Quotes

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Something Fine

The papers lie there helplessly
In a pile outside the door
I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t remember what they’re for
The world outside is tugging like a beggar at my sleeve
Oh, that’s much too old a story to believe

And you know that it’s taken it’s share of me
Even though you take such good care of me
Now you say “Morocco” and that makes me smile
I haven’t seen Morocco in a long, long while
The dreams are rolling down across the places in my mind
And I’ve just had a taste of something fine

The future hides and the past just slides
England lies between
Floating in a silver mist so cold and so clean
California’s shaking like an angry child will
Who has asked for love and is unanswered still

And you know that I’m looking back carefully
‘Cause I know that there’s still something there for me
But you said “Morocco” and you made me smile
And it hasn’t been that easy for a long, long while
And looking back into your eyes I saw them really shine
Giving me a taste of something fine
Something fine

Now if you see Morocco I know you’ll go in style
I may not see Morocco for a little while
But while you’re there I was hoping you might keep it in your mind
To save me just a taste of something fine

— Jackson Browne

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A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.

— Franz Kafka,
letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904

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It was more like trying to pull something heavier than you

‘Hold on to your heart,’ C said, watching the needle go in. The pharmacist slid it in expertly, horizontal and flush to the skin. Gately had never done Sunshine. Next to ungettable outside a Canadian hospital. He watched his own blood ruddle the serum as the pharmacist extended his thumb to ease the plunger back. The pharmacist’s assistant could really boot. C’s tongue was in the corner of his mouth as he watched. The corporate guy had Fackelmann’s arms held tight and a transvestal who’d gotten in behind the chair held his head by the chin and hair as the gray lady knelt before him with her threaded needle. Gately couldn’t keep himself from watching the stuff go in him. There was no pain. He wondered for a second if it was a hot shot: it seemed like a whole lot of trouble to go to just to get him off. The pharmacist’s thumbnail was ingrown. There were a couple eczema-flakes on Gately’s arm where the guy was inclined over it. You get to like the sight of your own blood after a while. The pharmacist had him half booted when Fackelmann started screaming. The scream’s pitch got higher as it drew out. When Gately could look away from the stuff going in, he saw the librarian-type lady was sewing poor old Count Faxula’s eyes open. A kid on the playground had used to turn his lids inside out at girls like they were doing now to poor old Faxter. Gately gave a reflexive jerk toward him, and C hugged him tight with one arm.

‘Easy,’ C said very softly

The taste of the hydrochloride in the Sunshine was the same, delicious, the taste of the smell of every Dr.’s office everywhere. He’d never done Talwin-PX. Impossible to get scrips for, the PX, a Canadian blend; U.S. Talwin’s got .5 mg. of naloxone mixed in, to cut the buzz, is why Gately only did NX on top of Bam-Bams. He understood they’d given Fackelmann the anti-narc so he’d feel the needle as they sewed his eyes open. Cruel is spelled with a u, he remembered. Linda McC. sounded borderline-psychotic. The little gray lady worked fast. The eye that was already sewed open bulged obscenely. Everybody in the room except C and the corporate guy and grim lady started shooting dope. Two of the fags had their eyes shut and their faces at the ceiling as if they couldn’t take watching what they were doing to their arm. The pharmacist was tying off the passed-out Pamela Hoffman-Jeep, which seemed like insult+injury. There was every different kind of style and skill-level of injection and boot going on. Fackelmann’s face was still a scream-face. The corporate-tool guy was dropping fluid from a pipette into Fackelmann’s sewed-open eye while the lady rethreaded the needle. It was just seeming to Gately he’d seen the fluid-in-eye thing in a cartridge or movie the M.P.’d liked when he was a Bim playing ball on the chintz in the sea when the Sunshine crossed the barrier and came on.

You could see why the U.S. made them cut the buzz. The air in the room got overclear, a glycerine shine, colors brightening terribly. If colors themselves could catch fire. The word on the C-II Talwin-PX was it was intense but short-acting, and pricey. No word on its interaction with massive residual amounts of I.V.-Dilaudid. Gately tried to figure while he still could. If they were going to eliminate his map with an O.D. they’d have used something cheap. And if the librarian was going to sew his eyes open. Gately was trying to think. Too they wouldn’t have got him. Him. Got him off.

