Jennifer Egan: A Visit From The Goon Squad

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

... Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

... Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

Tao Lin: Shoplifting From American Apparel

Like reading the internet.

"We are the fucked generation," said Sam.

Ferenc Karinthy: Metropole

I wish I'd read this when I first lived abroad. Metropole should be required reading for cultural exchange students.

Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown, for as soon as the engine purred into life he reclined his seat and fell asleep. He was quite exhausted, hardly having rested the last few days, working himself to a standstill, and apart from anything else there was the speech for the linguistic conference in Helsinki for which he had just now been preparing. He was woken only once during the flight when they brought him his meal, then he promptly fell asleep again, it might have been for ten minutes or for ten hours. He didn’t even have his wristwatch with him since he intended buying one out there and didn’t want to have to present two watches at customs back home, so he didn’t have the least clue how far he was from home. It was only later, once he was in town, that he discovered it wasn’t Helsinki and was shocked that he didn’t know where he actually was.

... Budai liked children and was generally touched by them but he had never seen so many all together and the sight confused and terrified him. He looked to escape, seeking an exit from the clinic. He was losing patience, wanting to see no more babies, worrying what would happen when the present batch grew up and joined the already teeming hordes in the streets.

... Then he gazed at the photograph of the author on the flap (...) and he still looked familiar. He wondered where he might have seen him, who he reminded him of, why he was drawn to him. (...) One evening he returned tired from his work at the market and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror just as he was
suppressing a yawn and it suddenly became obvious: the man in the photographs reminded him of himself.

... Filth and mess everywhere - had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried discraded wrappers and other rubbish with it.: a newsstand caught in the gust, a thousand newspapers were swirling about his feet. He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, halt and half paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks though the crowd that pressed against them and separated them. Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrows, struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along, trying to cross at traffic lights, trying to board and squeeze themselves onto buses, constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the melee. What power maintained them? What strength enabled them to go on living here?

... It added up to little more than nothing: it was an equation without known quantities.

... The lights started coming on in blocks, each estate or major road in one go, all the tiny pieces slowly fitting together as an entire lit area rose out of the grey-blue. There was no end of it as far as the eye could see. In the far distance the rows and clusters of illumination melted into a single mass, its edges lost in glimmering fogs and milky galaxies like the stars in the Milky Way whose light comes to us from thousands or millions of light years... Budai had been a city dweller all his life, the city, for him, being the only possible place of work, routine and entertainment. He was constantly drawn to the great cities of the world: the metropolis! And while the proportions of this one horrified and imprisoned him, he could not deny its sheer enormous urban beauty. Looking down on it from such a height, he was almost in love with it.

John Lanchester: Capital

The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control...

London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale...

You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty...

The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything, but she didn't see herself as one of them. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers...

It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing costumes, not just policemen and firemen and waiters and shop assistants, but people in their going-to-work costumes, their I'm-a-mother-pushing-a-pram costumes, babies and children in outfits that were like costumes; workers digging holes in their costume-bright orange vests; joggers in jogging costume; even the drinkers in the streets and parks, even the beggars, seemed to be wearing costumes, uniforms.

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

That I was a fraud had never been in question - who wasn't? Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?

... Eventually I stopped heaving, left the stall, and again splashed water on my face. The attendant asked me if I was all right. I blinked at him, breathed deeply, mumbled something about my family, and deposited a handful of coins in the bowl beside him, which might have been for mints.

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in who Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from buring windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and "Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

... You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

... almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

Michel Chion: David Lynch

It takes a long time to see it, but, like Laura Palmer later in Fire Walk With Me, who feels herself going down faster and faster, or her prostitute mother who chain smokes even before her daughter's death, or with the abandoned woman in Industrial Symphony No. 1, or with Marietta Pace in Wild At Heart, covering her face with lipstick in the bathroom and cracking up, or with Mary X in Eraserhead, in Blue Velvet Dorothy is prey to a sense of terminal depression. Once we have understood this, one can find ample evidence for it. She even says as much...

When you realise that the script's extravagant logic in fact revolves around the notion of forestalling Dorothy's suicide, by means of electro-shocks and strong sensations, through blackmail, Blue Velvet acquires a more interesting and beautiful meaning more in tune with the disturbance it provokes in us. Dorothy's hushed plea as she leans over the basin after Jeffrey leaves, her touching 'Help Me' is thus not a woman's request to help her recover her son and husband. She requests nothing of the sort from Jeffrey. Nor is it a 'Help me with my sexual frustration.' It is about a woman collapsing, slipping into the void of a terminal depression.