would you like a brownie?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
I was actually quite hungry because normally Sam and Patrick take me to the Big Boy after the football games, and I guess I was used to it by now. I ate the brownie, and it tasted a little weird, but it was still a brownie, so I liked it. But this was not an ordinary brownie. Since you are older, I think you know what kind of brownie it was.
“Yes. Thank you.”
I was actually quite hungry because normally Sam and Patrick take me to the Big Boy after the football games, and I guess I was used to it by now. I ate the brownie, and it tasted a little weird, but it was still a brownie, so I liked it. But this was not an ordinary brownie. Since you are older, I think you know what kind of brownie it was.
(34-5)
I like to think my brother is having a college experience like they do in the movies. I don’t mean the big fraternity party kind of movie. More like the movie where the guy meets a smart girl who wears a lot of sweaters and drinks cocoa. They talk about books and issues and kiss in the rain. I think something like that would be very good for him, especially if the girl were unconventionally beautiful. They are the best kind of girls, I think. I personally find “super models” strange. I don’t know why this is.
(51)
I always wanted to be on a sports team like that. I’m not exactly sure why, but I always thought it would be fun to have “glory days.” Then, I would have stories to tell my children and golf buddies. I guess I could tell people about Punk Rocky and walking home from school and things like that. Maybe these are my glory days, and I’m not even realizing it because they don’t involve a ball.
(52)
My grandma is very old, and she doesn’t remember things a lot, but she bakes the most delicious cookies. When I was very little, we had my mom’s mom, who always had candy, and my dad’s mom, who always had cookies. My mom told me that when I was little, I called them “Candy Grandma” and “Cookies Grandma.” I also called pizza crust “pizza bones.” I don’t know why I’m telling you this.
(85)
I have a date for the Sadie Hawkins dance. In case you didn’t have one of those, it’s the dance where the girl asks the boy. In my case, the girl is Mary Elizabeth, and the boy is me.
(108-9)
She keeps talking to me about the Billie Holiday record she bought for me. And she says she wants to expose me to all these great things. And to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to be exposed to all these great things if it means that I’ll have to hear Mary Elizabeth talk about all the great things she exposed me too all the time. It almost feels like of the three things involved: Mary Elizabeth, me, and the great things, only the first one matters to Mary Elizabeth. I don’t understand that. I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.
(129)
It suddenly dawned on me that if Michael were still around, Susan probably wouldn’t be “going out” with him anymore. Not because she’s a bad person or shallow or mean. But because things change. And friends leave. And life doesn’t stop for anybody.
(145)
I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me. But I was at a party with my friends, so it didn’t really matter that much. I just drank because I figured that it was about time to stop smoking so much pot.
(154)
All I hope is that tonight is great for the people whom it’s supposed to great for. I hope that my sister feels beautiful, and her new guy makes her feel beautiful. I hope that Craig doesn’t make Sam feel that her prom isn’t special just because he’s older. I hope the same for Mary Elizabeth with Peter. I hope Brad and Patrick decide to make up and dance in front of the whole school. And that Alice is secretly a lesbian and in love with Brad’s girlfriend Nancy (and vice versa), so nobody feels left out.
(173)
Hey Nostradamus!
2003
My family wasn’t so much anti-God as it was pro the world.
(13)
In the end, we are judged by our deeds, not our wishes. We’re the sum of our decisions.
(16)
Friends are always betrayers in the end—everybody has the one person to whom they spill everything, an that special person isn’t always the obvious person you’d think. People are leaky.
(21)
The sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.
(42)
If I’ve learned anything in twenty-nine years, it’s that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that’s sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift—bad choice of words—is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.
(52)
I’ve been writing these last bits in a coffee shop. I’m now officially one of those people you see writing dream diaries and screenplays in every Starbucks, except if you saw me writing, you’d maybe guess I was faking some quickie journal entries to hand my anger management counselor. So be it.
