From the ridiculously amazing introduction to Querida: An Anthology, edited by Caroline S. Hau, Katrina Tuvera, and Isabelita O. Reyes: A querida is defined by what she does, and with whom. Her name in Spanish means “beloved,” and tells us something about the passion she kindles, the affection she commands. Some names show her in action: live-in, for example, and patiki, which alludes to “a sexual act where the female mimics the bird (like kingfisher) that feeds on fish.” Other labels such as kalunya (from the root word alunya, “illicit caress”) and kaapid (from apid, “illicit sexual intercourse”) are less about her as a person and more about the bounds—legal, moral, and social—that she transgresses. “Kabit” dates back to the 1970s and originally refers to buses or jeepneys that plied the streets illegally alongside legitimate franchises. Having an affair is commonly described in folksy, dated language such as paglalaro ng apoy (playing with fire), pamamangka sa dalawang ilog (rowing in two rivers), pagsusunog ng uling (burning charcoal), pangangaliwa (literally, turning or moving left), pangkukulasisi (keeping a parakeet in a cage), and pangtsitsiks (tsiks may either derive from the Spanish chica, “girl,” or the American slang “chick”), a sure sign that the act and the stock characters in the family drama have been with us for as long as we can remember. [x]
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From the ridiculously amazing introduction to Querida: An Anthology, edited by Caroline S. Hau, Katrina Tuvera, and Isabelita O. Reyes:

A querida is defined by what she does, and with whom. Her name in Spanish means “beloved,” and tells us something about the passion she kindles, the affection she commands. Some names show her in action: live-in, for example, and patiki, which alludes to “a sexual act where the female mimics the bird (like kingfisher) that feeds on fish.” Other labels such as kalunya (from the root word alunya, “illicit caress”) and kaapid (from apid, “illicit sexual intercourse”) are less about her as a person and more about the bounds—legal, moral, and social—that she transgresses. “Kabit” dates back to the 1970s and originally refers to buses or jeepneys that plied the streets illegally alongside legitimate franchises. Having an affair is commonly described in folksy, dated language such as paglalaro ng apoy (playing with fire), pamamangka sa dalawang ilog (rowing in two rivers), pagsusunog ng uling (burning charcoal), pangangaliwa (literally, turning or moving left), pangkukulasisi (keeping a parakeet in a cage), and pangtsitsiks (tsiks may either derive from the Spanish chica, “girl,” or the American slang “chick”), a sure sign that the act and the stock characters in the family drama have been with us for as long as we can remember.

[x]

Source: wp.me

Then, without warning, we both straightened up, turned towards each other, and began to kiss. After that, it is difficult for me to speak of what happened. Such things have little to do with words, so little, in fact, that it seems almost pointless to try to express them. If anything, I would say we were falling into each other, that we were falling so fast and so far that nothing could catch us. Again, I lapse into metaphor. But that is probably beside the point. For whether or not I can talk about it does not change the truth of what happened. The fact is, there never was such a kiss, and in all my life I doubt there can ever be such a kiss again.
From The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.
Rejoice, people who always have money for reading material, especially those who have the opposite taste in books as I do! Huzzah! I’ll be setting free books from The Fortress of Solitude, and Pancho will find the strength to let go of his art books. You can’t miss us; I’m a beanpole, and he has a mustache. (Come by from 9am to 5pm, and, you know, give me money in exchange for books. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.) Books by these people, and moar: Jennifer Egan (that person who won a Pulitzer for a book with a chapter made entirely of PowerPoint slides, wtf literature), Ransom Riggs, Vendela Vida, John Banville, Georges Simenon, Leonard Michaels, Roberto Bolaño, Ali Smith, Maile Meloy, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham. And smut by the armful, closet perverts. [Bonus material: Crumbling Post-It flags and occasionally TMI marginalia.] 100% of the proceeds go to keeping Sasha fed. MOAR INFO.
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Rejoice, people who always have money for reading material, especially those who have the opposite taste in books as I do! Huzzah! I’ll be setting free books from The Fortress of Solitude, and Pancho will find the strength to let go of his art books. You can’t miss us; I’m a beanpole, and he has a mustache. (Come by from 9am to 5pm, and, you know, give me money in exchange for books. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.)

Books by these people, and moar: Jennifer Egan (that person who won a Pulitzer for a book with a chapter made entirely of PowerPoint slides, wtf literature), Ransom Riggs, Vendela Vida, John Banville, Georges Simenon, Leonard Michaels, Roberto Bolaño, Ali Smith, Maile Meloy, Julian Barnes, Colson Whitehead, Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham. And smut by the armful, closet perverts. [Bonus material: Crumbling Post-It flags and occasionally TMI marginalia.]

100% of the proceeds go to keeping Sasha fed.

MOAR INFO.

Call it readerly superstition, call it a far-too-strong awareness of my own psychological climate—but all these years, I stayed away from The Bell Jar because I was certain: I was Esther Greenwood. (And once I closed the book, I consulted the little gauge in my soul. There was that usual hum that runs through you after a good and/or timely book. But beyond that: I felt strange—both superior and self-pitying; I looked at all the teenagers that swarmed that coffee shop, all those souls that would never ever need to be scared of a book like The Bell Jar—all for naught or otherwise.)
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Call it readerly superstition, call it a far-too-strong awareness of my own psychological climate—but all these years, I stayed away from The Bell Jar because I was certain: I was Esther Greenwood.

(And once I closed the book, I consulted the little gauge in my soul. There was that usual hum that runs through you after a good and/or timely book. But beyond that: I felt strange—both superior and self-pitying; I looked at all the teenagers that swarmed that coffee shop, all those souls that would never ever need to be scared of a book like The Bell Jar—all for naught or otherwise.)

Source: wp.me

Circulation folder and slip stamped DISCARDED, after one measly entry on May 5, 1969. Found in a ridiculously well-preserved copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series. Introduced by Alfred Kazin, published in 1967 by The Paris Review—includes interviews with Jean Cocteau, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, etc.
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Circulation folder and slip stamped DISCARDED, after one measly entry on May 5, 1969. Found in a ridiculously well-preserved copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Third Series. Introduced by Alfred Kazin, published in 1967 by The Paris Review—includes interviews with Jean Cocteau, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, etc.

… the confrontation with the demons does not necessarily lead to the creation of great art (or any art at all). You can write in the darkest pit and filth of yourself and come up with some dull fragment of vers libre, indistinguishable from that of a hundred contemporaries. Thus pain does not guarantee anything. Art, you see, is not interested in your suffering.
From Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino. [x]

Source: silverfysh.wordpress.com

The short story will persist, and our attitude toward it will endure. The novel may die, resurge, die again, get resurrected endlessly by its legion detractors and champions; the essay will toy with medium and length and preoccupation and ethical standards; the novella will always be the special little snowflake it’s grown comfortably into; poetry will keep curdling our blood with its beauty, its inscrutability, and its conceit that it’s the best form for thought-and-soul that ever will be. And the short story will be in a corner, nursing a warmed beer, brooding over an overflowing ashtray, trying so obviously and awkwardly not to meet anyone’s eye for fear that it might seem too needy—and it’ll be there in that complicated metaphor of a corner forever. And, kids—we’ll all just have to deal with it. [READ MORE] There’s been a lot of hullaballo over the short story lately, and what’s a girl to do but raise her head from whatever book she’s reading and jump into the fray?
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The short story will persist, and our attitude toward it will endure. The novel may die, resurge, die again, get resurrected endlessly by its legion detractors and champions; the essay will toy with medium and length and preoccupation and ethical standards; the novella will always be the special little snowflake it’s grown comfortably into; poetry will keep curdling our blood with its beauty, its inscrutability, and its conceit that it’s the best form for thought-and-soul that ever will be. And the short story will be in a corner, nursing a warmed beer, brooding over an overflowing ashtray, trying so obviously and awkwardly not to meet anyone’s eye for fear that it might seem too needy—and it’ll be there in that complicated metaphor of a corner forever. And, kids—we’ll all just have to deal with it. [READ MORE]

There’s been a lot of hullaballo over the short story lately, and what’s a girl to do but raise her head from whatever book she’s reading and jump into the fray?

Source:

A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all. From A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. Someone give Lowell Lake a hug, please.
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A few miles away across the East River was the apartment he could never get used to, the job where he had nothing to do, the dozen or so people he knew slightly and cared about not at all: a fabric of existence as blank and seamless as the freshly plaster wall he passed. Soon his wife would return from New Jersey. Soon everyone would be back, and things would go on much as they had before. From the street outside came the sound of laughter and shouting, bottles breaking, voices droning in the warm air, and children playing far past their bedtime. It all meant nothing whatever to Lowell. Standing in the parlor of a house no longer his, listening to the voices of people whose lives were closed to him forever, contemplating a future much like his past, he realized that it was finally too late for him. Everything had gone wrong, and he had succeeded at nothing, and he was never going to have any kind of life at all.

From A Meaningful Life by L.J. Davis. Someone give Lowell Lake a hug, please.

Source: silverfysh.wordpress.com

Michael Dirda writes in Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life— The rapport between a reader and his or her book is almost like that between lovers. The relationship grows, envelops a life, lays out new prospects and ways of seeing oneself and the future, is filled with moments of joy and sorrow; when it’s over, even its memory enriches as few experiences can. But just as we cannot physically afford to fall in love too many times, suffer its gantlet of emotions too often and still remain whole, so the novel-reader cannot read too many books of high purpose and harrowing dimension or do so too often. Burnout, a failure to respond with the intensity literature demands, is the result. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction. This is why rereading is so important. Once we know the plot and its surprises we can appreciate a book’s artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with readiness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters—as a good first reader ought—we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftsmanship. [x]
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Michael Dirda writes in Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life—

The rapport between a reader and his or her book is almost like that between lovers. The relationship grows, envelops a life, lays out new prospects and ways of seeing oneself and the future, is filled with moments of joy and sorrow; when it’s over, even its memory enriches as few experiences can. But just as we cannot physically afford to fall in love too many times, suffer its gantlet of emotions too often and still remain whole, so the novel-reader cannot read too many books of high purpose and harrowing dimension or do so too often. Burnout, a failure to respond with the intensity literature demands, is the result. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

This is why rereading is so important. Once we know the plot and its surprises we can appreciate a book’s artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with readiness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters—as a good first reader ought—we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftsmanship.

[x]

Source: silverfysh.wordpress.com

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of others? She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates. An astonishingly beautiful quote about reading—although only the first line applies to my experience with the book whence it came. Yes: I have given up on James Salter’s Light Years, after a too-long struggle. Finally, Sasha. Finally.
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The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of others?

She laid the book down open beside a few others. She wanted to think, to let it await her. She would go back to it, read again, read on, bathe in the richness of its plates.

An astonishingly beautiful quote about reading—although only the first line applies to my experience with the book whence it came. Yes: I have given up on James Salter’s Light Years, after a too-long struggle. Finally, Sasha. Finally.

Source: wp.me

Eve was tall. Her face had cheekbones. Her shoulders slumped when she walked. The shelves in her living room were bent beneath the books. She worked for a publisher; oh, you’ve heard of him, she said.

Her life was one in which everything was left undone—letters unanswered, bills on the floor, the butter sitting out all night. Perhaps that was why her husband had left her; he was even more hopeless than she. At least she was gay. She stepped from her littered doorway in pretty clothes, like a woman who lives in the barrio walking to a limousine, stray dogs and dirt on the way.

I may not be getting along with James Salter’s Light Years as well as I had hoped—even projected—but he and I can occasionally agree on things.