Status Updates From Mao II

The prisoner perceives his own wan image in the world and knows he’s been granted the low-status sainthood of people whose suffering makes everyone ashamed.

She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or photograph or hairstyle or slogan.

She thought there were lives that constantly fell inward, back to first knowing, back to bewilderment, and this was the reference for every bleakness that passed across the door.

Bill’s own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, “Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.”

[survival] and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions

This person knew some things about bundling and tying. Survival means you learn how to narrow the space you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest

There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus.

You live in a fuckin’ ass mansion you got to think about it two times a month for like ten seconds total. Live in a shithole, it takes up your day. They cut the shithole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it’s livable.

Once you live in the street, there’s nothing but the street. Know what I’m saying. These people have one thing they can talk about or think about and that’s the little shithole they live in. The littler the shithole, the more it takes up your life.

Only those sealed by the messiah will survive.

This wasn’t a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth.

His freedom is tied to the public announcement of his freedom.

This is one of many things Beirut has learned from the West. Beirut is tragic but still breathing. London is the true rubble. I’ve studied here and taught here and every time I return I see the damage more clearly.”

U have a twisted sense of the writer’s place in society U think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things In Ctrl America, writers carry guns They have to And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be The state should want to kill all writers Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere

How do you create a shift in rooted attitudes and hard-line positions if not through public events that show us how to imagine other possibilities?

Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can’t survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can.

The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark.

“The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger.

Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation.”

“I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone—standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up.

People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.

What makes NYC different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board.

“By compressing a million moments of love and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you’re saying that life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone to hurrying its own transformation, or what’s the point? You take marriage, the faith of the species, the means of continuation, and you turn it into catastrophe, a total implosion of the future.

This guy is a genius.