Our Cousin & Our Aunt
- mom: what are you drinking?
- me: it's a mimosa, sparkling wine & orange juice
- mom: that's what taiwan is, "beautiful island"
- me: that's formosa
March 2012
“Failure is quite interesting, and it’s something I have a certain amount of experience with. I wasn’t a failure in the way lots of people are failures—I could always get published, that was pretty straightforward. Literary failure is funny because it’s not like you get this massive slap in the face and become a figure of ridicule. It’s more that you do this thing, you write this book, and then this big thing is poised to happen on publication. And nothing happens. It’s just a weird non-event. The literary Richter scale doesn’t register any kind of tremor. That was happening to me for a very long while, and then I managed to persuade myself that these serial failures were perhaps a kind of liberation in that it meant I was free from any kind of pressure from publishers. The stakes were so low that it didn’t really make any kind of difference to anybody that I went from writing a novel to writing a book about the First World War. So I’ve certainly known what it’s like for a book to simply, well, disappear.”
—bookforum talks with geoff dyer
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“And then there are the former and potential girlfriends — the ones who got away but will never quite go away, tantalizing each sad-sack midlifer with visions of a bliss that might have been if he hadn’t screwed it up.”
—Gen X Has a Midlife Crisis
“I thought it a virtue to be colorblind – but apparently being colorblind is a function of my status, and not an option open to everyone. Does refusing to see everyone’s race make me a racist (enabling and denying injustice in my “ivory” white-privilege tower)? Or does seeing everyone’s race make me a racist (perceiving each individual in ethnic/racial terms, rooting them in the context of human race relations)?”
—Feminist Mormon Housewives
“Traditionally, human rights work has been more akin to investigative reporting, but Ball is the most influential of a handful of people around the world who see that world not in terms of words, but of figures. His specialty is applying quantitative analysis to mountains of anecdotes, finding the correlations that coax out a story that cannot easily be dismissed.”
—The Body Counter
“So why does trauma seem to be a prerequisite that only women need to fulfill in order to be stereotypically strong?….The particular brilliance of this trope as an anti-feminist tool is in the fact that it seems to answer the cries of feminists who ask for more flawed and fully explored characters, but at the same time it sends the message that women who seek power (the same power that men are portrayed as just naturally possessing) are unnatural, that they somehow need an excuse. Gee, where have we heard that before?”
—Why Strong Female Characters Shouldn’t Need Dark Pasts to Justify Their Power
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“Even as multicultural image campaigns rightly lobby for more and better black representation in commercials, and as much as America now embraces the endorsement of certain black celebrities, the politically incorrect truth is that there’s a tipping point. The moment a product is “ghetto,” white consumers are gone—and then black consumers are gone, too.”
—Mad Men and race: The series’ handling of race has been painfully accurate
“All parents tell single stories about their kids and all kids wish they didn’t. Single stories are the principle reason that, eventually, kids become so eager to leave home — they want to escape the simple narratives told about them since they were born, to jar their parents into recognizing that they’re no longer (and maybe never were) the person they were made out to be when they were eight years old.”
—Family Lies? The Value of the Single Story
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“For the last twelve years, he’s made a comfortable living reselling titles he’s purchased for quarters at thrift stores and at yard, estate, and library sales. As a book scout who listens to his instincts rather than to technology, Pernu is one of the last of his kind—an old-school purist in a digital world.”
—An Old-School Book Scout
“Which is to say that nobody’s talented, not when it comes to prose, and if they are it wouldn’t matter. If you read a story by 100 beginning writers you would have no idea who was going to be a better writer in a year….Almost guaranteed the ones you thought had talent would be nowhere to be found, if they were writing at all, which is unlikely. Because what you thought was talent was actually promise, and promise isn’t an indicator of anything. Among the people that had spent ten years writing in their free time you might now see who has “talent”, but by then it’s a meaningless designation. They’ve already put in the time.”
—Stephen Elliot, “The Talent Myth”
