nathan > Recent Status Updates

In the middle of the magazine was a photograph of a woman with no underwear on at all, and the part between her legs was neater than I expected. It looked like the folded hinge of a door. I felt aroused by it, or, rather, aroused by the proximity I imagined I had gained to other men’s arousal. me.

I glimpsed in their lives the abyss that simmered below and around the village’s fragile idyll, and perhaps intimated something of the possible future that might await me in adulthood, which was beginning to stretch out into a forbidding emptiness in my mind.

In her eyes, I saw my own transparency, as if she had exposed me, and so there was a streak of cruelty in what I felt for her in that moment. I saw that she knew me, and some frightened part of my personality had to insist that she didn’t.

Luke’s breathing filled the space, so that I could almost imagine what it would be like to feel the warmth of his mouth against my skin.

it seemed impossible to be an adult who existed in everyone else’s eyes as a child.

..what I had made Luke do to me in my imagination.

I had gone through heartbreaks and love affairs entirely in my own head; I had imagined futures, private passions, brief, hot secrets, and all the while I was entirely inexperienced, entirely untouched, because I had not, until now, had the opportunity – without consequence – to be brave.

..but that I had a fire insurgent within me, a buried fire that had been stoked furiously for so long that it would rage through the world if for a moment I let it out.

I had spent so long just watching, never acting, I was terrified of exposing my desire; I thought it would be shocking, that it would tear right through the fabric of the world, and everyone would see it and know me, and everyone would know that I was not a harmless thing, an undesiring thing..

Why things were the way they were, why some things were praised and others scorned, began to seem less and less a fact of life, and more and more like a collective hallucination. The pretence of childhood was gone, and the pretence of innocence with it.

I was the rupture, the punctum in the landscape.

I wanted to see Luke’s eyes, green and urgent, holding me.

When my marriage fell apart, my husband said that he had realised I could love him but not desire him, and the moment he said those words I knew they were true.

some snatch of memory,

If, now that I am in my adulthood, time seems like a silted riverbed I cannot wade through, I find, more often than before, that I can spin it backwards, can turn it into a flow of waters – warmer, sweeter, washing the years away, carrying me with them.

And then the garden sends its snow upwards, into the sky, gathers back its fallen leaves, and blooms again in reverse.

Time runs faster backwards. The years – long, arduous, and uncertain when taken one by one – unspool quickly, turning liquid, so one summer becomes a shimmering light that, almost as soon as it appears in the mind, is subsumed into a dark winter, a relapse of blackness that flashes to reveal a face, a fireside, a snow-encrusted garden.

We want reading to free the mind; we do not want it to free the reader. For my part, I am with the old hidalgo. When he rode full tilt at that giant in disguise, he was acting on the correct assumption that reading was not enough. This, it seems to me, is the only way to do without authority: to go out and do it.

This is why we cling to authority: it guarantees our freedom while relieving us of the burden of exercising it, turning it into something fine and handsome and altogether useless, like an old suit of armor.

Not, I should say, “freedom of thought” as the liberal understands it—that is, the freedom to entertain every idea and commit to none. This is not true freedom; it is merely license, and always depends on the approval of some authority.

I have no illusions about the political power of a staff writer at a print magazine owned by a corporation: I do not think it is much, though I am not foolish enough to suppose it is nothing. But I do believe that criticism, at its best, can be a small act of freedom.

Let thought starve. The only criticism worth doing, for my money, is not the kind that claims to improve society in general; it is, as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one. To be clear, I do not wish to overvalue the business.

Smith never asked too much of her unlikely people. They hit their marks, said their lines, and disappeared, check in hand, back into the crowd. You could tell they had better things to do than be furniture in someone’s novel.

It asks me to care about people I do not know and will never meet, people who might as well not exist as far as my own life is concerned but whose destinies are nonetheless obscurely intertwined with mine.

But the humanist’s mistake is to suppose that politics is just lots and lots of ethics. Ethics asks us to recognize that the other has a soul; politics asks us to reject the soul as a precondition for moral interest. In this sense, fiction has always been an exercise in political consciousness.

This, too, is form—as Lin has said, his focus in autobiographical fiction is “still on creating an effect, not on documenting reality.”

My point is that what makes a piece of writing autofiction is not, in the first place, the self-consciousness suggested by that ponderous moniker but, rather, at least in Tao Lin’s case, the brazenness of its self-concealment. In other kinds of fiction, the author hides behind plot, character, or style; in autofiction, the author hides behind his own life.

all fiction is autofiction; every novel is a record of an author’s attempt to transcribe themselves. I don’t just mean that all fiction is, intentionally or not, autobiographical. I also mean that all novels refract the veiled subjectivity of their authors.

Ultimately, Li decides that he likes autobiography’s “self-catalyzing properties” too much to abandon it, observing that life is “larger, realer, more complicated” than a novel. Then again, that is the novel’s value—not that you can fit a whole life inside of one but that life, in being pared down to the size of a book, necessarily acquires the specificity of form.

criticism has long been an apprenticeship in thoughtful obedience; its grand historical function has been to make a world without authority entirely inconceivable.