The Verisimilar

Written by Himself

[verisimilary]

If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a 'work'? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment.

Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

[verisimilary]

Philip Roth in the NYT

[verisimilary]

Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”

[verisimilary]

An addendum to my earlier theory on memory, vis-à-vis thought thoughts. To recollect everything in one’s past is to hold oneself to an unreachable standard. It just can’t be done. The sponge that is the mind will gather details that are interesting, odd, pleasant, etc. A new experience will have all sorts of these attributes, and so the mind remembers them with or without a conscious host (the person). We may not be able to recall these memories right away….And we certainly can’t recall the darkest memories without meeting some sort of resistance, like trauma. It occurs to me now that in day-to-day existence events simply don’t have much significance, and therefore we forget the majority of our lives.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry, p. 60-61

[verisimilary]

So much that happens happens in small ways That someone was going to get around to tabulate, and then never did, Yet it all bespeaks freshness, clarity and an even motor drive To coax us out of sleep and start us wondering what the new round Of impressions and salutations is going to leave in its wake This time. And the form, the precepts are yours to dispose of as you will, As the ocean makes grasses, and in doing so refurbishes a lighthouse On a distant hill, or else lets the whole picture slip into foam.

John Ashberry, “Someone You Have Seen Before”

[verisimilary]

[verisimilary]

At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure. The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl. The great tectonic plates strain against each other while we sleep and wake. Rattlers in the dry grass. Sharks beneath the Golden Gate. In the South, they are convinced that they have bloodied their place with history. In the West we do not believe that anything we do can bloody the land, or change it, or touch it. How could it have come to this? I am trying to place myself in history. I have been looking all my life for history and have yet to find it.

Joan Didion, South and West, 117

[verisimilary]

How had I gotten from there to here: there, as always, was the question.

Joan Didion, South and West, 60

[longform]

The author on her reverence for water.

Joan Didion | PBS | Jan 1977

[verisimilary]

"A certain external reality remains, and resists interpretation. The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control."

[communicants]

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)

[verisimilary]

Because moss shows up more impressively if the painter ignores the tree, and the tree stands out better if the forest disappears, there is a general cry of exultation, and artists whose powers scarcely suffice to render the pettiest aspects of nature and who instinctively do not attempt loftier tasks are exalted above others who do not depict the dance of the gnats because it is scarcely visible next to the dance of the planets. The ‘peripheral’ begins to bloom everywhere: the mud on Napoleon’s boot at the moment of the hero’s abdication is as painstakingly portrayed as the spiritual conflict on his face…. In short, the comma puts on coat-tails and in its lofty complacency smiles haughtily at the sentence to which it owes its existence.

Friedrich Hebbel [I read it in Lukacs’s “Narrate or Describe”]

[verisimilary]

Let me begin with facts--bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation or my memory of them.

Dracula Chapter III

[beckisbookshelf-deactivated2023]

Slow books

[verisimilary]

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail--for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

Foreword to The Magic Mountain

[verisimilary]

I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren't commensurate to me in any way.

Elif Batuman, The Idiot, 92

[verisimilary]

Play It As It Lays and the seven-headed cobra of the Symbionese Liberation Front

[theparisreview]

I like Walden as much as the next guy. My problem with it—my problem with all books—is that it’s just such a passive experience for the reader. Thoreau does all the talking; I’m just supposed to listen. Thoreau does all the fishing; I’m just supposed to watch. Thoreau plants all the beans; he never asks, Hey, reader, would you like to come out here and give me a hand with the beans sometime? But all that’s about to change with Walden, a Game, the new video-game adaptation of Thoreau’s treatise on solitude that puts you in control of your spiritual self-discovery. Its designers, Robin Pogrebin writes, hope to fuse the thrills of gaming to the joys of quiet contemplation: “The new video game, based on Thoreau’s nineteenth-century retreat in Massachusetts, will urge players to collect arrowheads, cast their fishing poles into a tranquil pond, buy penny candies and perhaps even jot notes in a journal—all while listening to music, nature sounds and excerpts from the author’s meditations … Should you not leave sufficient time for contemplation, or work too hard, the game cautions: ‘Your inspiration has become low, but can be regained by reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human’ … The goal is not to win in any competitive sense, but to achieve work-life balance.”

This and more in today’s culture roundup.

[daysofchad]

This whole thing makes me want to tear the flesh from my own bones.