The Unbearable Lightness of Being: On Flirtation

The Unbearable Lightness of Being has some pretty gut wrenching descriptions of the struggle that some peope have in relationships that are less than completely committed.  The first part of this excerpt is an interesting set up for some of the feelings that are created by infidelity.  The second part's description of an academic approach to flirting seemed completely spot on for me when I read it.  Its hard to be genuine when you would rather not be engaging the opposite sex outside your own relationship in the first place:

p.142-43

What is flirtation?  One might say that it is behavior leading another to believe that sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility from becoming a certainty.  In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual intercourse without the guarantee...

Tomas kept trying to convince her that love and lovemaking were two different things.  She refused to understand...

She merely wished to find a way out of the maze...She took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and fialed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love.  How she wished she could learn lightness!  She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

If for some women flirting is second nature, insignificant, routine, for Tereza it had developed into an important field of research with the goal of teaching her who she was and what she was capable of.  But by making it important and serious, she deprived it of its lightness, and it became forced, labored, overdone.  She disturbed the balance between promise and lack of guarantee (which, when maintained, is a sign of flirtistic virtuosity); she promised too ardently, and without making it clear that the promise involved no guarantee on her part.  Which is another way of saying that she gave everyone the impression of being there for the taking.  But when men responded by asking for what they felt they had been promised, they met with strong resistance, and their only explanation for it was that she was deceitful and malicious.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: The Frequent Absence of Umbrella Etiquette

Every New Yorker dreads navigating busy Manhattan sidewalks in the rain.  Very few residents, and absolutely no tourists have any idea how to walk with an umbrella.  Apparently, these behaviors are not unique to New York or to the present day.

From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

p. 135

It was drizzling.  As people rushed along, they began opening umbrellas over their heads, and all at once the streets were crowded, too.  Arched umbrella roofs collided with one another.  The men were courteous, and when passing Tereza they held the umbrellas high over their heads and gave her room to go by. But the women would not yield; each looked straight ahead, waiting for the other woman to acknowledge her inferiority and step aside.  The meeting of the umbrellas was a test of strength.  At first, Tereza gave way, but when she realized her courtesy was not being reciprocated, she started clutching her umbrella like the other women and ramming it forcefully against the oncoming umbrellas.  No one ever said "Sorry." For the most part no one said anything, though once or twice she did hear a "Fat cow!" or "Fuck you!"

Ineluctable Modality of the Vaginal

One last passage from Rick Moody's Demonology.  While this excerpt is not representative of the entire short story, I think it is beautifully written:

p. 251

I refused to let him touch me as I cried, as I also refused to use tears strategically, they were just how i felt and I would not conceal it, they were a condensation and displacement, sure, but they required no action, and I was, it's true, a woman with a doctoral degree who believed against all reasonable evidence that there must have been some justifiability to the Western tradition of marriage, and who happened now to be crying, and who happened to be sad more often than not, who happened to have a striping of mascara on her cheeks, okay, but this only made him madder still, and there was a whole elegant spray of his logic about how feminine language undoes the proper meaning of words, of nouns....

Demonology

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover.  In fact, I may have never read Rick Mood at all had the cover of Demonology not been so strikingly odd compared to the title:

His writing is truly fantastic.  I sent some of these around a few years ago, but they are completely worth sharing again.

From The Carnival Tradition

p. 176

Late in every possible way. Late to engagements major and minor; late when it was crucial to be on time; late when it made no difference; late when lateness was clearly his fault; late in the mornings (for
having slept late); late in the evenings (for having stayed up late); late to the birth of his godchildren; late to plays; late to job interviews; late to dates and romantic escapades; late when remorseful about lateness; late when careless; late when happy; late when sad or impervious to feelings, increasingly late, and it had always been that way.

p. 221

Some people had cruelties inflicted on them because cruelties had been inflicted on them in the past. These initial cruelties acted as magnets for further cruelties. You saw the wound, you saw the way the victim loved the wound, you saw the way he tended it, how lovingly, how pridefully, and you couldn't do anything but reopen this wound. In fact, it was almost pleasurable to be the source of this renewed trauma for this unfortunate, because it was something that the victim knew well. Therefore, you were reassuring him even while you were inflicting discomfort.

p. 226

It was a delirium of stories in which the principals never quite met, never quite spoke, never quite loved, never quite left. The pieces didnt match and never would , but the pieces were almost identical.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Words Misunderstood

More fantastic excerpts from The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

On Betrayal

p. 92

And again she felt a longing to betray: betray her own betrayal.  She announced to her husband (whom she now considered a difficult drunk rather than an eccentric) that she was leaving him.

