The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

Too funny. Not the blood itself, but the pretentious linkage. There was the duress. The transubstantiation of the real thing into something so freighted with meaning that it collapsed in on itself.

This variety of poem often surfaced in seminar: personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works that failed to register genuine understanding of or real feeling for those works. Self-deceptions disguised as confession.

“Well, I am your friend. That’s why I’m trying to talk you out of being an asshole. For your own sake.”

Hospital kitchens were home to junkies, ex-cons, and old women—people who could never afford the hospitals where they worked.

It was the height of foolishness, academia. You sank down and down in debt, in desperation, in hunger, so that you could feel a little special, a little brilliant in your small, dark corner of the universe, knowing something that no one else knew.

It cheered them, like finding a rare piece of hard candy in their pockets or a getting phone call from their children or nieces and nephews. Little bursts of pleasure.

I love this line! “Little bursts of pleasure.” It so accurately brings to mind those seemingly tiny things that can shake off despair and ennui, if only for a moment. A shock of a fleeting technicolor scene spliced into a black and white film.

Platitudes. Eunice didn’t go around living her life awaiting a moment to dispense wisdom. She was in the business of living, getting by.

Eunice didn’t need his benediction. His compliment was an insult. It stung his pride.

Early December was finals season. Undergrads were everywhere. Taking every available surface for their performance of studying. A performance that they had been neglecting for most of the semester. You could always tell, like when someone showed up to hoop and holler in church on Easter and Christmas. There was something insincere in it. Desperate.

What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.

the boys no more than a year older than him, looking down through the studio windows at the streets below, something adult in their bored nonchalance, the way they were whispering to one another—making plans, Ivan knew, to smoke during lunch. That’s how young they still were, that they made plans to do something bad.

The person who ran the modern section was one of those philosopher artists who shouted Wittgenstein at the dancers as they worked their way through the tangled knot of his choreography. It was less a dance than an institutionalized destruction of the self.

The quality judgment had nothing to do with the object being assessed, he thought, but it had everything to do with proving that one possessed the faculty of discernment.

The public had a distrust of, an animosity toward, so-called public funds channeled into what they considered frivolities. The American economy ran on What good is this to me?

The certainty you could only get if you were just slightly delusional.

So they went on smiling, and then they were laughing at their table in the corner, while it rained and grew cold and the café grew loud and then warm and then empty, and the whole world, the whole procession of its events marched on without a single notice or care that there in their tiny, obscure particle of the galaxy, two people’s hearts were breaking over and over again.

At times like this when two people he liked very much did not like each other, Noah wondered what to make of the pernicious nature of loyalty. You couldn’t be all things to all people, and any friendship contained such microbetrayals.

He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.

Instead, the novel felt like a cool, flat sheet of ice into which he had wedged the dull, inadequate blade of his attention.

“That is so stupid. I cannot believe you wasted my time by saying that out loud with your human mouth. God.”

at all,

He would go to the smaller market there, get some eggplant, come back when he learned how to be a human being again.