Bokelskere.no

Do be more consistent, perhaps I shall be less tormented.

“You talk too damn much and too damn much of it is about you.”

The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss's daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even get rich - small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader's Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I'll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.

Americans will eat anything if it is toasted and held together with a couple of toothpicks and has lettuce sticking out of the sides, preferably a little wilted.

There are blonde and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blonde as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the small cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very, very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you found about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo’s rapier or Lucrezia’s poison vial.
There is the soft and willing alcoholic blonde who doesn’t care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as long as it is the Starlight Roof and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pale and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading the Wasteland or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provencal. She adores music and when the New York Philharmonic is playing Hindesmith she can tell you which one of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap d’Antibes, and Alfa Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absentmindedness of an elderly duke saying good night to his butler.

And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.

He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel.

One would think a writer would be happy here -- if a writer is every happy anywhere.

There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;*
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead*

sonette 104.

Om far min var en knortete rot som hadde trengt seg inn i fjellets sprekker og i det øyeblikk hans helse begynte å skrante dermed var dømt til å bli krystet av de krefter i fjellet han før hadde maktet å fortrenge, så var mor nettopp dette kantete, sprukne fjellet, som bare på lang avstand kunne virke jevnt og udramatisk, men som i nærsyn viste seg å være fullt av rasfarlige steinblokker og skjulte sprekker, det var som om revningene hennes sto i forbindelse med merkverdige kilder, for var folk så usjenerte at de åpent studerte henne, fikk de henne til å være et oppfarende og nærtakende menneske, mens hun derimot kunne være et sant oppkomme av fortellinger, skrøner og risper fra gamle dager, bare det var hun selv som kom på at det skulle fortelles, det var alltid hun som måtte gi av seg selv, hun mislikte all form for omtale, forventning og kunstferdig agering, og mest av alt mislikte hun å snakke med fremmede, da satt hun bare stille og så på dem, med et fiendtlig uttrykk ingen våget å spørre noe om.

sing your song,
I too have rhymed my reveries, but youth
Is too hot to show whatever it has found

To the contrary, my principle of selection was partly informed by my sense that it was the rawness and the unvarnished portrait this material presents of Susan Sontag as a young person, who self-consciously and determinedly went about creating the self she wanted to be, that was most compelling about the journals. It is for this reason that I have chosen to title this volume Reborn, drawing from a phrase that appears on the front of one of the early journals; it seems to sum up what my mother was about from childhood onward.
(Fra forordet til David Rieff)

Dear Sofia Coppola,
This question I wanted to ask you earlier about surfaces: I want to rephrase it. What I would like to ask you is this: What do you do when you're in a grown up man's kitchen and he is crying his heart out over some eggs and you are having a hard time trying to understand what has happened, why he is crying, and you think that it might be that he is thinking of his ex-girlfriend whom you've just discovered, when you were looking for some soap in the bathroom cupboard to wash away the blood you bled on his floor earlier on because you suddenly got your period getting out of bed, has left her expensive creams and make up there, as some kind of promise, as if she's never left? As if she's going to turn up any second, starting to rub her face in with moisturising cream with a hint of apricot?