How to End a Story (or anything else) Like Raymond Queneau:
“Anyway, this story is quite tedious. It’s a good thing it’s finished. Whether you like it or not, I couldn’t care less.”
February 2012
9 posts
“Witnesses are unanimous: Kant didn’t sweat. Or, he sweat as little as possible. Jachmann tells us that in the summer Kant would walk very slowly to avoid even the slightest drop of perspiration. Wasianki confirms that “Kant did not sweat, neither by night nor by day.” When Kant couldn’t avoid perspiring, even by wearing light clothes, he stayed in the shade, as if he were waiting for somebody, until the sweat vanished. If he noticed any sweat on him he talked about this fact very seriously, as if it were a very melancholy incident.”
- from ‘The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant’ by Frédéric Pagès [1999]
Feminist Theory, bell hooks [1984]
As long as any group defines liberation as gaining social equality with ruling-class white men, they have a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.
“I’m trying to write a book of poetry in which I translate a single poem, through the process of encipherment, into a sequence of genetic nucleotides, and then, with the assistance of scientists, I plan to build this genetic sequence in a laboratory so that I can implant the gene into a bacterium, replacing a portion of its genome with my text. The bacterium would, in effect, be the poem…I am hoping to write a book that would still be on the planet Earth when the sun explodes.”
- Christian Bök, from an interview in The Believer
Ode to the two local librarians:
One librarian is named Jorge, but people call him George. He wears nice-looking sweaters and wearing sweaters in Florida is an act of radical self-control that I find admirable. I want to have an affair with Jorge the Librarian, but Jorge the Librarian is married. To a woman, I think.
The other librarian is my future self, I think her name is Susan. It is morbidly fascinating to meet your future self, I really enjoy it. She is the ‘Tech Librarian.’ Susan the Tech Librarian looks really depressed, she has semi-greasy hair and she wears black clothing and glasses. She is the tall, skinny-ass variety of librarian that, when spoken to, will reply with monosyllabic answers and who will disappear from her desk for multiple, lengthy breaks throughout the day.
“It was just that someone, and the someone had to be you, was upsetting the balance of the emptiness of my nights, in which nothing could touch me - not even memories, not even desire - in which there was no other presence to threaten my vulnerability. You must have sneaked out of bed to find out if I stay up very late every night, sometimes all night, roaming through the Casa, because I never sleep, and you crossed my path, at first without showing yourself, only forcing me to feel your presence occupy the space of night, my territory, and demanding that I follow you without seeing you, like a dog tracking down a scent.”
- from ‘El obsceno párajo de la noche’ by José Donoso [1970]
“He felt obscene, as though he were something written on the wall of a toilet.”
—Harry Crews, Naked in Garden Hills [1969]
“A pillow perhaps and a good mattress,” replied Philippe Starck to the question of what kind of materials people need for survival.
from Phone Calls, Roberto Bolaño [1997]
For a long time he wonders how it is possible for the feelings and desires of a human being to swing from one extreme to the other.
Then he gets drunk or tries to lose himself in a book.
The days go by.
