@ sixes & sevens

In A Rumor of War I saw the still normal man my father could have become,

the man with the average sadnesses.

From Tom Bissell's "War wounds: a father and son return to Vietnam," originally published in Harper's  Magazine, Dec. 2004, and read aloud on Selected Shorts in 2008

love & magic

But the Too Perfect theory has larger meanings, too. It reminds us that, whatever the context, the empathetic interchange between minds is satisfying only when it is "dynamic", unfinished, unresolved. Friendships, flirtations, even love affairs depend, like magic tricks, on a constant exchange of incomplete but tantalizing information. We are always reducing the claim or raising the proof. The magician teaches us that romance lies in an unstable contest of minds that leaves us knowing it's a trick but not which one it is, and being impressed by the other person's ability to let the trickery go on. Frauds master our minds; magicians, like poets and lovers, engage them in a permanent maze of possibilities. The trick is to renew the possibilities, to keep them from becoming schematized, to let them be imperfect, and the question between us is always "Who's the magician?" When we say that love is magic, we are telling a truth deeper, and more ambiguous, than we know.

Adam Gopnik, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," New Yorker, March 17, 2008.

Another sit upright quotation

Innumerable books and dissertations have naturally ventured explanations of such incantatory texts ...; these analyses have uncovered the disguised presence of a lover or some erotic motif, but as with the analyses of Cubist pictures, finding a pipe or a smokestack or a cigar only goes so far in explaining the deeper meaning of the art.

This sit-upright quotation comes from, of all things, a Michael Kimmelman review of Janet Malcolm's recent biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. It appears in the Oct. 25, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books. It follows a selection from Stein's cryptic poem "Sweet Tail (Gypsies)".

Sentences that make you sit up

Shirtless, I lie on short grass. Its texture tickles my back. My companion, swimming, leaves me to my lonely thinking. (Once we shared summer ruminations. At times our silences run parallel. At others we're like strangers who don't meet.)

"Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda," from Insomnia, by Aamer Hussein. (italics supplied)

a mobster waxes poetic

'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation --
Tony Soprano, "Remember When" (episode 80), the final season

The exoticism of camels

For Kiki:

'One of the finest things is the camel,' wrote Flaubert from Cairo. 'I never tire of watching this strange beast that lurches like a donkey and sways like a swan. Its cry is something that I wear myself out trying to imitate--I hope to bring it back with me, but it's hard to reproduce a rattle with a kind of tremulous gurgling as an accompaniment.' Writing to a family friend a few months after he left Egypt, he listed the thinks that had most impressed him in that country: the pyramids, the temple at Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, some dancers in Cairo, a painter named Hassan el Bilbeis. 'But my real passion is the camel (please don't think I'm joking); nothing has a more singular grace than this melancholic animal. You have to see a group of them in the desert when they advance in single file across the horizon, like soldiers; their necks stick out like those of ostriches, and they keep going, going ...' -- Alain de Boton, 'On the Exotic,' in The Art of Travel (2002)

Contraphorisms?

Novelty in creative endeavors usually arises from routine--you have to be familiar with something before you know what is novel -- Michael Kimmelman, "The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies," The Accidental Masterpiece (2005)

So you liked it more before you knew all about it? -- uttered to me by Jenny Levine, at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial, on reading the wall label for a neat-o work of art

fortune cookie

Sentences that make you sit up

I had been mulling a post recently but hesitated to follow through. Thanks to a lunch with my comrade-in-blogs, Dan, when I mentioned the idea in passing and received his endorsement and amplification, I'm putting up what will certainly be the first of many chosen sentences.

This one appears early on in Qui Xiaolong's A Loyal Character Dancer, a police procedural set in modern-day China. Our protagonist, Chief Inspector Chen, is examining a body found in Shanghai's Bund Park:

He pulled up the dead man's eyelid--a bloodshot eye stared at the sky, which was dappled with clouds.

Most of this is the stuff of all police procedurals, a genre I admit I spend an inordinate amount of time reading. What made me sit up was the sudden shift in point of view as we pivoted from the 'd.b.' to the sky. Wow. I couldn't help but be reminded of all the art history babble I've read about how Asian art capitalizes on shifting points of view. (Qiu writes in English, by the way.)

Now, Dan is reading through Pynchon's latest, which to an outsider like myself might seem to be composed almost entirely and self-consciously of sit-up sentences. Can you winnow down your favorites to only a handful, I wonder?

Fractured phrases 1

take leave of one's sentences -- vb. phr.

1. To become incomprehensible or mute, especially suddenly and without any apparent reason.

This phrase came up as I stumbled over saying "take leave of your senses", but once spoken seemed to merit a life of its own.