But if we betray B., for whom we betrayed A., it does not necessarily follow that we have placated A.  The life of a divorcee-painter did not in the least resemble the life of the parents she had betrayed.  It calls forth a chain reaction of further betrayals, each of which takes us farther and farther away from the point of our original betrayal.

On Music

p. 94

And suddenly he realized that all his life he had done nothing but talk, write, lecture, concoct sentences, search for formulations and amend them, so in the end no words were precise, their meanings were obliterated, their content lost, they turned to trash, chaff, dust, sand; prowling through his brain, tearing at his head, they were his insomnia, his illness.  And what he yearned for at that moment, vaguely but with all his might, was unbounded music, absolute sound, a pleasant and happy all-encompassing over-powering, window rattling din to engulf, once and for all, the pain, the futility, the vanity of words.  Music was the negation of sentences, music was the anti-word!  He yearned for one long embrace with Sabina, yearned never to say another word, to let his orgasm fuse with the orgiastic thunder of music.  And lulled by that blissful imaginary uproar, he fell asleep.

On Parades/Protests

p. 100

Franz felt his book life to be unreal.  He yearned for real life, for the touch of people walking side-by-side with him, for their shouts.  It never occurred to him that what he considered unreal (the work he did in the solitude of the office or library) was in fact his real life, whereas the parades he imagined to be reality were nothing but theater, dance, carnival--in other words, a dream.

On Dissertations and Banned Books

p. 103

When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit.  We have more and more universities and more and more students.  If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics  And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite.  Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day.  Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.  That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being: I Think I'm in Love

I have a habit of ignoring the suggestions of men that I am dating when it comes to literature.  Despite the fact that The Unbearable Lightness of Being lived in my house for six years, I never considered it until I found it this afternoon on a table of "Staff All Time Favorites" in Barnes and Noble.  I have not been so consumed by something since Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

I am sure there will be NUMEROUS posts on this--but for the time being, here are a few snippets to encourage those that love the book to revisit it and to introduce those that have not yet read it to their next great love.

p. 31

For there is nothing heavier than compassion.  Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

p. 59

The dreams were eloquent, but they were also beautiful.  That aspect seems to have escaped Freud in his theory of dreams.  Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.  Our dreams prove that to imagine--to dream about things that have not happened--is among mankind's deepest needs.  Herein lies the danger.  If dreams were not beautiful, they would be quickly forgotten. But Tereza kept coming back to her dreams, running through them in her mind, turning them into legends.  Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams.

p. 59-60

Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo.  What is vertigo?  Fear of falling?  Then why do we feel it when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling.  It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts an lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

Masterful....ok.  I am going back to reading.  Might I suggest the album "Universe" by Sarah Slean to accompany the reading of these first 100 pages :)

The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction

On the Death of an Artist:

p. 9-10

It is one of the mysteries of death that it should seem, in the case of an artist or anyone with a public face, to make so little difference to all but those close to the person.  What has changed?  There will be no more books, tunes, paintings, films, acts from that source.  But what if there weren't many, or any, such performances still to come, what if the  epilogue or aftermath had already started?  What if the work we have is already rich and deep, enough for a lifetime?  What more do we want? We shall not be able to meet the person we probably should not have met anyway; we shall not write the letters he/she might not have answered. Such deaths are like the deaths of acquaintances we have not seen for ages, would never have seen again.  A scarcely perceptible shift in what was already an absence.


But the deaths of these figures whose work we care about do diminish us, take away a piece of our world, even if we can't quite say how our world is poorer.  These persons were not persons for us, but they were not mere reputations either.  They were habits of affection, ways of looking and thinking...they altered the color of our mind.




