The Orphic Fiddler

Research lady. Not-so-starving artist. Weasel under the cocktail cabinet. In other words, the inimitable Tess Grover. Address commentary, questions, and prepositions to orphicfiddler AT gmail DOT com. new TWTR.Widget({ version: 2, type: 'profile', rpp: 4, interval: 30000, width: 250, height: 300, theme: { shell: { background: '#333333', color: '#ffffff' }, tweets: { background: '#141214', color: '#ffffff', links: '#e64225' } }, features: { scrollbar: true, loop: false, live: false, hashtags: true, timestamp: true, avatars: false, behavior: 'all' } }).render().setUser('orphicfiddler').start();

[orphicfiddler]

Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of coddling a third group, which can consist, for example, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Leftwing populism is dyadic. Rightwing populism is triadic. It looks upward, but also down upon an out group.

John B. Judis, The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics

[orphicfiddler]

Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience. In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding systems of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety always lies in sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear - against alienation and separation. The choice to love is the choice to connect - to find ourselves in the other.

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

[orphicfiddler]

The more I think about it, the more I tell myself she was living that moment of youth when everything's going to be at the tipping point soon, when it's going to be a little too late for everything. The boat's still at the dock, all you have to do is walk up the gangway, you've got a few minutes left... A soft numbness overcomes you.

Patrick Modiano, Villa Triste

[orphicfiddler]

It all leaves me with the impression that I'm living in some kind of ravaged nuclear wasteland. The problem with that diagnosis lies in the absence of any level of apocalypse. No one dropped any bombs; no great fire scorched the earth. We just ended up like this. We followed a natural progression from past to present. We're not Post-Apocalyptic, we're Post-Yesterday. One look around, though, and I realize that we must have had some brutal kind of Yesterday

Jeremy Robert Johnson, Angel Dust Apocalypse

[orphicfiddler]

With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify. There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris

[orphicfiddler]

The world was full of holes, tiny apertures of meaninglessness, microscopic rifts that the mind could walk through, and once you were on the other side of one of those holes, you were free of yourself, free of your life, free of your death, free of everything that belonged to you. I had chanced upon one of them in my living room that night. It appeared in the form of a gun, and now that I was inside that gun, I didn't care whether I got out or not. I was perfectly calm and perfectly insane, perfectly prepared to accept what the moment had offered.

Paul Auster, The Book of Illusions

[orphicfiddler]

His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.

George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

[orphicfiddler]

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the 'other' side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it's on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

[orphicfiddler]

And she soon found that it was not all that much fun being the sort of person who eats a big dinner in a warm house while others shiver on their roofs in the dark.

George Saunders, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

[orphicfiddler]

You know how summer goes. You yearn for it and yearn for it, but there’s always something wrong. Everywhere you look, there are insects thickening the air, and birds rifling trees, and enormous, heavy leaves dragging down branches. You want to trammel it, wreck it, smash things down. The afternoons are so fat and long. You want to see if anything you do matters.

Emily Fridlund, History of Wolves

[orphicfiddler]

Black boys couldn't afford to be reckless, she had tried to tell him. Reckless white boys became politicians and bankers, reckless black boys became dead.

Brit Bennett, The Mothers

[orphicfiddler]

When the war began, the president said that he was sleeping like a baby. 'I'm sleeping like a baby, too,' the secretary said. 'Every two hours, I wake up screaming.'

George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America 

[orphicfiddler]

White is having all of Eric Garner's air in your lungs. No matter how queer you are. No matter how anything we are. If we are white we have Eric Garner's air in our lungs tonight. And that means our breath is not ours to hold. That means our exhale is owed to mercy, to the riot of our unowned hearts, to the promise that who we weep and fight and tear down the sun for will not only be our own faces in the mirror.

Andrea Gibson, “A Letter to White Queers, a Letter to Myself,” Pansy

[orphicfiddler]

Our culture is a prison and the only one with a key is little Emmy Jones covering every inch of her standardized test with the best number-two pencil version of Starry Night anyone has ever seen.

Andrea Gibson, “Yellow Bird,” The Madness Vase

[orphicfiddler]

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style

[orphicfiddler]

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

Stephen King, On Writing

[orphicfiddler]

Everyone has a pipeline through which he pushes what he is willing and able to share of himself out into the world, and through which he takes in all of the world that he is willing and able to bear. Max’s conduit wasn’t bigger than anyone else’s, it was simply unclogged.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Here I Am