sky

quotes from u & i by nicholson baker

"without some sort of anxiousness writing loses its charm."

"nothing is more impressive than the sight of a complex person suddenly ripping out a laugh over some words in a serious book or periodical."

"and yet after forty-five minutes, the pressure, slight at first but growing, to have at least one extra-dyadic conversation that i could use to imply hours of raucous socializing in later accounts, began to make me glance around with more purpose. i began to feel slightly desperate. we were forced to eat sliced and stuffed things at traypoint: each time the tray came around i felt that the bearer was adding another yes checkmark to his suspicion that we had arrived and talked to nobody but ourselves."

"[hetero] all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we're wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we're not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can't flirt, we feel like dummies discussing movies or books, we aren't in some moral bind with a woman that we need to confess, we've each said the other is a genius several times already, and the whole thing is depressing and the tone is false and we might as well go home to our wives and children and rent buddy movies."

"i think taste is a social concept and not an artistic one. i'm willing to show good taste, if i can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. since their words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, they should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves." -john updike

"normally, if i read something i think is wrong, i forget it two days later; but with updike, when i disagree with him, there is an element of pain, of emotional rupture, that makes me remember my difference, and as a result i keep returning unhappily to it over the years and checking to see whether the disaccord remains in effect - and because each time i check it i have to find grounds that still satisfy me for my continued refusal to be convinced by what he's said, i am able to refine my opinions in a way i could never do if i did find him universally agreeable."

"after a certain point, the management of one's own past vocabulary, the avoidance of repetition, becomes a major burden. your earlier formulations become contingent influences - and they hunt you down. . . the sheer amount of memory it takes as you're writing and you pause at some nominative juncture and review the options, and one by one reject those that file before your mind because you clearly recall or dimly suspect that you've found an earlier home for them - the sheer mounting strain of this, like the strain of a chess player who has to keep every move of every game they have ever played available for immediate review - must be exhausting."

"the intellectual surface we offer to the dead has undergone a subtle change of texture and chemistry; a thousand particulars of delight and fellow-feeling and forbearance begin reformulating themselves the moment they cross the bar. the living are always potentially thinking about and doing just what we are doing: being pulled through a touchless car wash, watching a pony chew a carrot, noticing that orange scaffolding has gone up around some prominent church. the conclusions they draw we know to be conclusions drawn from how things are now. indeed, for me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo. the dead can be helpful, needless to say, but we can only guess sloppily about how they would react to this emergent particle of time, which is all the time we have. and when we do guess, we are unfair to them. even when, as with barthelme, the dead have died unexpectedly and relatively young, we give them their moment of solemnity and then quickly begin patronizing them biographically, talking about how they 'delighted in' x or 'poked fun at' y - phrases that by their very singsong cuteness betray how alien and childlike the shades now are to us. posthumously their motives become ludicrously simple. . . all their emotions wear stage makeup. we can't really understand them anymore."


"i'm afraid of small pure words like 'sky' or 'water' or 'blue' or 'green': they too quckly induce an auto-suggestive trance of consent and submission, in which (as with 'catchy' above) you say, 'ah, simple, beautiful, beautiful, simple!"; and in less than fifteen seconds that isolated vocable has expanded to blot out everything else - all intelligence, all conscience, all conversation, all libraries--

sky

and it's too much! you lose your bearings! every concrete substantive seems arbitrarily lyrical! you don't need paragraphs or arguments or careful description at all! to protect yourself from this agoraphobic sensation of falling into a bottomless and eventually toxic word, you need a clunkier and uglier and more conspicuously victorian vocabulary around it, full of nearlys and indeeds and evens and himselfs - terms of near but not perfect transparency, that can almost be employed every fifth sentence or so without anyone's noticing, but not quite - so that you can use the language freely, without being transfixed into a mute and foolish nounage by the sacredness of the words you learned first."

"i will now seem to be obsessed with model airplanes and coins, when on my scale of obsessions they are very low. . . i find that i also offer the reader the opportunity to accuse me of being overinterested in scenes in which a person eats and thinks at the same time. . . i don't want my work to have this prominent 'philosophical snack' motif!"

"auden strikingly said that you should not speak ill of any writer, living or dead, to anyone but your closest friends, and absolutely not in print. simply don't talk about, don't give space to, things you don't like. i think i agree with that, except in cases where the writer has invited criticism by being intemperately critical themself."

"we don't want the sum of pain or dissatisfaction to be increased by a writer's printed passage through the world. their task is simply to delight and to instruct as well as they can."

"my 'no's point to the defining quality of a major writer: they exist above the threshold of assent, that faint magenta line over which nothing they can do can possibly be felt as a mistake. anything that causes doubt is either forgotten or is rerouted through some further circuit of forgiveness as more recalcitrant, and hence fresher, evidence of greatness."

"edmund white said that something in the tone of spackman's essays seemed to have the authority of a person like nabokov, 'who knows he's a genius.' . . . i did recognize the tone white meant: yeats had it maybe, writers develop it over the years, an air of rangy assurance, built on the knowledge that there are plenty of people who are interested in what the person has said up till now, and that the hush that has surrounded their past publications is unlikely to be replaced with indifference anytime soon, no matter what they do. this fixed certainty, the feeling of being pretty damned consequential, of tossing a few scraps to the eternally grateful who cluster around the podium, is in some personalities necessary perhaps to the completion of big, complex works."