the passions of the bookish

Everyone has their favourite books to be read and re-read. Such things become talismans and love-tokens, even personality indicators, the truly bookish will mate on the strength of a spine. The moderately bookish may be more cautious about splicing together their literary and lubricious endeavors but the passion they feel for certain printed sheets will be as lively as any got between plain. The world of the book is a total book and in a total world we fall in love.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Writer, Reader, Words," pg 25, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on complex emotion

There is a clash between what I feel and what I had expected to feel. My logical self fails me, and no matter how I try to pace it out, there is still something left over that will not be accounted for. All of us have felt like this, all of us have tried to make the rough places smooth; to reason our way out of a gathering storm. Usually dishonesty is our best guide. We call inner turbulence 'blowing things up out of all proportion'. We call it 'seven-year itch'. We call it 'over-tiredness'. Like Adam we name our beasts, but not well, and we find they do not come when called.

- Jeanette Winterson, "The Semiotics of Sex" pg 113, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on making standards in gay culture (art) and a tired paradigm

...this is particularly urgent where fiction and poetry are concerned and where it is most tempting to assume that the autobiography of Difference will be enough.
Let me put it another way: if I am in love with Peggy and I am a composer I can express that love in a ensemble or a symphony. If I am in love with Peggy and I am a painter, I need not paint her portrait, I am free to express my passion in splendid harmonies of colour and line. If I am a writer, I will have to be careful, I must not fall into the trap of believing that my passion, of itself, is art. As a composer or a painter I know that it is not. I know that I shall have to find a translation of form to make myself clear. I know that the language of my passion and the language of my art are not the same thing.

- Jeanette Winterson, "The Semiotics of Sex" pg 105, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on the dearth of slow readers

It seems so obvious, this question of pace, and yet it is not. Reviewers, who can never waste more than an hour, with a book, are the most to blame. Journalism encourages haste; haste in the writer, haste in the reader, and haste is the enemy of art. Art, in its making and in its enjoying, demands long tracts of time. Books, like cats, do not wear watches.
Over and above all the individual rhythms of music, pictures and words, is the rhythm of art itself. Art objects to the fakeries of clock culture.

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Veil of Words" pg 90, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on prurience in literature and the beauty of run-on sentences

The biography and the autobiography both pretend to honesty and frankness, offer to walk with the reader through unknown woods to sights not seen by other people. Both have the whiff of the bedroom about them even if they are not talking about sex. Voyeurism is a vice and a pleasure few of us can deny ourselves and because human beings are always curious and because human beings like to be in on a secret and because human beings are still not sophisticated enough or technological enough or dead enough yet to resist the lure of a good story, we can be taken in by someone who offers truth with a wink and says 'I'm telling you stories. Trust me.'

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Gift of Wings" pg 71, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

a function of art

Art is large and it enlarges you and me. To a shrunk-up world its vistas are shocking. Art is the burning bush that both shelters and makes visible our profounder longings. Through it we see ourselves in metaphor. Art is metaphor, from the Greek, meta (above) and pherein (to carry) it is that which is carried above the literalness of life. Art is metaphor. Metaphor is transformation.

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Gift of Wings" pg 66, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on genres and play

We are supposed to know where we are with biography and autobiography, they are the literary equivalents of the portrait and self-portrait. (Reflect a while on what the Post-Impressionists did with those.) One is the representation of someone else's life, and the other is the representation of your own. We shouldn't have to worry about form and experiment, and we can rest assured that the writer (or the painter) is sticking to the facts. We can feel safe with facts. You can introduce a fact to your mother and you can go out at night with a proven fact on your arm. There we are; a biography in one hand, and an autobiography in the other. A rose is a rose is a rose.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Testimony against Gertrude Stein" pg 49, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

what does the reader want

We seem to have returned to a place where play, pose, and experiment are unwelcome and where the idea of art is debased. At the same time, there are a growing number of people (possibly even a representative number of people), who want to find something genuine in the literature of their own time and who are unconvinced by the glories of reproduction furniture.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Writer, Reader, Words" pg 43, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on the problematic aggrandizement of history

Our present obsession with the past has the double advantage of making new work seem raw and rough compared to the cosy patina of tradition, whilst refusing tradition its vital connection to what is happening now. By making islands of separation out of the unbreakable chain of human creativity, we are able to set up false comparisons, false expectations, all the while lamenting that the music, poetry, painting, prose, performance art of Now, fails to live up to the art of Then, which is why, we say, it does not affect us. In fact, we are no more moved by a past we are busy inventing, than by a present we are busy denying.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Art Objects" pg 11, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on making art comprehensible

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No-one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Art Objects" pg 4, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

poetry: the hermit

In a small house under a long bridge lived a hermit with purple teeth and wild yellow hair.

At night he howled at the moon and in the morning he drank coffee.

Afternoons were spent in green grass with a thick book.

