Jeremy Maddux > Recent Status Updates

“Today I would say that writing was a refuge from my distress. But at the time, it was the legitimate ambition of an adolescent who wanted to get out of adolescence, who wrote, in his grand naiveté, also legitimate, on the first page of one of my middle school notebooks: ‘I want to be Victor Hugo or nothing.’”

Bouanani, Ahmed. The Hospital (p. 8). New Directions. Kindle Edition.

'Given enough time to coagulate, if you stir it up, it will refuse to mix and simply trail around the glass in chaotic patterns. It’s supposed to be an interesting metaphor about family, of course, but as ridiculous as it sound, you can look at the city as a glass of water. The blood of the ghetto, the thin fluidity of city life, it just doesn’t mix, how nothing is real in the ghetto but the ones you call family.'

'They say that blood is thicker than water. Literally, if placed in a glass, it will float slowly to the bottom where it will collect and coagulate.'

'Cosmo I’d leave him if I were you. He’ll just do a few steps, then put her down. It’s how he likes his women. Unconscious.'

'As his surname implies, Cosmo is an entertainer, someone who eats cockroaches in clubs and pubs for a living, and as an entertainer he has a theory of the audience. He argues that all humans need ‘a daily dose of disgust’. According to him, our world is like this: ‘No dreams. No miracles. Just freak accidents and freaks. Darwin got it all wrong. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It’s survival of the sickest.'

'When he says that Pitchfork, his business associate, likes his women ‘unconscious’ (107) it’s something he understands. At one point he exclaims, ‘Have you noticed how gorgeous people look when they’re terrified!’ (90). There’s a streak of the perverse that pulses like a vein through this play.'

His longest speech begins ‘I hate being touched by men’. It soon emerges that he doesn’t have parents. He says he never knew them; he wasn’t born but ‘hatched’. He’s self-made, and proud of it: ‘I unzipped my old skin and threw it away’. And he thinks he doesn’t need any friends. He’s ironic, detached, but also scared. He’s attracted to Haley, the sleeping beauty he finds amid the detritus of this strange household.

'They fed him crushed diamonds and fire. He gobbled the gifts. My parents begged him to pluck their eyes out. He thought he was Huitzilopochtli, a god, half-man half-hummingbird. My parents at his feet, wrecked honeysuckles, he lowered his swordlike mouth, gorged on them, draining color until their eyebrows whitened.'

'In the late winter of 2006, I returned to my home town and bought 612 acres of land on the far western edge of the county. The land was forested, undeveloped, and surrounded by hills and farms; no one had lived on it for years.'

Great opening lines.

Nero's bust rather disturbingly resembles Christian Weston Chandler. And now they both share an Oedipus Complex.

"So he threw a football at some terrorist's face at a Super Bowl and killed him?  Whoopee." "Sir, hear me out.  America loved that.  That was the highest rated Super Bowl ever.  How many people wanted to serve a knuckle sandwich to a real terrorist?  And you take Ram, and he used a football to do the job!  I mean, Goddamn.  You don't get more American than that."

"Calm down, sir.  Ram Rogan won't mate with anyone.  I'll make sure of that.  I promise you.  But we can't outright kill him.  People on board have been asking about Ram.  They want to see him.  He's a celebrity.  They want to know if he's okay.  I mean, we clubbed his ass good." "That shit-for-brains lunk head?"

'Meanwhile, sleep clinics in this country are operating at two hundred percent capacity; Night Worlds have sprouted all over America. Night Worlds have some kinship with the circled wagon trains of the West: the sleepless closing ranks against the night. They form spontaneously, on the margins of cities, but have developed an oddly standard layout: mazes of tents, nocturnally blooming speakeasies.'