flâneur

Quinn Cook

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on the atlas — 9

highlights — 10

  • They are generally full of concern for the world about them; finally, however, they just don’t seem able to imagine the corruptions and vulgarities and treacheries of American public life any more profoundly than they can imagine human character—that is, the country’s private life. All issues are generally solvable, which indicates that they are not so much wonder-struck or horror-struck or even plain struck by a state of civilization, as they are provoked by some topical controversy. “Controversial” is a common word in the critical language of this literature as it is, say, in the language of…
    Writing American Fiction – Commentary Magazine
  • As a literary creation, as some novelist’s image of a certain kind of human being, he might have seemed believable, but I myself found that on the TV screen, as a real public image, a political fact, my mind balked at taking him in.
    Writing American Fiction – Commentary Magazine
  • We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.
    Stalking the billion-footed beast, by Tom Wolfe
  • oung writers are constantly told, “Write about what you know.” There is nothing wrong with that rule as a starting point, but it seems to get quickly magnified into an unspoken maxim: The only valid experience is personal experience.
    Stalking the billion-footed beast, by Tom Wolfe
  • what produced great characters in the nineteenth-century European novel was the portrayal of “class traits modified by personality.”
    Stalking the billion-footed beast, by Tom Wolfe
  • the American writer in the middle of the 20th century has his hands full in trying to understand, and then describe, and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.
    Writing American Fiction – Commentary Magazine
  • Consider a Fourth of July orator,
    On Bullshit
  • a limited historical consciousness is ‘endemic to the discipline of creative writing, whose ultimate commitment is not to knowledge but to what Donald Barthelme called “Not-Knowing”’. Formed in the shadow of New Criticism, the creative writing discourse still displays ‘not a commitment to ignorance, exactly, but ... a commitment to innocence’
    Elif Batuman · Get a Real Degree
  • Night and its Enchantments – X: The Salamander
    Bertrand, Aloysius (1807–1841) - Gaspard de la Nuit
  • ideas that "confer status on members of the upper class at little cost while inflicting costs on persons in lower classes."
    Rob_K._Henderson