He liked to eat toads and fuzzy chicks, stole potatoes from the farmer and drank gasoline from a neighbor's tractor.

His breath smelled of rotten dill pickles and under all his nails lived crumbly villages of dirt. In some of these villages were ants. He was crawling with lice too, and spiders made webs in his hair.

His girlfriend was called Charlie and she was made of stone. He fashioned her from lime rock and kept her in a box in the bathroom.

One day he took her to the grass where he read aloud from a letter he'd written.

"I love you more than cake," it said, "more than thunder and more than snow."

She stared at him with a face like pavement.

"More than a hundred bees," he said, "more than all the crabs in Maryland."

He kissed her and pushed so hard his lip split open onto hers.

He loved her more than air but his house was in need of repairs, so with active hands he hacked her to gravel, took her home, and fashioned her to the walls.

At night he ran his fingers over the doorjambs and thought he felt them shiver.

- Tara Wray, "The Hermit"

on hurt, personification

He's about 300 pounds and knows martial arts, boxing and wrestling-- both the real and the fake kind. So I never know when I'm thrown to the ground or hurled against the roopes of a boxing ring fence (who can guess when he'll surprise me with a punch next?) if the ache in my back is real or cartoon, if my bruises will stay or wash off like kiddie tattoos.

Pain is a sneak and a cheat. He loves to eat unhealthy foods (scrapple, greasy gravy, Little Debbie Snacks). Not only that-- I think he smokes. I can smell it on his breath, all fire and ash, when he pins me to my bed without asking. He's hefty and invisible and likes to strike in the dark so that even my magnifying glass and double locks are useless. Sometimes I call him Sumo, the Devil, or any member of my family. He's a changeling and a scam. His footprints are the ones that make cracks in the sidewalk.

Pain first introduced himself as a sadist. I was confused at the time. He said he was seduced by the blue of my wrist, the soft hollow at the center of my throat. He squeezed my heart like a Nerf ball until it was all lumps and fingernail marks. I nursed Pain like a mother. I tried to cheer him up like a sister, but everyone knows how that story goes.

Pain and I did have a few good times, if you can call them that. Eating ice cream under the covers, our tears drying on our cheeks so they chapped. We liked to go to movies alone. Pain, being invisible, snuck in without paying, then he'd leave the seat next to mine and feel up another girl in the theater. I could always tell which one. I'd hear her crying the way I did or crunching her popcorn as though each kernel was a small bone in Pain's neck or foot. He still comes around, though I tell him it's over, though I spit into his round hairy face.

He just laughs that sexy laugh. You know, the kind that gets in your head and you can't tell if it's making you nauseous or turning you on. There's no restraining order that works on Pain, the outlaw who loves to chase and embrace us, the outlaw we sometimes love to chase and embrace.

- Denise Duhamel, "I'm Dealing With My Pain"

on name-related puns

… only through a consideration of the dialectic of freedom acting under given material conditions can the concrete reality of a man’s life be grasped. [Sartre] shows a particular freedom at grips with destiny, at first apparently crushed and suffocated by fatedness, later eroding this fatedness piece by piece. If Genet is a genius, then his genius is not a God- or gene-given gift, but an issue invented by Genet alone, in particular moments of despair. He seeks to rediscover the choice which Genet makes of himself, his life, and the meaning of the world, to become a writer, and to show how the unique specificity of this choice pervades even the interstices of the formal character of Genet’s style, the structure of his images, and the particularity of his tastes.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 67.

on Genet's negotiation of possession

… Genet is ‘faulty’ not only from the point of view of being, but also from that of having. … Nothing could belong to him, material possession was forbidden him, all his life had to be a continued effort to dematerialize objects and construct their metaphysical doubles, which alone he could possess.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 70.

on perspective and self-knowledge

With the return of self-consciousness, he knew that only violence could make him supple. It was Betty, however, that he criticized. Her world was not the world…. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her order was not.

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyheart, pg. 11.

poetry: an accomplished adult

I bought a paper shredder. Eight sheet maximum.
I wear a tie when I use it
because I'm like that,
on the edge.

I parallel park like a genius
and I don't lick my thumb
when I turn the page.

- Jace Mortensen, "Adulthood"

on sensation and history

…An account of the tears? when you recall them they bring back perceptible touches, numb of all pain, but which you can feel and which one can examine from afar as if looking at so many trails taken by our flesh in the world, such wealth gushing out from torment….

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 310, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on Genet's plight-as-orphan

Certainly [Genet] was born of a woman, but this physical origin was not retained in the collective memory. He came into the world from an unknown womb, almost as an article produced by a modern factory bears no trace of the human producer. Belonging originally to an administrative apparatus, his later affinities tended to be for institutions -- the reformatory and the prison.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 68.

on Genet's belief in inequality in love

The essence of the loved one is his indifference, his profound nature of being a thing, an object. Genet conceives of the couple as the union of body and spirit, but this relation is not reciprocal, since consciousness may be consciousness of body, but body is quite simply body, body is completely itself. The body in itself (en soi) is an autonomous substance; consciousness is in itself and for itself a relation. It is this autonomy of substance that Genet calls indifference. All the words he uses to designate the loved are negations or disguised negations -- for example, ‘immobile and silent’, ‘inflexible’, ‘impenetrable’, ‘the angel of death itself, as unyielding as a rock’. The loved one is absent, or present only as an appearance. His purest virtues are his destructive forces and his lack of positive qualities. In the moment of submission Genet reduces the male to a shadow, an appearance of being which exists only through Genet. This is the principal source of Genet’s treachery.
The loved male is above all the No: non-life, non-love, non-presence, non-good.

- - R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 82.

beware of the city

And she asked, What is City, Ternome? He, full of secular learning, exaggerated: City’s a quake. A tremor. There all things are possible, and there all things are mean. City sweeps and carries you along, never lets go of you, get you mixed up in its old secrets. In the end you take them in without ever understanding them. You tell those just-off-the-hills that that’s how it is and they eat it up: but the City has just gulped you in without showing you the ropes. A City is the ages all gathered in one place, not just in the names, houses, statues, but in the not-visible. A City sips the joys, the pain, the thoughts, every feeling, it makes its dew out of them, which you see without being able to point to it.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 173, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on the dangers of globalization

Often, thanks to a crew reduced by yellow fever, two-three would leave as sailors into the vertigo of the wide world, see other skies, breathe other winds. They came back disoriented with truths, more confused than washed-up zombies. Sons of the world but outside it all, half transparent, they floated about in town, stiff, hard, without a past.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 67, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on movers and shakers and community-makers

It was a kind of magical we. He loaded it with the meaning of one fate for many, invented the we that would prey on his mind in his last years.

- -Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 122, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on too-common turns of phrase

Her smile had opened naturally, not like an umbrella, and while he watched her laugh folded and became a smile again, a smile that was neither “wry,” “ironical” nor “mysterious.”

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, pg. 12.

on a flood of feeling, writing

I wrote. I wrote despair. Writing does well at the end of an edge of oneself. Ti-Cirique no longer had time to read my things. He was overwhelmed by my avalanche of words undoing the alphabet, by my sadness cut up by commas to teach silences; that despondency which inspired my words slamming into each other impaled on hyphens, or these word left unfinished that would open the pages to my Arcadius. I would let my tears dry to burden each i with a dot. I would string the beads of my shivers onto threads of ink and crush them waiting for them to bloom in my closed notebooks. I would tie together the memories… and I grated them together like manioc, making ink from the tears I cried. I wrote haikais colder than seventeen coffin nails, plowed lines bitter as toad gall. I wrote dictionary words which popped out of me like a deadman’s clots and left me more anemic than a cow hanging at a slaughterhouse. I wrote feelings which mingled verbs the way sleeper-women do. I wrote colors like Rimbaud having visions. I wrote melancholy which reinforced mine. I wrote blinking howls which made my ink run by. I wrote thinking involuntary, coming from God knows where like frightened she-dogs… writers are mad to live out such things in their heart; he would tell me that today’s writers don’t go through such things anymore: they’ve lost the primal drive of writing which comes out of you like necessity, which you wrestle (forever along), your life getting in a tangle with death, in the holy inexpressible. And out of that kind of drama, no one can make a profession.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on Genet's creation of self

What can I decide to be if I am already what I am: if I am ‘locked up in my being’? The word ‘being’ for Genet assumes an active, positive value, and in the phrase ‘J’ai decide d’etre ce que le crime a fait de moi’, to be is to throw oneself into one’s being in order to coincide with it.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper - Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy: 1950 - 1960, pg. 75.

on Jean Genet's theiving (to make sense of the world)

After this destruction another destructive act follows in the conversion of the value of a object from a use value to a value of exchange. Theft results, thus, in the radical destruction of the stolen object, the disorganization of the values of usefulness and sentimental association, an impoverishment of the world. Our acts sketch our form on being, the created object present its creator to himself in an objective dimension. In creation I am really exteriorized amongst beings in the world: in destruction the universe is reabsorbed into me.

- R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950 - 1960, pg 89.

an addiction for writing

I then gained a taste for notebooks: you could yank out stained pages, the squares would discipline my hand; what’s more, it looked like a book to me; it was possible to read it again, leaf through it, smell it. A brand new notebook, woah! I got carried away, the beauty of the pages, the promise of blankness, its threat too, this fear when the first word is inscribed and calls for the rush of a world one is never sure to tame.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 321-322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

on suspending disbelief

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it…. It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI & XVII: MYSTICISM, pg. 257.

on weariness

…he found it impossible to continue. The letters were no longer funny. He could not go on finding the same joke funny thirty times a day for months on end. And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.

- Nathaniel West, Miss Lonelyhearts, pg 1.