heep see (special summer reading edition)

David Byrne: Bicycle Diaries

A few years earlier I had been reminded that the former first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, was a habitué of discos during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This would have been the era of Studio 54, Regines, Privilege and Le Palace (in Paris) and other velvet rope clubs. This was also, um, the era of martial law and heavy censorship in the Philippines. Was the lightness, effervescence, and headiness inherent in that music --and the drugs that went along with it—similar to the feeling one gets when one is in a powerful position?

Pierre Michon: Small Lives

I did not know that writing was so dark a continent, more enticing and disappointing than Africa, the writer a species more bent on getting lost than an explorer.

Cesare Pavese: The Moon and the Bonfires

Now I knew why every so often a girl was found strangled in a car on the highway, or in a room at the end of an ally. Maybe they, too, these people, would have liked to drop on the grass, to agree with the tree frogs, to be masters of a piece of earth the length of a woman, and really sleep without fear. Well, it was a big country, there was some of it or everyone. There were women, there was land, there was money. But nobody had enough, nobody stopped no matter how much he had, and the fields, even the vineyards, looked like public gardens, fake flower beds like those at railway stations, or else wilderness, burned-over land, mountains of slag…A day would come when just to touch something, to make himself known, a man would strangle a woman, shoot her in her sleep, crack her head open with a monkey wrench.

Lawrence Wechsler: Seeing is Forgetting the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin

You had no visual or audio input at all, other than what you might do yourself. You might begin to have some retinal replay or hear your own body, hear the electrical energy of your brain, the beat of your heart…There were all kinds of interesting things about being in there which we observed, but the most dramatic had to do with how the world appeared once you stepped out. After I’d sat in there for six hours, for instance, and then got up and walked back home down the same street I’d come in on, the trees were still trees, the street was still a street, and the houses were still houses, but the world did not look the same; it was very, very noticeably altered.

heep see (special summer reading edition)

José Donoso: The Obscene Bird of Night

"Boy was to grow up believing that things came into being as his eyes discovered them and died when he stopped looking at them, that they were nothing but the outer shell perceived by his eyes, that other forms of birth and death didn't exist, and, so much was this the case, that the most important among the words Boy would ever know were all those signifying origin and end. No whys, whens, outsides, insides, befores, afters; no arriving or leaving, no systems or generalizations. A bird crossing the sky at a certain hour was not a bird crossing the sky at a certain hour, it wasn't headed for other places because other places didn't exist; Boy must live in an enchanted present, in the limbo of accident, of the particular circumstance, in the isolation of the object and the moment without a key or a meaning that could subject him to a rule and, in subjecting him to it, cast him into the infinite void it was necessary for him to avoid."

Janet Malcolm: In the Freud Archives

"When I was little, I remember how astonished and interested I was in how easy it is to take life-- when you're driving a car, all you have to do is move the wheel a few inches to the left and you kill somebody and also die yourself-- and how difficult it is to keep alive someone who is sick. Building is interesting, because it's ultimately impossible, I suppose, but killing is boring. It's easy to see through something --to show how stupid it is, or how wrong-- but that doesn't take very long, and then you're finished."

Jean Renoir: Renoir, My Father

"What most struck outsiders at first meeting were his eyes and his hands. His eyes were light brown, bordering on amber; and they were sharp and penetrating. He would often point out a bird of prey on the horizon flying over the valley, or a ladybird climbing up a single blade in a tuft of grass. We, with our young eyes, had to look carefully, concentrate and examine everything closely, whereas he took in immediately everything that interested him, whether near or far...As for their expression, they had a look of tenderness mixed with irony, of merriment and sensuousness. They always seemed to be laughing, perceiving the odd side of things. But it was a gentle and loving laughter. Perhaps it also served as a mask. For Renoir was extremely shy about his feelings and never liked to give any sign of the emotion that overpowered him when he looked at flowers, women or clouds -- other men touch a thing or caress it."

John Williams: Stoner

"But he was not beyond love, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth he had given it freely, without thought...He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive."