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‘It’s like, a family doesn’t work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?’
‘You wait in line, you’re a fool, seriously. A brother don’t need a gate – he jumps the fence. That’s street.’ ‘Again, please?’ said Howard. ‘Street, street,’ bellowed Zora. ‘It’s like, “being street”, knowing the street – in Levi’s sad little world if you’re a Negro you have some kind of mysterious holy communion with sidewalks and corners.’ ‘Aw, man, shut up. You don’t know what the street looks like. You ain’t never been there.’ ‘What’s this?’ said Zora, pointing to the ground. ‘Marshmallow?’ ‘Please. This ain’t America. You think this is America? This is toy-town. I was born in this
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Mozart’s Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don’t know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don’t know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins. The closer you get to the pit, the more you begin to have the sense that what awaits you there will be terrifying. Yet you experience this terror as a kind of blessing, a gift. Your
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Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.
It was not New York, sure, but it was the only city he had, and Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshipped the pastoral; if he could have written an ode he would have. But he had no ability in that area (he used to try – notebook after notebook filled with false, cringing rhymes). He had learned to leave it to the fast-talking guys in his earphones, the present-day American poets, the rappers.
Soul food has a scent that fills you up even before your mouth gets near any of it.
but I don’t know if they will survive. But right now they have the appearance of survival, which is almost the same thing.
‘Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes –’ read Kiki circumspectly, aware that she should know it. ‘So, that’s the pearl thing,’ said Meredith. ‘It’s probably stupid.’ ‘Oh – it’s so gorgeous,’ said Kiki, skim-reading the rest to herself in a quick whisper. ‘Is it Plath? That’s wrong, isn’t it.’ ‘It’s Shakespeare,’ said Christian, wincing slightly. ‘ The Tempest. Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change, Into something rich and strange. Plath stripped it for parts.’ ‘Shit,’ Kiki laughed. ‘When in doubt, say
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It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.
To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed. Elaine Scarry
Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once,
On Beauty No, we could not itemize the list of sins they can’t forgive us. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. It is always beginning to snow. Of sins they can’t forgive us speech is beautifully useless. It is always beginning to snow. The beautiful know this. Speech is beautifully useless. They are the damned. The beautiful know this. They stand around unnatural as statuary. They are the damned and so their sadness is perfect, delicate as an egg placed in your palm. Hard, it is decorated with their face and so their sadness is perfect. The beautiful don’t lack the wound. Hard, it is decorated
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Jack was now faced with a task he dreaded: saying something after reading a poem. Saying something to the poet.
his great love was the essay, and, if he were really honest with himself, beyond essays themselves, the tools of the essayist: dictionaries. It was in the shady groves of dictionaries that Jack fell in love, bowed his head in awe and thrilled at an unlikely tale, for example, the bizarre etymology of the intransitive verb ‘ramble’.
The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn’t have the fear you had nothing.
Why does the sex have to mean everything? OK, it can mean something, but why everything? Why do thirty years have to go down the toilet because I wanted to touch somebody else? Am I missing something? Is this what it comes down to? Why does the sex have to mean everything?
These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you – even when it isn’t in your power to bestow it – and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults, suddenly they’re children again.
You don’t have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
I see Zora worrying all the time about her looks, and I want to say to her, honey, any woman who counts on her face is a fool. She doesn’t want to hear that from me. It’s how it is, though. We all end up in the same place in the end. That’s the truth.’
a huge button bought in New York’s Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.
It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies – it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry your dick offends your intellectual sensibilities. It must be terrible. There’s your subtle, wonderful, intricate brain and all the time it turns out your dick is a vulgar, stupid little prick. That must be a real bitch for you!’
But it was the kind of marriage you couldn’t get a handle on. He was bookish, she was not; he was theoretical, she political. She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.
Claire struggled to simultaneously translate for her class. She soon gave it up under the weight of too many unfamiliar terms. Instead, she paraphrased: ‘They seem to be angry about America’s involvement in Haiti. The rhymes are very . . . crude, is the best way to put it.’ ‘We have something to do with Haiti?’ asked Hannah. ‘We have something to do with everywhere,’ said Claire.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
‘A Room with a View. Forster.’ Howard smiled sadly. ‘Can’t stand Forster. Enjoying it?’
‘I said it’s not such a bad idea. Reading something – every now and then.’
Surely a man can write a piece of prose without “intending” any particular reaction, or at least he can and will write without presuming every end or consequence of that piece of prose.’
‘Dr Belsey, if I may refer you to one of your own liberal lodestars, Jean-Paul Sartre: “We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are – that is the fact.” Now is it not you, Dr, who speaks of the instability of textual meaning? Is it not you, Dr, who speaks of the indeterminacy of all sign systems? How, then, can I possibly predict before I give my lectures how the “multivalency”,’ said Monty, enunciating the word with obvious disgust, ‘of my own text will be received in the “heterogeneous consciousnesses” of my audience?’ said Monty, sighing heavily. ‘Your entire line
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‘Is Howard Belsey really suggesting,’ she said with patrician disappointment, ‘that Wellington is such a terribly delicate institution that it fears the normal cut and thrust of political debate within its halls? Is the liberal consciousness (which it pleases Professor Kipps to ridicule) really so very slight that it cannot survive a series of six lectures that come from a perspective other than its own? I find that prospect very alarming.’
‘Kiki, if there’s one thing I understand about you liberals, it’s how much you like to be told a fairytale. You complain about creation myths – but you have a dozen of your own. Liberals never believe that conservatives are motivated by moral convictions as profoundly held as those you liberals profess yourselves to hold. You choose to believe that conservatives are motivated by a deep self-hatred, by some form of . . . psychological flaw. But, my dear, that’s the most comforting fairytale of them all!’
the weekly campus column ‘Speaker’s Corner’. The mere name of this column aggravated Jerome: it smacked of that wearisome Wellingtonian reverence for all things British. The British flavour spread to the contents of the column itself, which, no matter the student who happened to be writing it, always retained a superior, Victorian tone. Words and phrases that the student had never before had cause to use (‘indubitably’, ‘I cannot possibly fathom’) came from their pen.
In universities, people forgot how to live. Even in the middle of a music library, they had forgotten what music was.
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
Here Zora used an ancient English expletive, very loudly.
It was in her nature to come across a high horse and ride it for as long as it would carry her.
