Status Updates From Faces in the Crowd

Leave a life. Blow everything up. No, not everything; blow up the square meter you occupy among people. Or better still: leave empty the chair at the tables you once shared with friends, not metaphorically, but really, leave a chair, become a gap for your friends, allow the circle of silence around you to swell and fill with speculation. What few people understand is that you leave one life to start another.

I'd got stuck on a Rousseauian phrase, possibly more ingenious than rational, about how adversity is a scholmistress whose teaching comes too late to be truly useful.

New York has to be seen from the viewpoint of the subway. The flat horizontal perspective vanishes in there. A bulky landscape begins, with the double depth, or what they call the fourth dimension, of time.

The sonorous rivers: sidewalks, steps, and frost. The whistling of amorous breezes; the rhytm of my footsteps in the snow. In yhe logic of the sick person, of the idiot, the mad, everything is about to fall into place.

If I believed in turning points, which I don't, I'd say that I began that night to live as if inhabited by another possible life that wasn't mine, but one which, simply by the use of imagination, I could give myself up to completely. I started to look inward from the outside, from someplace to nowhere.

I go back to writing the novel whenever I'm not busy with the children. I know that I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself on the page, inhabit it; I have to remember never to put in more than is necessary, never overlay, never furnish or adorn. Open doors, windows. Raise walls and demolish them.

There are two types of people: those who just live and those who design their lives.

He went back every day to the same station the same pillar, to lop, cut, mutilate the poem. It had to be exactly as brief as his dead friend’s appearance, exactly as startling. After a month of work, removing everything extraneous, only two poignant lines survived, comparing faces in the crowd to petals on a dark bough.

There’s nothing so ill advised as attributing a metonymic value to inanimate things. If you think the condition of a plant in a pot is a reflection of the condition of your soul, or worse, that of a loved one, you’ll be condemned to disillusion or perpetual paranoia.

I knew it wasn’t a good idea to place the least trust in household objects; as soon as we become accustomed to the silent presence of a thing, it gets broken or disappears. My ties to the people around me were also marked by those two modes of impermanence: breaking up or disappearing.”

When a person has lived alone for a long time, the only way to confirm that they still exist is to express activities and things in an easily shared syntax: this face, this mouth, this hand that writes.

so much better with wine!

I am bookmarking several quotes from this one - the writing is quite beautiful.

Very fluid shift back and forth in reality and imagination here, and it's getting harder to distinguish which is which.

Stream of consciousness
What is reality here?
Enjoying it even if it's hard to follow :-)

Unfortunately I still don't like this very much.

Jag hade tänkt mig att jag skulle älska den här: gör det ibland, men inte oupphörligen.

Sakin, huzurlu ilerliyor.

Dejar una vida. Dinamitar todo. No, no todo: dinamitar el metro cuadrado que uno ocupaba entre la gente. Más bien: dejar sillas vacías en las mesas que se compartan con las amistades, no a modo de metáfora, sino en verdad, dejar una silla, volverse un hueco para los amigos...

Lovely stuff

A sacrifice of not grading student papers allows a weekend of residing, watching my son at play with his cousins, reading this fragmentary, iterative novella, the fragrance of a future nostalgia.

I'd got stuck on a Rousseauian phrase, possibly more ingenious than rational about how adversity is a schoolmistress whose teaching comes too late to be truly useful.

It is a shame that I find so little time per day to read what I want.

Rereading for class and picking so much up!

“Spanish is a language that lends itself to fault-finding and for that reason we are bad critics and good enemies of our friends."

Oh and y'all can stop worrying - Bolaño's spirit is alive and doing quite well in Ms. Luiselli's uncanny prose-bursts...

Heh, turns out I'm reading a ghost story for Halloween - didn't plan on it or nothin' but sweet

"Perhaps it's right that words contain nothing, or almost nothing. That their content is, at the very least, variable."

Not sure I like this book...

this book is really interesting. I definitely will have a lot to say once I finish it.

I can't make spaces from nothing. I can't invent. I only manage to emulate my ghosts, write the way they used to speak, not make noise, narrate our phantasmagoria.