Maximum Sentences

An old knot in the heart

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 09:56:00 -0400

“That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.”

and

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to loosen and untie.”

From: The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje

Read: During the great rainout of 2011.

"You know, Frank Black doesn't live in space. He lives here"

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:05:00 -0400

“People always say that it’s autobiographical and they always assume — and I always do — when they hear a song, they think it’s autobiographical. I did a songwriting panel at New Music Seminar one year with Kris Kristofferson. And he was saying, ‘You can’t write
fiction; songwriters only write about what they know.’ And I said, ‘Bullshit,’ right off the bat to him. ‘Bullshit. Science fiction writers do not live in outer space. You know, Frank Black doesn’t live in space. He lives here.’ We got a good laugh out of that.

“I write fiction a lot of times. In ‘Band Camp,’ there’s a kernel of my own story in there, because I did go to band camp.

“I’ve never finished a novel, really. I’ve thrown out several. I got close to finishing one but I threw it in the trash. I’ve been working on one for a long time. I just don’t think it’s my bag. I enjoy doing it, but I just don’t think it’s my bag. … Stories about growing up in the South. Stories about bohemian life, hanging-out kind of life. No big departure.

“I don’t know, there’s a certain mystique about the Southern writer. People in the rest of the country, they don’t assume that people in the South can read. So when somebody from the South can write … There’s all kind of mythic darkness associated with the South, the underbelly of violence.

“These are pretty universal songs — they could take place anywhere.”

From: An interview I conducted with Vic Chesnutt in February 2003. We talked about his new album at the time (Silver Lake), his drinking (“I did shit I don’t know what I did for years”), the car accident that left him paralyzed, small-town Georgia, Emmylou Harris, Sling Blade (in which he appeared alongside Billy Bob Thornton) and Madonna (who had recorded one of his songs). He was gentle, honest, tragic, funny and friendly. He was a real person, and he passed away Christmas Day 2009. You should know his music, if you don’t already.

Read: While looking around the past.

Bonus quote: “I don’t want to listen to me. I want to listen to other people. I got no business listening to myself.”

"You're not growing in the direction of your own nature"

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:14:00 -0400

“Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.”

From: Train Dreams: A Novella by Denis Johnson

Read: During an afternoon thunderstorm in Miami

"His favorite waking dreams"

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 17:46:19 -0400

“Always, after he was in bed, there were voices — indefinite, fading, enchanting — just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.”

From: This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Read: In an aeroplane over the sea

"By its very nature calculated"

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:22:41 -0400

“Whether it honors them well or not, an essay’s fundamental obligations are supposed to be to the reader. The reader, on however unconscious a level, understands this, and thus tends to approach an essay with a relatively high level of openness and credulity. But a commercial is a very different animal. Advertisements have certain formal, legal obligations to truthfulness, but these are broad enough to allow for a great deal of rhetorical maneuvering in the fulfillment of an advertisement’s primary obligation, which is to serve the financial interests of its sponsor. Whatever attempts an advertisement makes to interest and appeal to its readers are not, finally, for the reader’s benefit. And the reader of an ad knows all this, too — that an ad’s appeal is by its very nature calculated — and this is part of why our state of receptivity is different, more guarded, when we get ready to read an ad. …

“An ad that pretends to be art is — at absolute best — like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.”

From: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by DFW

Read: In front of the television.

"If I want to be any kind of grownup"

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 09:09:01 -0400

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable — if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

From: “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace

Read: During a lunch break, in a conference room at work, and four months’ shy of 40.

"In A, D and so on"

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 19:10:00 -0400

“He didn’t strike the piano keys for pitch — he simply opened his mouth and gave falsetto howls — in A, D and so on — they tuned by him. Then he took hold of the piano, as if he saw it for the first time in his life, and tested it for strength, hit it down in the bass, played an octave with his elbow, lifted the top, looked inside, and leaned against it with all his might. He sat down and played it for a few minutes with outrageous force and got it under his power — a bass deep and coarse as a sea net — then produced something glimmering and fragile, and smiled. And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.”

From: “Powerhouse” in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories by Eudora Welty

Read: At the gym, of all places

“Jack Kerouac Shoots Pool” — via Tnr.com

Sat, 16 Jul 2011 08:34:43 -0400

“Jack Kerouac Shoots Pool” — via Tnr.com

"The first ranks of the clouds"

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:58:00 -0400

“On summer mornings over the Glades the sky is only faintly hazed. The moisture is being drawn up from the sheen among the saw grass. By noon, the first ranks of the clouds will lie at the same height across the world, cottony and growing. The moisture lifts the whipped and glistening heights. The bases darken, grow purple, grow brown. The sun is almost gone. The highest clouds loose their moisture, which is condensed into cloud again before it can reach the earth. Then they grow more heavy. The winds slash before them and the rains roar down, making all the saw grass somber.”

From: The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Read: Late this summer afternoon, at my patio table in Miami, breathing in citronella and realizing that a blade of sawgrass has not nicked my skin in years.

"Yowling off the low stage"

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:26:16 -0400

“It was early 1983, probably, after the ‘Everything Falls Apart’ EP presaged Hüsker Dü’s departure from hard-core punk and before the ‘Metal Circus’ EP made it official. Just a gig at a crummy club near CBGB, and late — after 1. There weren’t a dozen onlookers, but Hüsker Dü’s two early records were knockouts, and that Minneapolis trio never came east, so there we were. From our booth in back the music sounded terrific: headlong and enormous, the guitar unfashionably full, expressive and unending, with two raving vocalists alternating leads on songs whose words were hard to understand and whose tunes weren’t. Another half-dozen curious fans drifted in. And then, halfway through, the guitarist passed into some other dimension. When he stepped yowling off the low stage, most of us gravitated closer, glancing around and shaking our heads.”

From: “Hüsker Dü’s Propulsive Liberation” by Robert Christgau, in the June 26 New York Times Book Review

Read: While yearning for a blast of Candy Apple Grey.

"A primordial calligraphy"

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:16:00 -0400

“To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons of a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature.”

From: The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant

Read: From the safety of my bedroom.

"Marooned in Missoula"

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:19:41 -0400

“And so I found myself marooned in Missoula, a wan, lipstick-wearing ex-Alabama sorority girl surrounded by strapping outdoorsy women with biceps larger than my thighs and pseudo-hippie girls who were carefully cultivating the tender tufts of underarm hair they showcased in homemade tapestry sundresses. Both kinds of women scared me, their dogmatic devotion to climbing or drum circles reminiscent of the reverent zealousness of the evangelical girls in my high school who carried their Bible instead of school books. I was suspicious of obsession, of full-throated abandon of any kind.

“And then I discovered video keno.”

From: “Ode to Video Crack” by Jennifer S. Davis in The Oxford American’s Best of the South issue

Read: While hamstrung in Hollywood.

A page from the notebook of Jack Kerouac, fantasy baseball...

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 23:14:00 -0400

A page from the notebook of Jack Kerouac, fantasy baseball manager.

From: “Kerouac at Bat” at Newyorktimes.com

Read: While wishing I had been able to watch tonight’s Yankees-Rangers game, which the Bombers won 12-4 — a repeat of the outcome from last night’s game.

"So as to make it last and last"

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:14:00 -0400

“To dismiss the twins as blank slates would be to misjudge them; their simplicity had depth. Rarely speaking of yesterday, they lived in the God-given now. Spending hours examining every flower at the Pleasant Valley Nursery. Licking every Twist & Shake ice cream cone so as to make it last and last. Pondering the art in the studio of Brother David Haack, then going off to build picture frames in their nearby workshop — where, occasionally, he heard them call each other Jerome and Irving.

“If they quarreled, Brother David said, ‘It would be over the measurement of a piece of wood.’ And even then, it would be done silently: a slight cock of Julian’s head, to suggest that he didn’t agree with Adrian’s calculations.”

From: “For Franciscan Twins, Simple Lives Had Depth” by Dan Barry in The New York Times

Read: Alone, in a quiet room.

"A fear of clouds"

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:21:00 -0400

“When you consider a person has to be free of a fear of fire (pyrophobia), a fear of confined spaces (claustrophobia), a fear of being alone (isolophobia), a fear of heights (acrophobia), a fear of steep slopes and stairs (bathmophobia), a fear of being forgotten or ignored (athazagoraphobia), a fear of the dark (nyctophobia), a fear of wild animals (agrizoophobia), a fear of birds (ornithophobia), a fear of thunder and lightning (brontophobia), a fear of forests (hylophobia), a fear of wind (anemophobia), a fear of clouds (nephophobia), a fear of fog (homichlophobia), a fear of rain (ombrophobia), a fear of stars (siderophobia), and a fear of the moon (selenophobia), then it’s little wonder most people aren’t meant to be lookouts.”

From: Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors

Read: While looking out the tinted windows of one office tower and into the mirrored windows of another, and imagining a career that would keep me outdoors, always, and suffering not at all a fear of open spaces (agoraphobia), a fear of work (ergophobia) or a fear of time (chronophobia).

"A three day's fever"

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:36:48 -0400

“Bring Dickens on a trip to Greenwich, in southeast London, and the quiet hamlet springs alive. The scene sounds less antiquated than you’d expect; the annual Greenwich fair was as rowdy as a college festival, ‘a three day’s fever, which cools the blood for six months afterwards.’ There were stalls selling toys, cigars and oysters; games, clowns, dwarfs, bands and bad skits; and noisy, spirited women playing penny trumpets and dancing in men’s hats. In the park, couples would race down the hill from the observatory, ‘greatly to the derangement of [the women’s] curls and bonnet caps.’ ”

From: “How Charles Dickens Saw London” by Rebecca Dalzell in Smithsonian

Read: While my fiancée, in a neighboring room of our house, neared the end of Great Expectations for the first time.

"Under a scouring sun"

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 09:36:43 -0400

“The exoticism of Kampsville was not the sort I’d craved. The town population was only four hundred; I recall a single bar with a pinball machine that was dominated by an angry-looking kid around my age. My digging compatriots were mostly retirees; stewed prunes figured prominently at mealtimes. But the real shock was the square metre of earth — delineated by strings attached to pegs — that was the extent of my archeological domain. We weren’t allowed to sit on our squares, only to squat. Nor were we to dig on our dig, only to skim away fine layers of earth with a scalpel, lowering the surface of our metre over the course of days, until the objects embedded there — projectile points or pottery shards—rested on top. This soil-shaving took place under a scouring sun, in ninety-degree temperatures. By day two, I was craving stewed prunes long before lunchtime. By day three, I’d renounced my goal of becoming an archeologist.”

From: “Archeology” by Jennifer Egan in The New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue

Read: While recalling a visit to a similar dig in the Badlands of South Dakota in the late 1990s. The archaeologists on site looked more like Barnaby Jones than Indiana Jones, but they were close to unearthing their own holy grail: a prehistoric pig.

"Into the air backward"

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:06:00 -0400

“Directly in front of us, as though engaged in some avant-garde stage performance, a Brazilian surfer dropped onto a wave. He wobbled in the barrel for a few seconds before being pitched into the air backward; the effect was of a bowling pin blown off a balance beam by a fire hose. We saw his board rocket into the sky, and the flash of a leg that looked like it was bent in the wrong direction. ‘There’s a scenario,’ Miller said. ‘A bad one.’ “

From: The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey

Read: While sitting in the waiting room of a car wash in Coconut Grove that advertises free popcorn. There was none, but then, I’ve never had any use for popcorn before noon.