The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction by Michael Wood

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Pedestrian v. "Serious" Art:

p. 198-200

Living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to alot of shitty country music. 'Cause that's like pretty much all there is on the radio, when you're tired of like, listening to Green Day on the one college station.  And these country musics that are just so--you know, "Baby since you've left I can't live, I'm drinking all the time" and stuff.  And I remember just being real impatient with it.  Until I'd been living here about a year.  And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor?  And what they're really singing to is to themselves, or to God, you know? "Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning."  That in a weird way, I mean they are incredibly existentialist songs.  That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable.  But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it.  Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.



Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On the Value of Art:

p. 91

I have this--here's the thing where it's going to sound sappy to you.  I have this unbelievably like five-year-old's belief that art is just absolutely magic.

And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do.  And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On the Avant-Garde and Expressing What it Means to be Alive:


p. 36-40

There’s ways that experimental avant-garde stuff can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings, in that way that conventional realistic stuff can’t.

[Realism] imposes an order and sense of ease of interpretation on experience that’s never there in real life. I’m talking about the stuff, you know, what’s hard or looks structurally strange—or formally weird—I mean some of that stuff can be very cool.

There’s really really shitty avant-garde, that’s coy and hard for its own sake. That I don’t think it’s a big accident that a lot of what, if you look at the history of fiction—sort of, if you look at the history of painting after the development of photography—that the history of fiction represents this continuing struggle to allow fiction to do that magical stuff. As the texture, as the cognitive texture, of our lives changes. And as, um, as the different media by which our lives are represented change. And it’s the avant-garde or experimental stuff that has the chance to move the stuff along. And that’s what’s precious about it.

And the reason that I’m angry at how shitty most of it is, and how much of it ignores the reader, is that I think its very very very very precious. Because it’s the stuff that’s about what it feels like to live. Instead of being a relief of what it feels like to live.

I’m talking about what it means to be alive. And how formal and structural stuff in avant-garde things I think can vibrate, can represent on a page, what it feels like to be alive right now. But that’s only one of the things that fiction is doing. I’m not saying it’s the only thing. I’m working hard here to try to make sense of what it is I’m saying to you. If your life makes linear sense to you, then you’re either very strange, or you might just be a neurologically healthy person—who’s automatically able to decot, organize, do triage on the amount of stuff that’s coming at you all the time.

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

On Writing and Being a Social Creature:

p.16-17

DFW: There is an unbelievable arrogance about even trying to write something—much less, you know, expecting that someone else will pay money to read it. So that you end up with this, uh…I think exhibitionists who aren’t shy end up being performers. End up playing their trade in the presence of other people.

Lipsky: There’s that John Updike quote: “Shyness, and a savage desire to hold another soul in thrall…”

DFW: But there’s also the shyness feed into some of the stuff that you need as a fiction writer. Like: Part of the shyness for me is, it’s very easy for me to play this game of: What do you want? What will the effect of this be on you? You know? It’s this kind of mental chess. Which in personal intercourse, makes things very difficult. But, in writing when I think a lot of what you’re doing—there are very few innocent sentences in writing. You gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you’ve got to be able plausibly to project what an alien consciousness will make of it. So there’s a kind of split consciousness that I think makes it difficult to deal with people in the real world. For a writer. But that actually comes in handy.

Of Course You End up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

This is Water...

It has been three weeks since my dissertation defense and I am finally feeling decompressed enough to turn back to one of my greatest loves: the written word. I tried as hard as I could to direct all of my attention to my research and not become distracted by new fiction or by the dozens of books that I read over and over again when I need comfort or inspiration. Even though spring was meant to be only about criminology studies and not about literature, distractions did creep in, despite my best efforts.


Last year, the New York Times reported that a biography of one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, would be released at some point in the spring of 2010.

I pre-ordered it on Amazon and even though I should not have given in to the temptation, after the introduction, I couldn't put it down. It was better than I imagined. In the next several posts I will transcribe a few excerpts that I thought were particularly fantastic. In the meantime, I want to begin this bit of David Foster Wallace obsession with an excerpt from a speech that DFW gave as a commencement address. The full text is available in many places, including published as a small book.

Here are a few excerpts that moved me:

"So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think… But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking ... isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about."

"I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean: to be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded…Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me."

"The liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed…It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now. I wish you way more than luck."