Status Updates From Somebody with a Little Hamm...

Outside the window, another old lady stood and shouted in at us [in Russian]. “What is she saying?” I asked Mischa. He listened for a moment and then said, “I think she’s asking how we [writers] make our money. She’s asking, do we even work.”

Dickens is excessive by modern standards. But modern standards have become denatured, &Dickens is excessive like Nature; like living things, his creatures must twist &turn, expand out or tunnel in until they have utterly fulfilled what they are. It’s very entertaining, but it’s also faithful to human experience, which indiscriminately mixes trivia with genius, artificiality with raw power, sentimentality &seriousness

I understand this impulse, or at least I think I do—many authors must secretly itch to stop torturing their characters, to spread their arms and give it up, making everything right in the end...

In past books, you felt the characters’ awkward, sometimes belligerent attempts to negotiate between the two poles, and you felt their disappointment when they failed; you also ...

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[Greil] Marcus doesn’t grope and crush his subject in the way many critics do, because his writing works much like music: It flies by in a comet tail, pieces of thought, feeling, and image all scrambled together. These components are often not fully developed in the way one would typically expect of an essay, but, rather, play off one another with enigmatic grace of sound.
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gaitskill is the sort of writer that makes me realize a well-crafted metaphor is oftentimes better at capturing the essence of a subject than trying to describe it outright. like the difference between holding something up to a mirror vs trying to draw it yourself if that makes sense