(97)
I am not a stupid woman. I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t how to join if I tried. I live in a condo in a remote suburb of a remote city. It rains a lot here. I need groceries and I go to the shopping center. Sometimes they’ll be rebuilding a road and putting those bright blue plastic pipes down in holes; there’ll be various grades of gravel in conical piles, and I almost short-circuit when I think of all the systems that are in place to keep our world moving. Where does all the gravel come from? Where do they make blue plastic pipes? Who dug the holes? How did it reach the point where everyone agreed to be doing this? Airports almost make me speechless, what with all of these people in little jumpsuits eagerly bopping about doing some highly qualified task. I don’t know how the world works, only that it seems to do so, and I leave it at that.
(176)
Lists only spell out the things that can be taken away from us by moths and rust and thieves. If something is valuable, don’t put it on a list. Don’t even say the words.
(238)
These days I think that everybody’s just one spit away from being a mall bomber. People say sugary nice things all the time, but believe none of it. See how many weapons people have stockpiled; inspect their ammo cache; read their criminal records; get them drunk and bring up God; and then you really know what it is you have to protect yourself from. Forget intentions—learn the deeds of which they’re capable.
(241)
Why I’m Like This
2002
It drives me crazy that you just can’t count on anyone to stay down so you can feel up. And just to put a capper on the whole thing, tonight I have to go to a party. I’ve got to get in the shower and dry my hair and put on makeup and pick an outfit. And then for three or four excruciating hours I have to skirt the edge of my bitter homebody character and try not to get so smashed that I say something truly revealing. Because nobody wants to hear it.
(70)
I have an almost unshakable confidence in my ability to think logically. And I am pretty much always right.
(86)
Am I the only one for whom the most mundane of activities lead inexorably to accidental death?
(103)
It had been a year since we started trying to conceive. That probably doesn’t seem like long to some people, but since I have a self-destructive habit of calculating my life in dog years, it was an eternity to me.
(145)
Recently, my niece broke her wrist while she was on vacation in France with my brother, his wife, and their other daughter. She fell off a swing. Let me say first that I was not in France. And yet I have replayed the scene, or my rendering of it, over and over in my imagination. I take nothing in stride. How could it have happened? Wasn’t anyone watching? She herself told me about some Charging Wild Boars. What about them? This is how it goes, late into the night. Clearly, there is an ineluctable crack in my psyche which will eventually require surgery, or drugs, or both.
(153)
If therapy did one thing for me it pushed my anger from its longtime residence in the space between my ears and sent it rocketing out my mouth. At one time, if a car cut me off as I was crossing the street, the event would provoke a furious interior monologue about where the driver had to be that was so important that it was worth running me down. I would fantasize about confronting him, perhaps from my hospital bed or in a dramatic courtroom showdown. Now, I will just kick the back of the car as it makes the turn and yell “Asshole!” What a nice example I set for my son. I am so primed for an actual confrontation that David sometimes whispers, “Choose joy,” if I seem to be building up a particularly frothy head of steam.
(177)
The Anomalies
2003
“Ooh! Let’s make a toast!” I suggest after the waiter brings Ray his Mountain Dew. I’ve recently become fond of toasting because it’s one of those things you can do to make yourself feel more grown-up without spreading disease.
(19)
Alone, I wait for the bus, tying not to notice that everything around me is dying the mildew death, the great cracked concrete standstill that is the case in the Midwest, a land that doesn’t know whether to stay or grow, a realm that calls it quits after a Wal-Mart, a Red Lobster, and a winning basketball team, an undecided, unambitious region that ultimately ends up a halfway house for humanity, full of pointless towns and hindered sons. A god needs to drop a bomb here to improve it.
(32)
“William Blake wrote, ‘Without contraries is no progression.’ I hold this to be true, and it may offer some insight into the magnificent splendor that is me.”
(32-3)
“Hey, man, you can just put that beer in the back of my truck,” says a patron. I hear this or a variation of this comment at least ten times a day. I stopped making any sort of response years ago. These men, along with their fathers and sons, mothers, wives, and daughters, are all hooked up to the same giant mechanical brain. This brain hovers above the stratosphere in the big black sky and has nothing to do with God. It is man-made. From it hang billions of wires that are skinnier than rat hair. Most people (id est—the humanoids) cannot see these wires. But on a clear day, if I squint hard enough, I can see all the wires playing Dr. Tangle and entering the base of everyone’s brains at the back of their necks. I cut mine long ago, and it was a painless procedure, seriously.
