Radio Free Blog

Another blog about books, music, and movies. Same as it ever was.

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It really doesn't get much better than sitting in a basement bar, enjoying a great IPA, and reading Thomas Pynchon's V.

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“Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes.”

Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer (p. 72)

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“The sea: you watch it for a while, lose interest, and then, because there is nothing else to look at, go back to watching it. It fills you with great thoughts which, leading nowhere and having nothing to focus on except the unfocused mass of the sea, dissolve into a vacancy which in turn, for want of any other defining characteristic, you feel content to term ‘awe.’ You lean on the rails, looking at the sea and the other ships whose passengers are leaning on the rails looking across at you, thinking about waving but somehow losing heart. The soldier said that the waters here in the Straits of Messina were very dangerous. A terrible undertow. Jump off the boat and you will be sucked under.”

-        Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer (p. 47)

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D’Angelo - “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”

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Spoon - “New York Kiss”

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First Lines: How Did I Ever - Mary Robison

“1.

I have a dream of working a combination lock that is engraved on its back with the combination. Left 85, right 12, left 66. ‘Well shit, man,’ I say in the dream.”

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For the first time in, well, probably my whole life, I would rather sit in silence than listen to any sort of music.

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If one quality of capital-L Literature is that it gets you out of your own head (empathy, yeah, but also something far more indefinable), then this book is Literature. The embarrassingly small number of moments (like, three) of not-really-calm-but-something-distantly-approaching-it that I have had over the past few days have all been due, exclusively, to this book. It really did give some clarity to a muddled and heavy depression (and depression is the right word: I have spent most of my days lying in bed, and I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to do anything I normally do - a feeling I fear is going to be rather long-lasting). For that, I’m thankful. Now that it’s over, I’m not sure what to do, except maybe pick up another book and try, once again, to ignore it all for a short time.

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Vince Staples - “Summertime”

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“It was one of those times when you sense that something critical but indefinable that relates to your life and how it’s lived has ended irrevocably and so you feel an anxious loss. Out of this solemn desinence I felt various incunubula threaten to emerge none of which promised anything of even slight appeal.”
- A Naked Singularity, Sergio De La Pava (p. 495) Emphasis: “an anxious loss.”

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First Lines: Out of Sheer Rage - Geoff Dyer

“Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D.H. Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray ti was meant to delay and alleviate. Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself. If, I said to myself, if I can apply myself to a sober – I can remember saying the word “sober” to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented ring – if I can apply myself to a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence then that will force me to pull myself together. I succeeded in applying myself but what I applied myself to – or so it seems to me now, now that I am lost in the middle of what is already a far cry from the sober academic study I had envisaged – was to pulling apart the thing, the book, that was intended to make me pull myself together.” 

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"Who am I to fuck with the order of the universe?"

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“Mornings feel like paper.

A morning is continuous. You don’t realize it if you sleep when it’s dark. You wake suddenly in the light and there is division between one time and another.

I tell you now: There’s no division. You have more past than future? No, you don’t. You have neither.”

-        Binary Star, Sarah Gerard (p. 122)

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Lucinda  Williams - “ 2 Kool 2 Be 4-gotten”

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              “Nobody ever talks about the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, or the fact that most, if not all, galaxies orbit supermassive black holes.

              It is not good for casual conversation to talk about circling oblivion.

              Death.

              By death I don’t mean individual inevitable conclusion, but the death of any trace of any of this. Deep death, if you consider that death is a matter of time.

              The nature of a supermassive black hole is such that the density of its singularity is less than that of a smaller black hole. In some cases, it is no denser than water.

              This means that a body traveling toward the black hole center will not experience significant tidal force until very deep in the black hole.

              An observer would notice very little change. Once a body crosses the event horizon, ti redshifts, but it never disappears.”

- Binary Star, Sarah Gerard (p. 74)

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- Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer

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Miguel - “FLESH”