Tuesday, February 9, 2016
The Police
So lonely/
so lonely/
so lonely/
I feel so lonely
I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo --
I feel so lonely LONELY LONELY LO
I FEEL LONELY
SO LONELY!!
from Jonathan Franzen's Purity
Regarding Pip's relationship to her mother:
'No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched. The problem, as Pip saw it -- the essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything -- was that she loved her mother. Pitied her; suffered with her; warmed to the sound of her voice; felt an unsettling kind of nonsexual attraction to her body; wished her greater happiness; hated upsettting her; found her dear. This was the massive block of granite at the center of her life, the source of all the anger and sarcasm that she directed not only at her mother but, more and more self-defeatingly of late, at less appropriate objects. When Pip got angry, it wasn't really at her mother but at the granite block.'
Quite.
After heartbreak (complete with humiliation):
'Nothing could end it. Pip couldn't leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame.'
Did find the poem 'Muttersprace/Mother Tongue' that changed Andreas Wolf into a famous person truly annoying, for it having been half in German, with no translation in sight, and SORRY, but I don't have a fucking iPhone or Kindle to do it for me, so whole thing went over my head. Mighta been nice to include an appendix, Jon? Athan?
Regarding journalism, Leila says:
'In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be.'
(To the point of still getting mail from the Unabomber in jail!)
Taking care of her disabled, novelist/teacher husband, she comes home with Pip and he says:
'The soul is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That's what I've become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.' He nodded at Leila. 'And she worries that I'm not happy.'
'Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.'
Re discussion about feminism:
'Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. 'I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,' he'd said once. 'What I don't get is the theory. Whether woman are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.' And he'd laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefitted professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.'
'Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?'
'I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.'
'...she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the heart of shyness.'
'I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed her hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden. He pulled away and composed himself.'
Then there was this -- to me -- hilarious 'exchange of information/one-up-man-ship' that guys are able and WILLING to to engage in, for up to forty, NAY, seventy-five (and longer, trust me) minutes at a time about (in this case) 'the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential -- ... Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of of that, too.'
(brag much?)
This the kind of thing modern men use (sitting in the front seat on a double date, having met only through their girlfriends) while the women in the back are confiding in each other about abortion.
p. 429
'Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with hit. Even hating your own heart is no relief.'
Here's one of the best descriptions of addiction I have ever read:
'It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he'd also been glimpsing death in online porn. Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response.
... The brain reduced by machine (paper, pipe, straw, glass tube, needle -- all utilitarian tools, ultimately) to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality:
*(ie YOUR NAME: JUNKIE)* a person might as well have been already dead.'
*content mine*
Later...: as he gets an unsavory source to delete the selfies he took with himself (Andreas), is 'reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he'd scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles:
'Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: probably the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was.'
(And that will bring/us/back/to:
Faulkner (whose dialect I have to be willing to master): 'the past isn't dead. It isn't even past yet!'
What is that they say about great artists? 'They don't plagiarize...they steal outright.')
sic
(c'est moi)
Bit of great stuff re dogs later. Cain't go wrong with dog stuff. Even just stupid dog stuff is great:
(re tennis balls Pip uses to replace the Ativan when it runs out; ie, hitting dead ones against a garage wall): '
Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.'
Next tiny down-turned corner'ed page for this, re flying in turbulence:
'She expected death the whole way. What was interesting was how quickly she then forgot about it, like a dog to whom death was literally unimaginable, while she rode in a cab. Dogs again had it right. They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.
And my penultimate fave:
'Pip nodded , but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power; how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?'
Beautifully said, Jonathan Franzen. I thank thee for that.
Okay so here's the last and then we have to quickquicklikebunnies give tome back to libe, or be charged! Because other people are waiting! (surely among the sweetest words to any writer's published ears!) yeah yeah yeah don't copy edit that just let it be.
Of course, deadline having been stated, am just going to say how lyrical he is on the subject of the California twohead (towhead?) bird. I would like to write out nearly all of page 555 and the first para of 556. But/cher (whoa) gonna have to read that one for yourself.
And if you're not an animal and/or total bio-diversity lover, 't'won't be your fave.
I did like the note (and the deeply honest cynicism of the last page).
Thanks for writing books, JF.
I feel the way Jeanette Winterson once put down:
'I write so that I will always have something to read.'
Ouehhhhh, c'est moi aussi.
'No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched. The problem, as Pip saw it -- the essence of the handicap she lived with; the presumable cause of her inability to be effective at anything -- was that she loved her mother. Pitied her; suffered with her; warmed to the sound of her voice; felt an unsettling kind of nonsexual attraction to her body; wished her greater happiness; hated upsettting her; found her dear. This was the massive block of granite at the center of her life, the source of all the anger and sarcasm that she directed not only at her mother but, more and more self-defeatingly of late, at less appropriate objects. When Pip got angry, it wasn't really at her mother but at the granite block.'
Quite.
After heartbreak (complete with humiliation):
'Nothing could end it. Pip couldn't leave her bed, let alone leave her room, let alone go outside, where the strong sunlight of another hideously perfect day might honestly have caused her to die of shame.'
Did find the poem 'Muttersprace/Mother Tongue' that changed Andreas Wolf into a famous person truly annoying, for it having been half in German, with no translation in sight, and SORRY, but I don't have a fucking iPhone or Kindle to do it for me, so whole thing went over my head. Mighta been nice to include an appendix, Jon? Athan?
Regarding journalism, Leila says:
'In reporting, as in sex, Leila had always been a caller-back. The only way she could morally tolerate her seductions was honestly to be, at some level, the person she was pretending to be.'
(To the point of still getting mail from the Unabomber in jail!)
Taking care of her disabled, novelist/teacher husband, she comes home with Pip and he says:
'The soul is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That's what I've become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.' He nodded at Leila. 'And she worries that I'm not happy.'
'Over the years, Leila had come to believe that politicians were literally made of special stuff, chemically different stuff. The senator was flabby and bad-haired and acne-scarred and yet completely magnetic. His pores exuded some pheromone that made her want to look at him, keep hearing his voice, be liked by him. And she did feel liked. Everyone he wanted to be liked by did.'
Re discussion about feminism:
'Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. 'I get feminism as an equal-rights issue,' he'd said once. 'What I don't get is the theory. Whether woman are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.' And he'd laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around: conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefitted professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.'
'Have you ever been tempted to leave a thought unspoken?'
'I'm a writer, baby. Voicing thought is what I'm poorly paid and uncharitably reviewed for.'
'...she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the heart of shyness.'
'I stroked his head and held him close. If he'd been a woman, I would have kissed her hair. But strict limits to intimacy are the straight man's burden. He pulled away and composed himself.'
Then there was this -- to me -- hilarious 'exchange of information/one-up-man-ship' that guys are able and WILLING to to engage in, for up to forty, NAY, seventy-five (and longer, trust me) minutes at a time about (in this case) 'the rate of caloric transfer is proportional to temperature differential -- ... Andreas tried to fight me with integral calculus, but I remembered the basics of of that, too.'
(brag much?)
This the kind of thing modern men use (sitting in the front seat on a double date, having met only through their girlfriends) while the women in the back are confiding in each other about abortion.
p. 429
'Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married. Only love, only long empathy and identification and compassion, can root another person in your heart so deeply that there's no escaping your hatred of her, not ever; especially not when the thing you hate most about her is her capacity to be hurt by you. The love persists and the hatred with hit. Even hating your own heart is no relief.'
Here's one of the best descriptions of addiction I have ever read:
'It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he'd also been glimpsing death in online porn. Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response.
... The brain reduced by machine (paper, pipe, straw, glass tube, needle -- all utilitarian tools, ultimately) to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality:
*(ie YOUR NAME: JUNKIE)* a person might as well have been already dead.'
*content mine*
Later...: as he gets an unsavory source to delete the selfies he took with himself (Andreas), is 'reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he'd scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles:
'Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: probably the same thing! "It's over now!" What's that supposed to mean? It's as good as if it never was.'
(And that will bring/us/back/to:
Faulkner (whose dialect I have to be willing to master): 'the past isn't dead. It isn't even past yet!'
What is that they say about great artists? 'They don't plagiarize...they steal outright.')
sic
(c'est moi)
Bit of great stuff re dogs later. Cain't go wrong with dog stuff. Even just stupid dog stuff is great:
(re tennis balls Pip uses to replace the Ativan when it runs out; ie, hitting dead ones against a garage wall): '
Could a more perfect manufactured object than a tennis ball be imagined? Fuzzy and spherical, squeezable and bouncy, its stitching a pair of matching tongues, its voice on impact a pock in the most pleasing of registers. Dogs knew a good thing, dogs loved tennis balls, and so did she.'
Next tiny down-turned corner'ed page for this, re flying in turbulence:
'She expected death the whole way. What was interesting was how quickly she then forgot about it, like a dog to whom death was literally unimaginable, while she rode in a cab. Dogs again had it right. They didn't trouble themselves with mysteries that could never be solved anyway.
And my penultimate fave:
'Pip nodded , but she was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power. Secrets were power. Money was power. Being needed was power. Power, power, power; how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?'
Beautifully said, Jonathan Franzen. I thank thee for that.
Okay so here's the last and then we have to quickquicklikebunnies give tome back to libe, or be charged! Because other people are waiting! (surely among the sweetest words to any writer's published ears!) yeah yeah yeah don't copy edit that just let it be.
Of course, deadline having been stated, am just going to say how lyrical he is on the subject of the California twohead (towhead?) bird. I would like to write out nearly all of page 555 and the first para of 556. But/cher (whoa) gonna have to read that one for yourself.
And if you're not an animal and/or total bio-diversity lover, 't'won't be your fave.
I did like the note (and the deeply honest cynicism of the last page).
Thanks for writing books, JF.
I feel the way Jeanette Winterson once put down:
'I write so that I will always have something to read.'
Ouehhhhh, c'est moi aussi.
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