The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none fo this ever really happened — which a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. “Lyric essay” is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, an can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it’s apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then to do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers, take note. Some of the best fiction is now being written as nonfiction.

— Reality Hunger

These verses weare made
by Michaell Drayton Esquier
Poett Lawreatt
the night before hee dyed

.
Soe well I love thee, as without thee I
Love nothing; yf I might chuse, I’de rather dye
Then bee on day debarde thy companye.

Since beasts, and plantes doe growe, and live and move,
Beastes are those men, that such a life approve:
Hee onlye lives, that deadly is in love.

The corne that in the grownd is sowen first dies
And of on seed doe manye eares arise:
Love this worldes corne, by dying multiplies.

The seesds of love first by thy eyes weare throwne
Into a grownd untild, a harte unknowne
To beare such fruitt, tyll by thy handes t’was sowen.

Looke as your looking glass by chance may fall
Devyde and breake in manye peyces smale
And yett shewes forth, the selfe same face in all;

Proportions, features, graces just the same,
And in the smalest peyce as well the name
Of fayrest one deserves, as in the richest frame.

Soe all my thoughts are peyces but of you
Whiche put together amkes a glass soe true
As I therin noe others face but yours can viewe.

— Michael Drayton (1631)

I love fools’ experiments; I’m always making them.

— Darwin (?)

Reality, as Nabokov never got tired of reminding us, is the one word that is meaningless without quotation marks.

The appeal of Billy Collins is that compared with the frequently hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren’t; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone’s “real life” (even if the author constantly reminded us how fictionalized that life was). At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, I know all the moments are “moments”: staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. I find I can listen to talk radio in a way that I can’t abide the network news — the sound of human voices waking before they drown.

— David Shields, Reality Hunger 

Night on the prairies,
The supper is over, the fire on the ground burns low,
The wearied emigrants sleep, wrapt in their blankets;
I walk by myself — I stand and look at the stars, which I think
now I never realized before.

No I absorb immortality and peace,
I admire death and test propositions.

How plenteous! how spiritual! how resumé!
The same old man and soul — the same old aspirations, and
the same old content.

I was thinking the day most splendid till I saw what the not-
day exhibited,
I was thinking this globe enough till there sprang out so
noiseless around me myriads of other globes.

Now while the great thoughts of space and eternity fill me I
will measure myself by them,
And now touch’d with the lives of other globes arrived as far
along as those of the earth,
Or waiting to arrive, or pass’d on farther than those of the earth,
I henceforth no more ignore them than I ignore my own life.
Or the lives of the earth arrived as far as mine, or waiting to
arrive.

O I see now that life cannot exhibit all to me, as the day cannot,
I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death.

— Walt Whitman

It was the day of Gandhi’s assassination; but on the Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the center of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.

— Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

— (via Jason Oberholtzer)

Outsiders underestimate the importance of learning how to fail at something very complicated, over and over again, and then finally make it.

— Nicholson Baker

— (courtesy of Sleepz and Thinkz)

In what matter was he born?

He awoke as if from sleep.

His sensations?

Bewilderment, perplexity.

Are not these terms synonymous and one as a consequence redundant?

Yes: but the terms of the inquiry postulated unsingular information.

— Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds, Extract from Shorthand Note of a cross-examination of Mr. Trellis at a later date on the occassion of his being on trial for his life, the birth of Furriskey being the subject of the examination referred to

There are two ways to make big money, he said, to write a book or to make a book.

It happened that this remark provoked between us a discussion on the subject of Literature — great authors living and dead, the character of modern poetry, the predilections of publishers and the importance of being at all times occupied with literary activities of a spare-time or recreative character. My dim room rang with the iron of fine words and the names of great Russian masters were articulated in fastidious intonation. Witticisms were canvassed, depending for their utility on a knowledge of the French language as spoken in the medieval times. Psycho-analysis was mentioned — with, however, a somewhat light touch. I then tendered an explanation spontaneous and unsolicited concerning my own work, affording an insight as to its aesthetic, its daemon, its argument, its sorrow and its joy, its darkness, its sun-twinkle clearness.

Nature of explanation offered: It was stated that while the novel and the play were both pleasing intellectual exercises, the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic. In reply to an inquiry, it was explained that a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his  credulity. It was undemocratic to compel characters to be uniformly good or bad or poor or rich. Each should be allowed a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living. This would make for self-respect, contentment and better service. It would be incorrect to say that it would lead to chaos. Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required, creating only when they failed to find a suitable existing puppet. The modern novel should be largely a work of reference. Most authors spend their time saying what has been said before — usually said much better. A wealth of references to existing works would acquaint the reader instantaneously with the nature of each character, would obviate tiresome explanations and would effectively preclude mountebanks, upstarts, thimbleriggers and persons of inferior education from an understanding of contemporary literature. Conclusion of explanation.

That is all my bum, said Brinsley.

— Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds 

Deviantart

The mind may be impaired by alchohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me to be the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation.

Nature of interrogation:  Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste with wine whence we may rise to hear the lute well touched or artful voice warble immortal notes or Tuscan air? What mad pursuit? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Here’s to your health, said Kelly.

Good luck, I said.

— Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds 

[Aquinas] follows Aristotle in holding that women only arise because humid south winds and frequent downpours produce human beings with greater water content.

— Simon Blackburn, Lust 

Melodious is your voice, said Conán.

Small wonder, said Finn, that Finn is without honour in the breast of a sea-blue book, Finn that is twisted and trampled and tortured for the weaving of a story-teller’s book-web. Who but a book-poet would dishonour the God-big Finn for the sake of a gap-worded story? Who could have the saint Ceallach carried off by his four acolytes and he feeble and thin from his Lent-fast, laid in the timbers of an old boat, hidden for a night in a hollow oak tree and slaughtered without mercy in the morning, his shrivelled body to be torn by a wolf and a scaldcrow and the Kite of Cluain-Eo? Who could think to turn the children of a king into white swans with the loss of their own bodies, to be swimming the two seas of Erin in snow and ice-cold rain without bards or chess-boards, without their own tongues for discoursing melodious Irish, changing the fat white legs of a maiden into plumes and troubling her body with shameful eggs? Who could put a terrible maddness on the head Sweeney for the slaughter of a single Lent-gaunt cleric, to make him live in tree-tops and roost in the middle of a yew, not a wattle to the shielding of his mad head in the middle of the wet winter, perished to the marrow without company of women or strains of harp-pluck, with no feeding but stag-food and green branches? Who but a story-teller? Indeed, it is true that there has been ill-usage to the men of Erin from the book-poets of the world and dishonour to Finn, with no knowing the nearness of disgrace or the sorrow of death, or the hour when they may swim for swans or trot for ponies or bell for stags or croak for frogs or fester for the wounds on a man’s back.

True for the telling, said Conán.

Conclusion of the foregoing.

— Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds