#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon “Well you are presentable, there's no avoiding that. When you transmigrate into your next body, you might consider something a bit less eyecatching….I suppose I only mean, be cautious.…” "Of the flesh but not the world….”

Finished #TheAgeofWireandString #BenMarcus SHE WAS the first grass guard of American shelters…the girl wielded her shade stick so that the sun might never collaborate with the grass in destroying the house.

#GeraldMurnane Born February 25, 1939 From #Inland “There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in….

#Players #DonDeLillo “I wouldn't want to say porta rickens…coloreds…the well-meaning white folks who have taken up the struggle against the struggle,not knowing…that the capitalist system…power structure…pattern of repression are themselves a struggle. It's not an easy matter,being the oppressor…

#Pnin #VladimirNabokov Electric devices…Plastics swept him off his feet. He had a deep admiration for the zipper. But the devoutly plugged-in clock would make nonsense of his mornings…The frame of his spectacles would snap in mid-bridge… And he still did not know that he was on the wrong train.

#Dhalgren #SamuelRDelany she asked, "when they got the first astronauts to the moon…next time…you looked up and saw the moon in the sky instead of on television…I realized that for the last fifty thousand science-fiction novels it had still been just a light hanging up there…now it was...a place."

#MobyDick #HermanMelville The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass. #MelvilleMonday 🐳

#InvisibleCities #ItaloCalvino Kublai Khan interrupted him…”Does your journey take place only in the past?" All this so that Marco Polo could explain…the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey…the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed…

#Libra #DonDeLillo Knowledge was a danger…the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President…

#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon he was certain…that none of these figures were his real fellow crewmen…rather a ghost-Unit,from some Abode he wished never to visit, resolved on working him mischief…masked to look like Chums of Chance. But then Darby Suckling caught sight of him,and the moment passed.

#TheAgeofWireandString #BenMarcus Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam…producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.

Finished #PaleFire #VladimirNabokov an old-fashioned melodrama with three principles: a lunatic who intends to kill an imaginary king, another lunatic who imagines himself to be that king, and a distinguished old poet who stumbles by chance into the line of fire, and perishes in the clash…

Michael Silverblatt was a great reader, a great talker, and a great champion of so many Dalkey Archive Press authors. We’ll be posting some of our favorite interviews all week. Tonight, listen to his conversation with William H. Gass about “The Tunnel”: www.kcrw.com/shows/bookwo...

Finished #PafkoattheWall #DonDeLillo He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful.

#MobyDick #HermanMelville “Whales are scarce…whenever thou art up here." Perhaps they were;or perhaps there might have been shoals of them…but lulled into such an opium-like…reverie is this absent-minded youth…the blending cadence of waves with thoughts…he loses his identity… #MelvilleMonday 🐳

#Moderan #DavidRBunch Central could have decreed a compulsory Joy Day…Not one of the underprivileged people would have been excused…At a common instant…a steel finger in Central would touch a small jolly-color orange button marked GO GENTLY…celebrators then would simply in a twinkling be a POUFF!

#InvisibleCities #ItaloCalvino But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening…that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

#ThePaleKing #DavidFosterWallace We don't think of ourselves as…parts of something larger…We think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights…but not our responsibilities. We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government…to legislate morality.

#ANakedSingularity #SergioDeLaPava you are printed...The resulting bar code is sent to Albany for the purpose of producing a rap sheet...lt means everything because sentencing like Physics and other sciences builds on what came before so that the worse your past was,the worse your present will be…

#PafkoattheWall #DonDeLillo Everything else recedes around him, the game…and crowd,while he studies his fingers…He looks at the system of ridges on his fingertips, these are criminal prints…it makes him wonder how many others made it over the turnstiles and what will happen to those who got caught…

#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon “flight into the next dimension…always at the mercy of Time…We went from two dimensions…out into town- and map-space…and now…years of sky-roving, maybe some of us are ready to step 'sidewise'…into the next dimension-into Time-our fate, our lord, our destroyer."

Finished #Players #DonDeLillo “Our big problem…was that we didn’t give our government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we’d imagined…Assassination, blackmail, torture…We thought they bombed villages,killed children,for the sake of technology…

#MobyDick #HermanMelville …this science of Cetology…in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his System of Nature, A.D. 1776, Linnaeus declares, “I hereby separate the whales from the fish.” #MelvilleMonday 🐳

#Dhalgren #SamuelRDelany TO WOUND THE AUTUMNAL city. So howled out for the world to give him a name. The in-dark answered with wind. All you know I know….

#Eyes #WilliamHGass I loved my mother at first… she showed pride for me occasionally and her best side sometimes, not her worst she gave me Kool-Aid and bread and peanut butter after school and a kiss for a kiss… for learning the spelling of the word for the day which was go away

#PaleFire #VladimirNabokov Took photographs… Whatever in my field of vision dwelt- …hickory leaves, the svelte Stilettos of a frozen stillicide …printed on my eyelids’ nether side Where it would tarry for an hour…two, And while this lasted all I had to do Was close my eyes to reproduce the leaves…

#Players #DonDeLillo To be alone with her was to occupy the immediate center of things. There were no gradations to this kind of desire...He took the glass out of her hand...ending one sequence of encounter to begin another. The second he touched her, touch turned to grip.

#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon crew of the Inconvenience became aware of doubts creeping in…If it was all just some elaborate hoax they'd chosen to play on themselves,to keep distracted from a reality too frightening…They may only have once been readers of the Chums of Chance Series of boys' books…

#ThePaleKing #DavidFosterWallace What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable? Discuss important differences between reserve accounting and charge-off accounting…

#MobyDick #HermanMelville “He's a queer man, Captain Ahab- so some think- but a good one. Oh, thou’lt like him well enough; no fear, no fear. He's a grand, ungodly, god-like man, Captain Ahab….” #MelvilleMonday 🐳

#InfiniteJest #DavidFosterWallace 30th Anniversary “I wasn't trying to hurt myself. I was trying to kill myself. There's a difference…I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all…The last thing more I'd want is hurt. I just didn't want to feel this way anymore…

#TheCollectedStoriesofDianeWilliams #DianeWilliams Introduction by #BenMarcus At the post office the woman finally got a good look at the monster, a stare. She was breathing the same air, not as before, deprived. #Intercourse

#Moderan #DavidRBunch …thanks to science, our once-dirty Earth-ball clean…coated with plastic, our hardly-used air…colored in beauty with a different hue each month…our once garbage-wrecked oceans frozen…our temperatures as quiet and as changeless as ever…through Season Control in Central.

#MobyDick #HermanMelville Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself…bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…then, I account it high time to get to sea…This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

#AgainsttheDay #ThomasPynchon “The State is evil, its divine right proceeds from Hell, Hell is where we all went. Some came out...broken, dying...intimidated into silence...all of us, even those who had voted and paid our taxes like good bourgeoisie, came out hating the State.

#SixtyStories #DonaldBarthelme they said is death that which gives meaning to life…I said,no,life is that which gives meaning to life…they said,but isn't death,considered as a fundamental datum,the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of-

Finished #TheVivisectors #MissouriWilliams I had begun to be in the world and I had found it unbearable…Now that so many doors had been opened, I was determined to close them again-they had been opened against my will.

Great American Novels. #BookSky💙📚

#ThePassionAccordingtoGH #ClariceLispector THEN, BEFORE UNDERSTANDING, MY HEART WENT GRAY… Meeting the face I had put inside the opening…in the half-darkness…My cry was so muffled that only the contrasting silence let me know I hadn't screamed. The scream had stayed beating in my chest.

#IntheHeartoftheHeartoftheCountry #WilliamHGass Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid. I've a collection now I keep in typewriter-ribbon tin…their bodies dry…the heavy soul is gone, the case is light…Alas for us, I want to cry…we must love what perishes: the muscles and the waters and the fats.

#SlouchingTowardsBethlehem #JoanDidion A sign…San Francisco My Christopher Robin wandered away. He called April 10th But he hasn’t called since He said he was coming home But he hasn’t shown. If you see him on Haight Please tell him not to wait I need him… If he needs the bread I’ll send it ahead.

Finished #DeathandtheGardener #GeorgiGospodinov “Ten apple trees…forty figs, fifty grapevines...” Such is the father's perpetual gift: fruit trees and vines. And this gift is never-ending, because it renews itself every year. My father recreated Laertes' gift without knowing it.

#Moderan #DavidRBunch Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger— There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere.

#Araucaria heterophylla Norfolk Island pine Norfolk pine

Finished #TheStoryofMyTeeth #ValeriaLuiselli His face is turned toward the past…a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe that piles ruin onto ruin…but a hurricane is blowing in…impels him inevitably toward the future, to which his back is turned…That hurricane is what we call progress.

#SlouchingTowardsBethlehem #JoanDidion first time I had dealt directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization…been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed…it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.

Finished #Eileen #OttessaMoshfegh I hated almost everything. I was very unhappy and angry all the time. I tried to control myself, and that only made me more awkward, unhappier, and angrier. I was like Joan of Arc, or Hamlet, but born into the wrong life....

#Players #DonDeLillo “The future has collapsed right in on us…what does it look like?…It looks like waves and waves of static. It's being beamed in ahead of schedule…It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street…As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It used to be people waved."

#TheVivisectors #MissouriWilliams …the family…a conversation had never started…the possibility of beginning one had seemed more and more remote…that imaginary conversation had already become irrelevant because the silent one that raged around its edges was enough to occupy everyone's attention.