August 3, 2012
"The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they’d ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come."

— Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, p. 47.

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(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: quotes cormac mccarthy blood meridian literature 
July 30, 2012
"…fighting about Steely Dan is both how we came to love one another as well as the form that love found for itself, one mode of its enactment, its nurturance, and its renewal. There is nothing unique in this. It is what you do when you are young, but not only (I think) when you are young: you love things (songs, records, books) and in the abundance of that enthusiasm you talk, you measure that love with and against others’. You mix your words and your delight up with those of another person, or of many people, and you feel out what’s provoking, or disquieting, or otherwise pleasing about how those words and enthusiasms rub up against one another. What you forge together is a kind of idiolect, a semiprivate argot of appreciation and critique, ardor and invective. This is one of the things you do when you fall in love: you and your beloved make a language together—with words, theories, your bodies—a language that you refine and refashion over many years, and that eventually comes to carry within it much of your history together."

— Peter Coviello, “The Talk That Does Not Do Nothing,” in The Believer’s 2012 Music Issue

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(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: music quotes writing peter coviello steely dan the believer 
July 12, 2012
"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto."

— The Mennonite, in Blood Meridian, p. 43.

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Filed under: quotes blood meridian cormac mccarthy 
July 12, 2012
"Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French."

— P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins. According to my friend Jayne Hildebrand, this is the novel’s opening line. It is now among my favorites.

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(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: quotes p.g. wodehouse the luck of the bodkins french literature 
June 26, 2012
"There are many things worse than being homeless in a homeless place—in fact, this is one condition of being at home, if you are yourself homeless. For example, it is much worse to be homeless and then to go home where everyone is at home and then still be homeless. The South was at home. Therefore his homelessness was much worse in the South because he had expected to find himself at home there."

— Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, p. 149.

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(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: quotes walker percy literature the last gentleman 
June 21, 2012
"More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor."

—

— Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, p. 16.

Here we go. Percy’s writing on honor—particularly the essay “Stoicism in the South”—is required reading.

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Filed under: quotes walker percy the last gentleman literature 
June 20, 2012
"For [the thirteen-year-old Lethem], the songs resemble an ancient circle, each amplifying a cumulative mystery with their own. Embrace the fact that this text is forever closed, and describe its insular workings. Don’t make it less itself; make it more."

—

— Jonathan Lethem, Fear of Music, p. 37.

Apparently all I do now is read 33 1/3 books. There are worse ways to spend one’s time. 

I love the above quote, which is the third or fourth one in its chapter alone (“Is Fear of Music A Text?”) that I’ve wanted to post. The way he describes the album’s songs remind me of Sebald’s descriptions of the events that make up The Rings of Saturn (the descriptions themselves, I mean, not the events). The Rings of Saturn is one of my favorite books; it’s a way I’d like to be able to write.

It’s unfair that Lethem can be so good at writing about music when he’s not really a music writer. 

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(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: jonathan lethem quotes talking heads fear of music sebald rings of saturn 
June 15, 2012
"What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren’t about making cases for or against things? It wouldn’t need to adopt the kind of ‘objective’ (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music."

—

—Carl Wilson, Let’s Talk About Love, p. 156.

I’m about 85% of the way there with Wilson on this one. What’s holding me back is the proliferation, since his book’s 2007 publication, of the Internet’s idolatry of the personal. While I agree with Wilson’s basic ideas, namely that our aesthetic tastes are socially composed and aren’t nearly so objective as we believe them to be, and that the role of the critic (at least in part) should be to replicate the experience of the music itself, I wonder how frequently the kind of sharing he writes about here isn’t just more self-valorization. 

But of course, I still wrote the above paragraph.

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Filed under: carl wilson writing criticism quotes 
May 10, 2012
Yet another reason to love Walker Percy: this question and answer comes between long and comprehensive analyses of semiotics and the unquestioned assumptions of empiricism. True genius is probably involved in being able to answer all three questions the way he does. (Taken with instagram)

Yet another reason to love Walker Percy: this question and answer comes between long and comprehensive analyses of semiotics and the unquestioned assumptions of empiricism. True genius is probably involved in being able to answer all three questions the way he does. (Taken with instagram)

9:15am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZnxlayLDfEqT
Filed under: quotes walker percy literature photos 
May 9, 2012
"A lot of people listening to music now don’t listen to the songs or lyrics at all. They just go, “Good tones…” and that’s it. But we’re obsessed with songs. Sometimes, I feel like people aren’t listening to our songs, they’re just listening to the sound."

— Alex Scally, Beach House, Pitchfork interview. Truth-telling.

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(Notes: 2)
  
Filed under: quotes beach house sound the age pitchfork link