The very air of the room bulged. It ballooned. Fackelmann’s screams about lies rose and fell, hard to hear against the arterial roar of the Sun. McC. was trying to muffle a cough. Gately couldn’t feel his legs. He could feel C’s arms around him taking more and more of his weight. C’s arms’s muscles rising and hardening: he could feel this. His legs were, like: opting out. Attack of floors and sidewalks. Kite used to sing a ditty called ’32 Uses For Sterno Me Lad.’ C was starting to let him down easy. Strong squat hard kid. Most heroin-men you can knock down with a Boo. C: there was a gentleness about C, for a kid with the eyes of a lizard. He was letting him down real easy. C was going to protect Bimmy Don from the bad floor’s assault. The supported swoon spun Gately around, C moving around him like a dancer to slow the fall. Gately got a rotary view of the room in almost untakable focus. Pointgravè was vomiting chunkily. Two of the fags were sliding down the wall they had their backs to. Their red coats were aflame. The passing window exploded with light. Or else it was DesMontes that was vomiting and Pointgravè was taking the TP’s viewer off the wall and stretching its fibroid wire over toward Fackelmann against the wall. One of Fax’s eyes was as open as his mouth, disclosing way more eye than you ever want to see on somebody. He was no longer struggling. He stared piratically straight ahead. The librarian was starting on his other eye. The bland man had a rose in his lapel and he’d put on glasses with metal lenses and was blind-high and missing Fax’s eye with the dropper half the time, saying something to Pointgravè. A transvestal had P.H.-J.’s torn hem hiked up and a spiderish hand on her flesh-colored thigh. P.H.-J.’s face was gray and blue. The floor came up slowly. Bobby C’s squat face looked almost pretty, tragic, half lit by the window, tucked up under Gately’s spinning shoulder. Gately felt less high than disembodied. It was obscenely pleasant. His head left his shoulders. Gene and Linda were both screaming. The cartridge with the held-open eyes and dropper had been the one about ultra-violence and sadism. A favorite of Kite. Gately thinks sadism is pronounced ‘saddism.’ The last rotating sight was the chinks coming back through the doo, holding big shiny squares of the room. As the floor wafted up and C’s grip finally gave, the last thing Gately saw was an Oriental bearing down with the held square and he looked into the square and saw clearly a reflection of his own big square pale head with its eyes closing as the floor finally pounced. And when he came back to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.

— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

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Introduction to the Universe

At the instant I first became aware of the cosmos we all infest I was sitting in my mother’s lap and blinking at a great burst of lights, some of them red and others green, but most of them only the bright yellow of flaring gas. The time: the evening of Thursday, September 13, 1883, which was the day after my third birthday. The place: a ledge outside the second-story front windows of my father’s cigar factory at 368 Baltimore street, Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A., fenced off from space and disaster by a sign bearing the majestic legend: AUG. MENCKEN & BRO. The occasion: the third and last annual Summer Nights’ Carnival of the Order of the Orioles, a society that adjourned sine die, with a thumping deficit, the very next morning, and has since been forgotten by the whole human race.

At that larval stage of my life, of course, I knew nothing whatever about the Order of Orioles, just as I knew nothing whatever about the United States, though I had been born to their liberties, and was entitled to the protection of their army and navy. All I was aware of, emerging from the unfathomable abyss of nonentity, was the fact that the world I had just burst into seemed to be very brilliant, and that peeping at it over my father’s sign was somewhat hard on my still gelatinous bones. So I made signals of distress to my mother and was duly hauled into her lap, where I first dozed and then snored away until the lights went out, and the family buggy wafted me home, still asleep.

— H. L. Mencken,
from Happy Days, 1940

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Marginal Revenge

THOMASINA:  If you do not teach me the true meaning of things, who will?

SEPTIMUS:  Ah. Yes, I am ashamed. Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure. Fermat’s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y, and z are whole numbers raised to power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2. (Pause.)

THOMASINA:  Eurghhh!

