Jimmy > Books: year-2010s‎ (163)

MEN AND WINDS HAVE THIS IN COMMON: NEITHER HAVE THEIR FEET ON THE GROUND. NOMADS, THEY COME AND GO LIKE THE PAIN OF SHATTERED LOVE, NERVOUS TENSION, I

MEN AND WINDS HAVE THIS IN COMMON: NEITHER HAVE THEIR FEET ON THE GROUND. NOMADS, THEY COME AND GO LIKE THE PAIN OF SHATTERED LOVE, NERVOUS TENSION, INDEPENDENCIES, WARS OF LIBERATION, THE URGENT NEED TO DEFECATE IN THE STAIRWELL OF A BUILDING BETWEEN TWO BLACKOUTS.

All nights have this particularity: they are long and popular. They teem with the rabble. They stifle awareness and accrue neurosis. They bind a straw mattress and a clock into an unrecognizable muddle. They come from the heart, improvise, and facilitate multiple partnership agreements between foreign bodies.

"Do you have the time?"

RULE NUMBER 64: let them play the hardmen, for they paper over society’s dregs. RULE NUMBER 67: the mightier crush the mighty, the mighty defecate in the mouths of the weak, the weak sequestrate the weaker, the weaker do each other in, then split for elsewhere.

RULE NUMBER 46: fuck by day, fuck by night, fuck and fuck some more for you know not what tomorrow brings.

The City-State works like this: the girls are emancipated, democratic, and independent. Poverty does away with shame and your courtesies.

The main character in the African novel is always single, neurotic, perverse, depressive, childless, homeless, and overburdened with debt. Here, we live, we fuck, we’re happy. There needs to be fucking in African literature too!

He felt guilty at fiddling with history. Is there a limit to the imagination of a writer who takes real facts and uses them to construct a world where truth and fiction coexist? What right does one have to play around with collective memory? Is there any credibility in getting these sometimes-disparate characters in tune?

the rules of the game are clearly defined, and that the main thing is to live off anything that falls into your hands. The tragedy is already written, we merely preface it.

I told them it was a novel written by someone who didn’t know much about Texas because he didn’t know about Texas, a novel that didn’t really have much to say, a halfhearted attempt to come up with of a series of groundless hypotheses, a mixture of the stream of consciousness technique, the paralysis of consciousness technique, and the derangement of consciousness technique, a novel that even a passing dog would laugh at, and after I said these things they rang true and my friends seemed perplexed, and I said the novel was going to be a disastrous failure to be mocked by everyone to which we toasted. But there was an advantage to writing with failure in mind, which was to say that failing to write a failure wouldn’t really be a failure, so the fear of failure wouldn’t weigh you down as heavily as you wrote.

The only thing that concerned me was finding out how long and until when I could go on saying things like this that were pure nonsense and that kept going off on a tangent and that had nothing to say and that, furthermore, made no difference whether they said anything or not and in the end were irrelevant, and you could say that I’m writing this in order to find that out (and also to find out how many repetitions of words and phrases I could use, which naturally bring pleasure to people who understand the pleasure they bring and don’t to people who don’t understand them). There were too many fictions that made an attempt to say something and too few that intentionally said something that may be irrelevant, and as for me I thought that there was a need to think that there was a need to think that there was a need to say things that may be irrelevant, and to think that there was a need to think that there was no need to say other things, and what I wanted to say was things that kept going off on a tangent forever if only that were possible.

The thing about matryoshkas, Mujae announced while he grated the radish, is that they’re hollow to begin with. There’s nothing inside of any substance

The thing about matryoshkas, Mujae announced while he grated the radish, is that they’re hollow to begin with. There’s nothing inside of any substance. There’s just one matryoshka inside another, that repetition is itself what defines a matryoshka, not any actual object part, so in fact it’s more precise to say that a matryoshka contains an eternal recurrence than a number of smaller matryoshkas. So it’s not as though anything has ceased to exist because it broke; all we’ve done is confirmed that it never existed in the first place.
That sounds so futile, Mujae.
Futility is precisely why I’ve always thought that a matryoshka resembles human life.

“Don’t erase things from the world just because you are incapable of imagining them.”

“Don’t erase things from the world just because you are incapable of imagining them.”

A misuteri, she says, mystery, a sort of black hole. And in that family, the black hole happens to be the chamber pot. They may even be aware that the chamber pot is their version of the unknowable. Or maybe they’ve never even thought about it along these lines – but even so, the point is that some things are impossible to comprehend.

"That's what family means to him: no longer counting as other people."