— Literature Without Literature - Christian Lorentzen, Granta, Jul. 18, 2024
“Pleasure is why we read literature, but the pleasures literature delivers are complex and not easily described, defined, or fixed in time and place. As Guillory writes, the pleasures of literature are often only gained at the expense of pains: the initial pain of learning to read, the pain of understanding difficult books, the pain of grasping the literary history from which books emerge, the pain of looking at something we can’t yet comprehend though we know we could, the pain of examining the nature of our own pleasure. Perhaps it’s these pains that turn our eyes away from the pleasures of literature to the disenchanted explanations of political economy, to the suspicions of paranoid reading, to the preening pondering about what the books we enjoy say about us rather than what they say to us.”
— Stalking the billion-footed beast - Tom Wolfe, Harper’s, Nov. 1989
“Of one thing I am sure. If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious, the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists not only took over the richness of American life as their domain but also seized the high ground of literature itself. Any literary person who is willing to look back over the American literary terrain of the past twenty-five years—look back candidly, in the solitude of the study—will admit that in at least four years out of five the best nonfiction books have been better literature than the most highly praised books of fiction. Any truly candid observer will go still further. In many years, the most highly praised books of fiction have been overshadowed in literary terms by writers whom literary people customarily dismiss as “writers of popular fiction” (a curious epithet) or as genre novelists. I am thinking of novelists such as John le Carré and Joseph Wambaugh. Leaving the question of talent aside, le Carré and Wambaugh have one enormous advantage over their more literary confreres. They are not only willing to wrestle the beast; they actually love the battle.”
— False Light: Moral Worldbuilding and the Virtues of Evil - Brandon Taylor, The Sewanee Review, Summer 2024
“Recently, I went to see a Rothko exhibit with my friend Adam. We were in Paris, and the city was gray and cold. On my way to the Fondation Louis Vuitton, I walked through a wooded area. I looked up, and there were pine trees. For a few moments, I couldn’t walk because I was so flattened by the sight of these enormous trees. They were bare of needles. The scaly bark was an ashen purple. The branches were dark as they spread out over the milky veil of the sky. I used to run through pine forests with my cousins. The pine tree is an indelible image of my childhood. But something about seeing them there, when I least expected it, thousands of a miles away from the pine trees of my youth, the trees which had been cut down to pay for booze and which would never be replaced, all this time and distance away from those lost trees, to have encountered them in Paris, my life so radically transformed, startled me. We went to the Rothko show. I was still thinking about those trees. When we arrived at a series of late gray-and-black paintings, I felt that Rothko had captured something true in my experience of the world. Amid the swirling gray field in the lower half of one of the paintings, I saw the shifting faces of those in the beyond—indistinct, but present. I do not mean that there were figurative aspects to the painting or even that the painting gestured toward the figurative at all. I also do not mean to say that there was anything in the painting that suggested I should have found some personal resonance in it. Yet, in that negative space, the painting felt extremely personal to me. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is not looking as such. But that in my looking at the subtly shifting bands of light and shadow in the abstract gray field of the Rothko paintings, I remembered very strongly how I felt when I watched my father’s cigarette smoke turn and billow or how I watched fire and smoke stream out of the burning barrels we used to dispose of trash or the shapes the wind made as it kicked up dust from the fields in late summer. What I felt then was perhaps a recognition for a prior state of looking, which belonged to a part of my life that has nothing to do with the way I live now or the person I am. The Rothko with its many shifting shades brought it all back, tumbling over me. In a moment like that, the strange and sudden overlaying of the past and the present brought on by just one painting, you can’t help but to think, Yeah, art can be an ethic. Art can be a moral universe.”
Currently reading: My Seditious Heart - Arundhati Roy
Currently listening: Falling Away From Me - KoRn