Frustration

“I want to get a job done,” he said.

“Does being celibate help?”

“There’s a connection.  But I don’t know what it is, it’s not causal.  About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work.  Increasingly.  Three years without getting anywhere.  Sterility.  Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers…”

–The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin

Home

This is the most beautiful place on earth.
There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio, or Rome — there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment.

–Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

War is God

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be….
War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

–Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy

Rage

My heart heard resound and followed then the unholy kettles of war.  Some wicked family tree, dressed in steel, towering beyond my years though already cast in eclipse, conspired to instruct my response, fitting this rage with devastating action.  I scrambled to my feet, teeth grinding back and forth like some beast accustomed to the shattering bones and tearing away pounds of flesh, even as my hand vanished in a blur, lashing out for something lying near the corner trash can, an empty Jack Daniels bottle, which I’m sure, proof positive, I never noticed before and yet of course I did, I must have, some other sentient part of me that had to have noticed, in allegiance with Mars, that unsteady quake of dangerous alignments, forever aware, forever awake.

–House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski

Bordando el Manto Terrestre

And while we’re on the subject:

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world.  Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried…She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape…Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jokey.  If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

–The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

The worst

Thinking of anything was beyond him. I sympathize. I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.
–The Dolt by Donald Barthelme

Beethoven vs. Rossini

For lack of any other inspiration, here is a delightful bit of debate from Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon which will make your head hurt but in the best possible way:

“Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. “I’m not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,” Gustav argues, “but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur.”

“So?” is Säure’s customary answer to that one. “Which would you rather do? The point is,” cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, “a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,” shaking his skinny old fist, “there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!” It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. “The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber’s in the crockery, the magpie’s stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together. …”

Damage

“When you have suffered enough damage, you have a choice: you can seal off all the cracks around yourself, putting up a thick casing of diffidence and reserve, or you can let all your protections fall and leave yourself open to every touch, every collision.”
–Andrea is Changing Her Name, by Keven Brockmeier

Seriously, go watch the Wire

“You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” -Frank Sobotka

They’re trying to kill me

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.

“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.

“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.

“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”

“And what difference does that make?”

–Catch 22 by Joseph Heller