The Backlog

"When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world,..."

Tue, 22 May 2012 10:33:55 -0400

“When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.”

- John Cage to Philip Guston (via goldgoldgoldd)

"I’m not sure how fiction and poetry work, but part of it is that really we notice a lot more..."

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:59:00 -0400

“I’m not sure how fiction and poetry work, but part of it is that really we notice a lot more than we notice we notice. A particular job of fiction is not so much to note things for people but rather to wake readers up to how observant they already are, and that’s why for me as a reader the descriptions or just toss offs that I like the most are not the ones that seem utterly new but the ones that have that eerie ‘good lord I’ve noticed that too but have never even taken a moment to articulate it myself.’”

- David Foster Wallace, Interview with Mark Shechner, Conversations With David Foster Wallace, 105.

Last night: Roasted chicken thighs and fennel (425º, maybe forty minutes?), roasted potatoes...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:22:50 -0400

Last night: Roasted chicken thighs and fennel (425º, maybe forty minutes?), roasted potatoes (half-inch cubes, par-boiled for five minutes, then into the oven with a couple tablespoons of schmaltz for forty more), boiled broccoli, dressed with olive oil and a drop of vinegar.

"Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that..."

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:27:00 -0400

“Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end.”

- Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life, 230.

"Now, when this anthology I’d edited, Matters of Life and Death, was coming out, the publisher..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:57:35 -0400

“Now, when this anthology I’d edited, Matters of Life and Death, was coming out, the publisher arranged a launch reading for the book at a museum in Boston. Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Richard Yates were going to read, in that order. I showed up just before the reading, and met everybody in the lobby, and sat down with Yates for a little while—first time I’d met him—though he was hardly in a state to have much conversation with me. He was very, very drunk. He had on a beautiful suit that was full of cigarette holes, and his elbow kept slipping off the table, he could hardly put two sentences together, and I thought, Oh, well, what can one do, you know? And so the reading began, first Jayne Ann, then Mary, and Yates was slumped in the front row and every once in a while you’d see his head bob up violently and you’d know he’d gone to sleep. Now, “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” is a very long story, and it’s written in a complex language, full-throated sentences, delicately inflected, nuanced. How was he going to get through a page of it? But when Mary Robison ended her reading and Yates was introduced, he made his way to the podium and read that story without dropping a comma. He read it in a beautiful, smoke-cured, gravelly voice. It was a wonderful reading. A perfect reading. Professional doesn’t even begin to describe it. And then he came off the podium and I went up to congratulate him and he was drunk again.”

- Tobias Wolff, in his Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review.

"But, you know, it seems as time goes on that the deepest good for me as man and writer is to be..."

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:38:20 -0400

“But, you know, it seems as time goes on that the deepest good for me as man and writer is to be found in ordinary life. It’s the gravity of daily obligations and habit, the connections you have to your friends and your work, your family, your place— even the compromises that are required of you to get through this life. The compromises don’t diminish us, they humanize us—it’s the people who won’t, or who think they don’t, who end up monsters in this world. I’m not talking about dishonesty, I’m talking about having some give, sometimes letting go of things that you aren’t inclined to let go of, that you may even have attached the name of principle to, to justify your fear of bending.”

- Tobias Wolff, in his Art of Fiction interview in The Paris Review.

"…like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers."

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 17:00:34 -0400

“…like watches ticking on the wrists of dead soldiers.”

- Jean Cocteau, on Proust’s notebooks.

"A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being..."

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:23:42 -0400

“A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said—remains, buzzing”

- John Updike, Self-Consciousness

"Any kind of close listening, though, reveals that the best raps are usually operating in a high gear..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:29:00 -0500

“Any kind of close listening, though, reveals that the best raps are usually operating in a high gear of poetical efficiency _against_ the almost Eliotically strenuous limitations of both complex rhythmic demand and the requirement of near-cognate rhyme; the limitations here are the invaluable constraints of form that all good new art helps define itself by struggling against from inside them—the formal Other all ‘fresh’ speech needs. Straight rhyme, for example, is such a stiff formal cincture that in rap it necessitates really complicated prosodic innovations—disordered but effective enjambment, stresses alternated between standard feet, wild combinations of iamb with trochee and of both with spondee, the kind of metrical libertinism that spells f-r-e-e-v-e-r-s-e but is here required by _exactly_ the sort of tight aural walls free verse was all about knocking down”

- Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers 97 [within a Wallace section].

"These ‘nodes of associations’ we call ‘pavlovs’—a unit of measure of..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:24:00 -0500

“These ‘nodes of associations’ we call ‘pavlovs’—a unit of measure of everything we feel or think while hearing music we’ve heard before.
Pavlovs can be formed in as many different ways as we can come to love anything. Fucking to an album makes you love that album forevermore (unless of course the woman you were with later breaks your heart into many small pieces, in which case you’ll come to pavlov—yes, it’s also a verb—the album with pain and hate it for all time). Aesthetically, pavloving shouldn’t happen, but in experience it does. Thus at least two young Bostonians alive as of this writing cannot listen to, say, Side A of the 10,000 Maniacs’ In My Tribe in any context without feeling things more pungent than anything sanely attributable to the Maniacs.
Pavlovs are everything we come to associate with music—and can re-experience in listening again—that isn’t ‘in’ the music. They’re what we each bring to bear, when rightly cued. Pavlovs are the saliva that flows when the bells ring.”

- Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace, Signifying Rappers, 90 fn 37 [within a Costello section].

Some links

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:32:00 -0500

Here are a few self-promotional links for your Tuesday afternoon.

Back in October, my friend Mahvesh Murad interviewed me for The Herald, the monthly magazine supplement to Dawn, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely-read English-language daily. It was published in November, and you can read it now, by clicking here.

And Velichka Ivanova reviewed my book for the European Journal of American Studies.

"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:39:53 -0500

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

- Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 62.

Roasted Trout, Green Beans, Almonds, and Mint

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:48:22 -0500

Last night’s dinner was a big success, combining the idea from Whitney Chen’s excellent piece on roasting whole fish with this side dish from Dinner: A Love Story.

I topped and tailed a bunch of green beans, then tossed them with a good quarter cup of chopped almonds and maybe a tablespoon of chopped mint (if I had more, I would have used more). I took my two boneless whole trout out of the fridge, salted and peppered their insides and outsides, stuffed them with sliced lemon, sliced shallot, and a few sprigs of thyme, and rubbed them with a quickly made garlic oil (i.e., microplaned garlic stirred into olive oil).

I heated up a little too much olive oil in the cast iron pan over medium heat, then added the green beans, almonds, and mint to the pan. After arranging them relatively evenly into a bed, and after they started really sizzling, I laid the trout over top. Then into a 400º oven for fifteen minutes, after which the fish had reached its requisite 145º internal temp.

The fish was perfectly cooked, the combination of green beans with the almonds was really wonderful, and I love that the whole thing only dirtied one pan. I ended up making some simple steam-sauteed spinach as well, so there was a little more dishwashing to do, but nothing too serious.

"Where do these Innate assumptions come from? Not from what We think truest, or most want to..."

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:13:41 -0500

“

Where do these
Innate assumptions come from? Not from what
We think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. They’re more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly they harden into all we’ve got

And how we got it; looked back on, they rear
Like sand-clouds, thick and close, embodying
For Dockery a son, for me nothing,
Nothing with all a son’s harsh patronage.
Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,
And age, and then the only end of age.

”

- Philip Larkin, from “Dockery and Son”

"Grief is, in a sense, the bill that comes due for love."

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:25:20 -0500

“Grief is, in a sense, the bill that comes due for love.”

- George Saunders, in his eulogy for David Foster Wallace.

Six ingredients

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:12:00 -0500

Three carrots, two stalks of celery, one onion. Two cups of split peas, one smoked ham hock, eight cups of water.

"Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness..."

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 14:20:58 -0500

“Why should a life with some unusual metaphysical feature built into it inevitably end in unhappiness and early death?”

- Nicholson Baker, The Fermata, 279.

"This obligation to write out one’s own mind, to express the mind’s multifariousness and complexity,..."

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 08:52:00 -0500

“This obligation to write out one’s own mind, to express the mind’s multifariousness and complexity, is something that Wallace and Baker are very interested in. Baker’s subsequent work attests to a slow rumination on everything his eye crosses, while Wallace seems not just committed to cataloging everything that goes through a mind but the act of mental mastication that occurs at the same time. If one could call Baker and find him home thinking, one could find Wallace home thinking about thinking. His stories are above all about thinking, the pain and recursion of it, the entrapment of it.”

- Barrett Hathcock, on Nicholson Baker as the link between Updike and Wallace.

They never made it to the park. They picnicked on each other. As Leonard pulled her toward the...

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:33:00 -0500

They never made it to the park. They picnicked on each other. As Leonard pulled her toward the mattress, Madeleine dropped her packages, hoping the wine bottle didn’t break. She slipped her dress over her head. Soon they were naked, raiding, it felt like, a huge basket of goodies. Madeleine lay on her stomach, her side, her back, nibbling all the treats, the nice-smelling fruit candies, the meaty drumsticks, as well as more sophisticated offerings, the biscotti flavored with anise, the wrinkly truffles, the salty spoonfuls of olive tapenade. She’d never been so busy in her life.

-Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot, 66

I can describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness. Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do. You go here and I’ll go there—okay, now you go here and I’ll go there—all right, now she goes down that way, while I head up this way, and you sort of half turn around on this … and so it went, Doctor, until I came my third and final time.

-Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 137

Oh man, this chicken

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:04:00 -0500

Run, don’t walk, to make this Halal-style chicken and rice from the Serious Eats cookbook. The rare recipe that’s as good as the write-up makes it sound. This had me immediately dreaming of variations (as shawarma! swap out the coriander and oregano for cumin and cilantro and make tacos! etc!).