SEPTIMUS:  Nevertheless, that is the theorem.

THOMASINA:  It is disgusting and incomprehensible. Now when I am grown to practice it myself I shall never do so without thinking of you.

— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Act I, Scene I

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Beauty is the first test

The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. . . . It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.

— G. H. Hardy

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His Own Best Character

Word Play

By Alex Williams
nyt.com

“OH, Jon-Jon!”

Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, was inspecting an advance copy of Jon-Jon Goulian’s new memoir, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt,” at a party at The Review’s TriBeCa headquarters on a recent Wednesday night.

Next to him stood Mr. Goulian, an old friend, who bounced on the balls of his feet in anticipation, looking like a star (or starlet) in the making, his eyes hidden behind rhinestone-encrusted Gucci sunglasses.

Mr. Stein, like a lot of the men there, seemed to have beamed in from 1962. He wore a skinny regimental-stripe tie and herringbone tweed jacket, and periodically freshened his drink from a bottle of Scotch stashed in a metal file cabinet, a Nat Sherman cigarette dangling from his lips.

Mr. Goulian, by contrast, seemed to have beamed in from a future century. Head shaved and body toned like an Olympic swimmer’s, he wore a brown knee-length tie-dye skirt, five-inch Steve Madden wedge sandals and lip gloss. He drank only tap water, and winced at the cigarette smoke that hung in the air.

Seated on a windowsill in his office, Mr. Stein ran his finger down the gushing blurbs printed on the book’s back flap from the writers Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart and paused on one from the novelist Benjamin Kunkel: “If Jon-Jon Goulian did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent him.”

Mr. Stein peered up adoringly at his friend: “I’ve often felt that.”

Mr. Goulian is, by his own account, a hot mess of contradiction. A former baby sitter, law clerk, freelance personal trainer, and assistant at The New York Review of Books (“the only person who ever took the job for the money,” he said), he presents himself, at age 42, as an androgynous man-child with hermit tendencies.

Nevertheless, his Capote-scale party skills have made him a kind of mascot for the city’s literary A-list. And while his own writing output until now consisted of a few assignments for Slate, which he never filed, his first book — a sprawling comic memoir of a life spent battling countless neuroses and defying expectations of everyone close to him — earned him a $750,000 advance.

He is now a client of the powerful Wylie Agency. He was named to Rolling Stone’s list of Hottest Breakout Stars of 2011, as well as Out magazine’s “Hot List” (Mr. Goulian says that he is, except for a bit of adolescent experimentation, straight).

But will American book buyers be as charmed and intrigued by this walking paradox as New York’s writerly in-crowd?

“Are people inherently interested in the subject of Jon-Jon?” asked Sloane Crosley, a socially connected writer who also provided an enthusiastic blurb for the book. “Probably not, but that’s irrelevant. He has this totally unique brand of masculinity mixed with charming vanity.”

In February, Random House took the unusual step of holding a book party to celebrate the release of the review galleys of the book, three months before its actual publication this week. Held at the Wooly, a too-cool lounge in the Woolworth Building, it attracted more than 150 publishing insiders, many of them plucked from the mastheads of Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine and Esquire. Many, including Katie Roiphe and Larissa MacFarquhar, one of at least seven New Yorker writers in attendance, counted themselves as close friends of the honoree.

Mr. Goulian certainly cut a curious figure there, his face made up like a David Bowie sideman from the “Hunky Dory” era, as he traded industry gossip with Andrew Wylie, who was dressed like a Threadneedle Street arbitrageur in a gray suit, while Depeche Mode blared over the loudspeakers.

“The New York literary world could use a few more curious figures,” Mr. Wylie said moments later. The agent, who represents Philip Roth and Dave Eggers, was asked who came to mind when thinking about this latest literary sensation. “My mother,” Mr. Wylie said, casting a glance at Mr. Goulian in a sarong-length gray skirt.

It’s easy to see why publishers might consider Mr. Goulian an easy sell. In a culture dominated by reality TV and weepy confessionals, his story makes for ideal back-flap material. (In a review of the book in The New York Times this week, Dwight Garner called it a “loquacious, high-strung, daft and vaguely sad new memoir.”)

