Paul Lisicky

Writer of LAWNBOY, FAMOUS BUILDER, THE BURNING HOUSE, and UNBUILT PROJECTS. I teach in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden and at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. My next book, THE NARROW DOOR, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. See more at http://paullisicky.net

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Moon from the High Line last night.

[radiophile]

Well, I have said this in the past, so I hope i don’t bore you by repeating it, but I think that we live or die under the tyranny of perfection. Socially, we are pushed towards being perfect. Physically, beautiful to conform to standards that are cruel and uncommon, to behave and lead our lives in a certain way, to demonstrate to the world that we are happy and healthy and all full of sunshine. We are told to always smile and never sweat, by multiple commercials of shampoo or beer. And I feel that the most achievable goal of our lives is to have the freedom that imperfection gives us. And there is no better patron saint of imperfection than a monster. We will try really hard to be angels, but I think that a balanced, sane life is to accept the monstrosity in ourselves and others as part of what being human is. Imperfection, the acceptance of imperfection, leads to tolerance and liberates us from social models that I find horrible and oppressive.

Guillermo del Toro, on why he has always been intrigued by monsters [x] (via queerly-it-is)

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The Naked and the Unnaked

1. This business of voice. How to speak of it? It is a little like trying to write about blood. You’ve been taught that blood is of you, in you, but you can’t hear it unless you put your hands over your ears.2. Does a voice engage senses other than the ear? Does a voice have a scent, a taste? Can a voice summon up red wine or pomegranate or Cherry Kool-Aid? 

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Joy Williams reads "George and Susan" at the Tin House conference last week.

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Taffy, the wonderful dog of our childhood, in her midcentury moment (c. 1977).

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"In some ways, it’s the book I would have loved to have written when I was eighteen. I feel like in its sensibility the book goes back to a much more lyrical drive in me that a lot of us were educated out of. At least in the time that I was coming up, there was a certain suspicion of lyricism. I came up during the big Minimalists, when the idea was that language is figurative enough and you don’t need to embellish it. But I’m at a point in my life where it was like, You know what? Too bad. There is something about this that’s really important to me and I’m just letting it rip. I’m just doing it. We’ll see what happens."

--from THE RUMPUS interview with Stacey D'Erasmo (on the novel WONDERLAND)

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The bunny and the patch of light. 

(At the base of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown.)

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Provincetown, 9:30 PM last night.

[mttbll]

Virginia Woolf said, a hundred years ago, ‘You must kill the angel in the house.’ The angel in the house was that Victorian ideal of the long-suffering, mother-of-the-world character, and Woolf said you have to kill her in order to write, to create. I would say that in the twenty-first century one still feels a certain amount of cultural pressure to not say certain things, and I have strong muscles for resisting that. Mostly because I feel that every single one of us on the planet is flawed and is doing his or her best to get through the damn day. And if you create characters who do not have as many edges and fissures and incongruous places as real people do, then you are failing to love your characters sufficiently. Because you’re saying, ‘I’ll be interested in you as a character so long as you behave in socially acceptable ways.’ And that to me is very poor art. Anna has some edges, of course she does. So do I, and so does everyone I love. If we cannot love people in their complexity, then we’re rather cruel and cold as a culture. If we only love our female characters when they are either giving or suffering, then we are really shortchanging ourselves as human beings.

Stacey D’Erasmo (via mttbll)

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From the builder's brochure of my family's summerhouse (c. 1960). The house hasn't fared well since Sandy, and it has to be torn down this fall, why might be why I'm posting these now, so full of optimism and simple high spirit: the roofline, the open window, the butterfly chair.

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Head of the Meadow Beach, North Truro, MA. Monday, June 2nd.

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Here’s what I mean by the miracle of language. When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death… And here’s the magic. You’re different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.

Anthony Doerr (via mttbll)

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Sky outside at 9:13 PM tonight. 

Looking north from Fishburn Court, Provincetown, MA.