(35)
“Thank God,” he says, hugging his untainted daughter. “I was beginning to worry that I was a complete failure as a father and as a reverend. You’ve restored my faith with your morality, Rory.” I don’t bother telling him that my virginity has nothing to do with morality, that my frigidity is based on a palpable disgust for fellow man, that I’ve simply had no desire to consummate any relationship with any of the primitive idiots I’ve so far encountered in this town, and that so-called morality has been a favorable side effect.
(140-1)
If you are not nervous, you should be. Cowardly are the cool. Coolness comes from lies that people give themselves—that they are in control, that everything is going to be all right, that they belong wherever they are. The truth is that every second of every day, there are a thousand things that could go wrong, from the tiny animals infecting our bloodstream to the biggest VIPs making horrendous mistakes that will make our great-grandchildren want to sleep all day.
(157)
Everything Is Illuminated
2002
Oh, yes. There is one additional item. I did not amputate Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior from the story, even though you counseled that I should amputate her. You uttered that the story would be more “refined” with her absence, and I know that refined is like cultivated, polished, and well bred, but I will inform you that Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior is a very distinguished character, one with variegated appetites and seats of passion. Let us view her evolution and then resolve.
(55)
First I witnessed the television. It was exhibiting a football game. (I do not remember who was competing, but I am confident that we were winning.) I witnessed a hand on the chair that Grandfather likes to view television in. But it was not Grandfather’s hand. I tried to see more, and I almost fell over. I know that I should have recognized the sound that was a little less than crying. It was Little Igor. (I am such a stupid fool.) This made me a suffering person. I will tell you why. I knew why he was a little less than crying. I knew very well, and I wanted to go to him and tell him that I had a little less than cried too, just like him, and that no matter how much it seemed like he would never grow up to be a premium person like me, with many girls and so many famous places to go, he would. He would be exactly like me. And look at me, Little Igor, the bruises go away, and so does how you hate, and so does the feeling that everything you receive in life is something you have earned.
(68)
“Make sure you secure the door after we go to our room,” I told him. “I do not want to make you a petrified person, but there are many dangerous people who want to take things without asking from Americans, and also kidnap them. Good night.”
(72)
“It’s late,” he thought, “and I must be thankful for everything I have, and reconciled with everything I have lost and not lost. I tried very hard to be a good person today, to do things as God would have wanted, had He existed.”
(85)
“You could give someone else a chance.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
“But you could do it anyway.”
“Nope.”
“But we agreed that ceremony and ritual are so foolish.”
“But we also agreed that they are foolish only to those on the outside. I’m the center of this one.”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
“But you could do it anyway.”
“Nope.”
“But we agreed that ceremony and ritual are so foolish.”
“But we also agreed that they are foolish only to those on the outside. I’m the center of this one.”
(91)
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be mistaken for light—a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut’s eyes. The glow is born from the sum of thousands of loves: newlyweds and teenagers who spark like lighters out of butane, pairs of men who burn fast and bright, pairs of women who illuminate for hours with soft multiple glows, orgies like rock and flint toys sold at festivals, couples trying unsuccessfully to have children who burn their frustrated image on the continent like the bloom a bright light leaves on the eye after you turn away from it.
(95)
The man fashioned a map on a piece of paper that Grandfather excavated from the drawer for gloves, where I will keep lubricated extra-large condoms when I have the car of my dreams. (They will not be ribbed for her pleasure, because there is no need, if you understand what I mean.)
(109)
I have made efforts to make you appear as a person with less anxiety, as you have commanded me to do on so many occasions. This is difficult to achieve, because in truth you are a person with very much anxiety. Perhaps you should be a drug user.
(142)
Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night’s sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn’t hear her husband’s ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren’s will be. But we learn to live in that love.
(266)
you’re tacky and i hate you.
Mixes | Buddies | Literature | Dictionary
Overheard | Questions of the Week
Mixes | Buddies | Literature | Dictionary
Overheard | Questions of the Week