A grandson of the political philosopher Sidney Hook, Mr. Goulian grew up in a household humming with high achievement. His father was a doctor, his mother a lawyer; one older brother went to Harvard, the other Yale. Through his first years of high school, Jonathan Goulian, an A-student and soccer standout, seemed on the same path.

Then he veered sharply off it — showing up at his senior prom wearing white tights, high heels and a Viking helmet. Before long, he rechristened himself Jon-Jon. “Jonathan just seemed too masculine for me to live up to,” he recalled. “There was something childlike, delicate, fragile about the nickname Jon-Jon.” What Mr. Goulian was struggling with was not sexual identity issues, he insists, so much as general identity issues. After puberty, he found himself paralyzed by body insecurities, sexual inhibitions, hypochondria and the expectations of upper-middle-class society.

“You hit 12, 13 and suddenly so much is at stake,” he recalled on a recent Friday, over a lunch of unsalted nuts and fresh figs at the rambling Upper West Side apartment where he has been staying with an old family friend, a woman in her 70s. “It’s not just about playing soccer and getting into the right college. It’s not just about wearing the right clothes and being presentable. It’s about being good-looking and to hook up with the right people. And I never really made it past there.”

His escape was to render himself unrecognizable. He started wearing skirts and makeup — though not, as he saw it, in a “gay” way. At 15, he begged his parents to pay for one nose job (he paid for another one himself when he was 24). “Certain things are expected of a boy who’s making his way through life,” he said. “But maybe nothing would be expected of this weirdo.”

As a portrait of a young man doing his best to make a hash of his parents’ best-laid plans, “The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt” is a story of relentless self-doubt and the endlessly sliding sideways through odd jobs, with the author losing himself in fleeting obsessions, like body building or collecting serial-killer cards.

At times, Mr. Goulian did try to appease his parents, he said. He graduated from Columbia, and New York University law school, and clerked for a federal judge. During his 20s, he worked at a law firm that handled white-collar and organized-crime cases.

It was during those years that Mr. Goulian fell into a group of young writers that included Ms. Roiphe and Ms. MacFarquhar, whom he met through the journalist David Samuels, who was dating one of Mr. Goulian’s roommates at the time. Back then, Ms. Roiphe recalled, Mr. Goulian didn’t seem to have any literary ambitions. (“I still don’t have any literary ambitions,” Mr. Goulian retorted.) “The first ambition I can remember was just the ambition to not be a lawyer,” she said, adding that he covered his neck and arms with so many tattoos that he effectively made it impossible to put on a suit and look professional.

Mr. Samuels recalls Mr. Goulian back then as “ferociously inquisitive and smart, but he really hadn’t read anything.” In pre-Gatsby fashion, Mr. Goulian asked him to compile a list of must-read books. “I made him a list of books: ‘Moby Dick,’ Hemingway short stories, ‘The Devils’ by Dostoyevsky. Then I watched him buy all the books and read every one of them, and read them with this fierce scrutiny and ability to retain whole pages, and recite, word for word. I thought, this is serious.”

When he finally left the law, Mr. Goulian took a stab at screenwriting. He cut a demo record as an electro-pop performer. Nothing took. Eventually, a friend tipped him off to a temporary manual-labor gig, which turned out to be a job organizing the personal library of Robert B. Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books. He ended up applying for a job as his assistant. The application involved writing a five-page analysis of a feature by a well-known Review writer.

Mr. Goulian responded with a searing 20-page analysis in squint-inducing eight-point type (never mind that Mr. Silvers at the time was in his 70s).

He got the job anyway, and went on to decorate the offices with stuffed animals from his personal collection.

He provided more than comic relief, however. “He was a brilliant editorial assistant,” Mr. Silvers said. “He was very, very helpful in analyzing and criticizing manuscripts, some of them highly complex. He combined a fine sense of language with the skills of a first-class lawyer.”

He was also succeeding at parties, the one setting where the perpetually skittish Mr. Goulian seems to feel comfortable. His logorrheic, hyperkinetic charm quickly gave him a foothold in an insular world, where poseurs are typically snubbed or mocked, Mr. Samuels said. His transgressive image gave him a certain cachet, too.

