Alex Kudera's Blog, page 50

false economies

"A the cafe, he chucked the copy of Loot on the table—he had barely realized he was still carrying it—then barked his order at the Russian girl. He smoked while he waited for his beans on toast. When it came, he ate in big forkfuls, gulping his tea and hating the English, for their false politeness, their shitty weather and ludicrous food, for how, just when you were feeling good, they always found a way to kick you right in the ass."

~~ from False Economies by Gordon Haber

necessity

"The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it."

~~ from Maurice Blanchot's Faux Pas

covered in kilometers

"I walked the last block between snorts and moans. What was left of me arrived at the door to the building. The neighbor from the tenth floor was just leaving, the woman who would go downstairs with her poodle to the consortium meetings. I went in and went up on the elevator. In the mirror I was horrifying. That wasn't the same face that had taken the elevator down that morning. Deadly pallor, sunken eyes, disheveled hair, rumpled clothing, out of alignment, asymmetrical, hunched over, filthy, beaten, guilty, and covered in kilometers."
~~ from The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

The Woman from Uruguay

"That was all I told Guerra about you, Catalina. I didn't say one word more. There was a certain loyalty in my disloyalty. And I was very drunk. All of this was happening as we were jaywalking, in a state of grace. Fortunately Uruguayans actually slow down when they see you set foot in a crosswalk. In Buenos Aires we would have been run over."
~~ from The Woman from Uruguay by Pedro Mairal

men didn't buy books

"[The literary agent] asked if I had taken a look at the rejections his assistant had scanned and emailed me the week before. Half a dozen letters on publishing house letterhead gave brief, polite explanations why they would not be purchasing my novel. One editor said she had bought too many novels similar to mine. Another explained he couldn't buy a wrestling novel because women wouldn't be interested in wrestling and men didn't buy books."

~~ from Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill

perfect relaxation

"Some people are so constituted that they can sleep well all their lives, or during the best part of their lives, or at least a tolerably good part of their lives, I thought, while some others, those like me, can't sleep, they never sleep, they are condemned never to be able to sleep, for even when they are sleeping they are never really relaxed by nature and what they do can't be called sleeping, these people never sleep as long as they live because all thier lives, no matter how long they live, they have never had the advantage of a perfect relaxation of their head and body."
~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

three points of support

"A body needs at least three points of support, not in a straight line, to fix its position, so Roithamer had written." ~~ from Correction by Thomas Bernhard

Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill

 

Almost Heaven

Andrew Cockburn's recent Harper's Letter from Washington, "The Enemy Within," is where I  learned that Senator Joe Manchin lives on a house boat named Almost Heaven when he's in D.C. 

A few days later, I read that covid-positive Lindsey Graham was socializing with other senators on that very same vessel just before it was recognized that Graham had the virus.

what, in fact, was I doing here?

"[W]hat, in fact, was I doing here?—why was I so strangely attracted and enticed by the life of this man who despised me and my kind (and deliberately so or with his eyes wide open, as he liked to put it)?—why had I come here under cover of darkness, walking along these empty and godforsaken streets like a thief?—why, when visiting his museum near the Kuznechny Market or other places connected with him, had I kept somehow to the side or trailed behind, as if I had turned up there by accident and none of it really interested me?"

~~ from Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin