“When your life is half over, I think you have to see the face of death in order to start writing seriously. There are people who see the end quickly, like Rimbaud. When you start seeing it, you feel you have to rescue these things. Death is the great Maecenas, Death is the great angel of writing. You must write because you are not going to live any more.” —Carlos Fuentes

—Scatological?
—Eschatological, the doctrine of last things . . .
—Good lord, Willie, you are drunk. Either that or you’re writing for a very small audience.
—So . . . ? how many people were there in Plato’s Republic?
—William Gaddis

If you were to ask me what I most aspire to these days, it would be this: to vaporize each and every incidental word, to release the pure expression, which today, more than ever, must be sought in nouns and verbs… given that we can’t ever dispense with language! —César Vallejo

Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come. —Montesquieu

An Atheist Prays for Her Therapist

Trust is a funny word. A word you laugh at when you are able to. Sometimes, though, you can catch yourself not taking it serious enough. That’s about the time you catch the stench of an oh-so-cosmopolitian meal being served up by America’s best two-faced broad. You know, the kind of meal that pretends to be what it isn’t. You wonder to yourself, then, how long she’s been cooking and who she’s been cooking for? Was the meal for you or someone else? Was it supposed to make you sick or were your culinary tastes simply below her bourgeois levels? Did the aroma go over your head, you silly simpleton?

Well, the janitors and the poorly dressed of the world will always have Tim Kinsella on their side. And we can sing along with little instrumentation but plenty of sincerity: “The problem is you can’t understand what the problem is. And it’ll kill you love like you will never die. And everything you think makes you cool makes you even more of a loser.”

The rest of us will continue to live in a naive bliss, trusting in friendship and neglecting the greater fashion of the world’s social structures that you can never figure out but seem so eager to promote (it seems one can never dissent against oneself enough). And then we will turn the tape over and sing along some more, through our hearts and fingertips as we kiss what we love and you look for more things to lose. Friendship is a funny word. A word you laugh at when you are able to. The problem with friendship, though, is you can never take it serious enough.

“However, because our mirror neurons don’t get emotionally involved with abstractions, we’ve learned to live with them, as though the dead were perfectly normal company every morning and every night, rather like the weather forecast or the national anthem that brings the broadcast to a close.” —Jorge Volpi

La Muerte es un a vida vivida. La vida es un a muerte que viene. (Death is a life lived. Life is death on its way.) —Jorge Luis Borges

“I’m like every other 30-something, middle-class white person: I feel like the world owes me my best-selling memoir. But I guess, in the end, this pencil-sharpening book will have to do.” —David Rees

Sitting in the April sun, dressed in black, of course, surrounded by flowers that, so I’m told (or so I’ve overheard, actually), do not normally exist yet, collecting pollen on my sweater, the bright reprinted pages of Gaddis swarmed (I wanted to use the word alight—it was only a modest swarm at best—but we don’t still use the word alight, do we?) by friendly flies, surrounded by a sea of even brighter legs filling the horizon just above (though further beyond) the pages I sometimes look up from; digesting, reading, warming, (surprisingly not) sweating, existing, etc.-ing.

“That is what is so miraculous about a city: that each person’s bearing and conduct vanishes among all these thousand types, that everything is observed in passing, judgments made in an instant, and forgetting a matter of course.” —Robert Walser