Vol 4.1
Would you still love me if I had a brass nose? What if I were intractable? What if I were as old as the Sibyll? Beauty isn’t everything. I cannot recall the face of Bach.
Among the power brokers of the art world, the recent weakness in the market hardly registers as a crisis. But the effects of this deeper, structural change will be felt outside of art's capitals.
By being private it may be wildly public. How do you find yourself navigating these questions of audience, who a book is for, what its public role is, once it’s off the desk and out in the world?
I wonder why I am up at such a bleak hour of the morning to watch two men hurt each other.
Writers, like lone gunmen, are compulsive worldbuilders. They write their own past, present, and future. DeLillo has described himself as a man in a small room.
If the Stalinist party line was Proletarian Realism, we could perhaps call The Girl a Proletarian Impressionism: not approaching anything like full abstraction, and yet focused considerably more on the sense of a given reality than perfect fidelity to the likeness you'd like it to have.
sunrise broken open
against rowhome
roof matchbox town
I will bend my articulable joints; I will bend my slender neck and set myself to the task of deciphering hermetic secrets scratched on tattered onionskin.
These are games where understanding of the world—both its fiction and mechanical form—are, ultimately, the point. And importantly, they’re treated by developers with near equal weight, internally consistent. You don’t “beat” these games.
Why is pain so hard to describe? Of course, there’s the obvious issue: it monopolizes any brain space that might have been used to cultivate apt metaphors and precise descriptions. But even Greenwell’s well-wrought sentences—more vivid than most—leave the sensation out of reach.
I took them, these placebo pills, because they allowed me to assert control over my impulses. I had once been a woman domineered by primitive and animalistic impulses, with too many opinions and too much attitude.
For real you can trust me in a country that can only
be explained by computers who’ll hallucinate