“Most writers are geeky and slovenly and could stand to lose 10 pounds,” Mr. Samuels said. “And here’s this super-cool, tattooed, 3-percent-body-fat guy who wants to be your friend and talk about books. So at a literary party, he’s the person everyone wants to talk to.”

IT’S tempting to see Mr. Goulian’s outrageous persona as a pose, a marketing ploy: the Lady Gaga of literature. But friends insist there is nothing canny about it. “He’s always been a kind of crazy free spirit,” Ms. Roiphe said. “When I say crazy, I mean actually crazy.”

After he left The New York Review in 2003, Mr. Goulian had something of a lost decade, cobbling together his rent by cleaning houses, or collecting review copies from editorial friends and selling them at the Strand, he said. Despite his social appetite, Mr. Goulian can spend months in seclusion at his grandfather’s old house in Vermont, or weeks in his New York apartment without seeing anyone, friends said.

And romance? “I’ve never had a sexually sustained relationship that lasted longer than two weeks,” said Mr. Goulian, who writes freely about masturbation in the book.

As the book makes clear, he has been freaked out by the squishy details of physical intimacy since he was a teenager. During adolescence, he had four sexual encounters (two with girls, two with boys), but Mr. Goulian didn’t lose his virginity (with a woman) until college. These days, he doesn’t “date” in the traditional sense, but does occasionally “hook up,” and only with women, he said.

Still, sexuality is a vexing issue for him. At one point in his 30s, Mr. Goulian — who says he had never smoked anything, or had taken any other type of drug aside from the occasional drink — even tried a monthly regimen of Ecstasy to try to delve deeper into his sexual psyche. “I’m turned on by women, and like hooking up with them, especially super-smart or powerful ones, but before long all I wanna do is cuddle with them,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“Ecstasy, I was told, opens you up, gives you a little window into the subconscious,” he continued. “Maybe on E, I thought, I’ll dig guys, and that’ll explain everything, but that’s not what happened. I just babbled my head off to strangers and danced alone in a corner.”

Mr. Goulian said that he hoped that the sustained self-analysis (“the only kind of analysis I can afford”) that came with writing a memoir for two years might help him untangle his psyche. It didn’t.

“It’s not like I’m doing this to build character, to see how much abuse I can take,” he said of his outré attire. “It’s not a book about a rebel. A rebel is someone who aggressively asserts his individuality in the face of the pressure to conform. That’s not the person in this book. This is a person who, out of an inability to conform, is falling back on the shield behind which to hide. It’s out of cowardice, not boldness.”

Of course, wandering around New York City in a get-up almost guaranteed to attract jeers from construction workers seems like a funny way to avoid judgment.

“You’re being judged, you’re being called stuff, yeah,” he agreed. “But,” he added, with a measure of satisfaction, you’re “not being asked to be a doctor anymore.”

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One Infuriating Excuse for a Paragraph — but that’s marketing for you

Welcome to the coalition. As bouldering culture spreads and takes root globally, creativity is exploding. As more people breathe in bouldering’s eclectic blend of tribalism and sweet, pure intensity, the focus of our collective energies results in a truly new ascending philosophy: new places to go, new ways to train physically and mentally, and new ways of attempting to crack the age old bottom-to-top code. Our language is universal and it’s not about words, it’s about movements going into motion. After all, you gotta free your mind if you want to do the problem. It really is as simple as that.

— Black Diamond Equipment, Ltd.

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This Vast Landscape

Here in this vast landscape, swept by winds from the sea, I wonder if there is any person anywhere who can answer the questions that stir in the depths of your being. For even the best miss the mark when they use words for what is elusive and nearly unsayable. But nonetheless, I believe you are not left without a solution, if you turn to things like those that are refreshing my eyes. If you ally yourself with nature, with her sheer existence, with the small things that others overlook and that so suddenly can become huge and immeasurable; if you have this love for what is plain and try very simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, perhaps not in your conscious mind, but in your innermost awareness.

— Rilke, Worpswede, July 16, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet