"Reckless and intense: we are headed straight to the point of the matter, and there is no time."

"This urgency, this wildness, the seeming unruliness of his style, which is echoed in the many abrupt twists and turns in the action toward the end of the chapters—the reader must be kept in a state of suspense until the next installment—runs against something else, something heavier and slower, a patiently insistent question that is related to everything that is happening: What are we living for?"

Writes the great novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, in "The Light of 'The Brothers Karamazov'/Although Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote with wildness and urgency, he patiently insisted on asking an essential question: What are we living for?" (The New Yorker).

Dostoyevsky was rushing because he was writing installments and needed the money. His wife observed

I remember a blog post from December 6, 2021 titled "I remember...."

I remember it began: "I remember something made me read this old blog post of mine, from 2013, when I had a little project going where I'd take one sentence from 'The Great Gatsby' and present it for discussion.... The sentence of the day was 'I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: 'Are you going to the Ordways'? the Herseys'? the Schultzes'?' and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands.'"

I'm looking back at that post because I just did a search of my archive for "Brainard," because I'm reading a new article in The New Yorker, by Joshua Rothman, "What Do You Remember? The more you explore your own past, the more you find there" and it begins: "Last year, for my birthday, my wife gave me a copy of 'I Remember,' an unusual memoir by the artist Joe Brainard. It’s a tidy little book, less than two hundred pages long, made entirely from short, often single-sentence paragraphs beginning with the words 'I remember.'"

Writing about that "Gatsby" sentence, I'd said: "Things remembered: fur coats, chatter, hands waving, matchings of invitations, and long green tickets. These remembered things give the reader a sense of the incompletely delineated human beings.... This is a mass of faceless humanity, cluttered with hands, waving and clasping.... " And a commenter, gadfly, said: "Althouse is doing her Joe Brainard, 'I Remember' schtick - but she can't top the master." He quoted Brainard's book, and it was obviously my kind of thing — very sentence-y. I immediately read it. I'll read it again, now that I'm reminded of it.

But what is Joshua Rothman saying about it?

Was Virginia Heffernan's Wired article about Pete Buttigieg badly written?

I saw Wired's promotion of the article on Twitter 2 days ago (2 members of my family independently shared this with me, so it must be my kind of raw material):

With a remarkable blend of intellect and empathy, Pete Buttigieg brings a fresh perspective to the forefront of public discourse. https://t.co/mzbXgnvkSv

📷: ​​Argus Paul Estabrook pic.twitter.com/KzI3qKrIA2

— WIRED (@WIRED) May 18, 2023

I read the first few paragraphs of the article and felt stirred up to make fun of it, but then I stopped myself. This morning, I'm seeing a Legal Insurrection article by Mike LaChance that reflects the sort of mockery I nearly fell into: "Wired Magazine Gets Roasted for Cringeworthy Puff Piece on Pete Buttigieg/'he was willing to devote yet another apse in his cathedral mind to making his ideas about three mighty themes—neoliberalism, masculinity, and Christianity—intelligible to me.'"

Did I miss my chance to get in on the early mockery action or was I right to stop myself — because this thing might be brilliant writing? Is this something in the Hunter S. Thompson/Tom Wolfe tradition?

Legal Insurrection quotes the first, second, and fifth paragraphs and comments "It's so over the top." Yeah? And did the writer go over the top for a reason and with exciting, interesting words? Let's read the first 2 paragraphs and keep in mind that this might be great writing:

"For shockingly long stretches of time, you felt as though your own excellent taste and sensitivity were powering the novels."

"You wanted to live in Knausgaard’s brightly illuminated version of a world that you almost recognized as your own. In other words, Knausgaard performed a sly transference, a variety of literary hypnosis."

From "Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Haunting New Novel/In 'The Morning Star,' the Norwegian novelist gives voice to the feeling that something terrible is coming for us all" (The New Yorker).

The article writer — Brandon Taylor — deploys "you" in describing a feeling he can't possibly know that I have ever had. He's had it, and he's challenging me to think about whether I have ever had it? I wonder! It's a pretty specific delusion. 

"I was accustomed to thinking of most novels the way Nabokov wanted me to, or as Flaubert did—he once wrote that the most beautiful books depend 'on nothing external . . . just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.'"

"Then something happened to change my thinking. I realized that the real world is full of people who, presumably, have feelings about being appropriated for someone else’s run at the Times best-seller list.... Is moving someone down the existence scale from 'human person' to 'character' anything like murder?... I thought that I recognized my past in a stranger’s words... Yet perhaps I was exaggerating the similarities, getting paranoid, self-absorbed.... Who owns a story? In writing my original piece, I lifted the lives of my parents and sister.... If Hall did use my text in some way, perhaps she only turned me from a superpowered narrator back into a character... 'My'... ends up a desiccated, unlovable, insect-like creature; her twin sister dies young.... Interrogating [my] anger now, I find it fascinating. It scans as an authorial fury. My essay was not just a personal history; it was an attempt to reckon with literary and societal representations of anorexia..."

From "Who Owns a Story? I was reviewing a novel. Then I found myself in it" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). This article is from 2019. It came up in a search I was doing this morning (about a book that's mentioned in a different part of the essay).

In asking "who owns a story," Waldman isn't asking for a discussion of copyright. It's about art and ethics. Personally, I've been somebody else's fictional character. More than once. It's a complex matter to be used like that. You may enthusiastically support it, at least some of the time. You might want your story told... but perhaps not quite like that. And if it's told once, is it still there for you to tell it? 

"August Strindberg once claimed in his profound, deranged seriousness that the stars in the sky were peepholes in a wall."

I'm reading that in "My Struggle: Book 1" by Karl Ove Knausgaard (p. 205).

Knausgaard goes on to other things, but I want the original Strindberg. I find this on the internet...

But that's from a play — "The Butcher's Apron" — by Charles Tidler in which Strindberg is a character.

I can't find the original Strindberg. When I read the sentence in the Knausgaard book, I imagined the stars as peepholes for those watching us from the other side of the sky.

But in that Tidler play, it's the other way around, and we on this side can go up to a peephole and look through to the other side. Maybe I was influenced by "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes":



And here's the post from a few days ago where we were talking about peepholes, including the idea of reversing a peephole.