“more has been written about how relationships don’t work, than about how they do. we have virtually no language, other than banality, to describe the couple who have been happy together for a long time. we would like them to have a secret. we would like them to have something they could give us. or that we could give them, other than our suspicion.there is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. there’s nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage.”
When Audrey Munson was born—on June 8, 1891, to Katherine and Edgar Munson, in Rochester, New York—her life was expected to take the typical course of the life of a woman born in a rural area at that time. She was to grow up with strong morals, in a righteous family, receiving a cursory amount of education. When the time was right, she was to marry an eligible man and become the head of her own household, leading a simple life focused on the upkeep of family, hearth, and home. America was taking shape on the backs of women who followed these ideals.
But there was another option, perhaps best embodied in Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie, in which Dreiser’s heroine lives a life of moral ambiguity as a rural woman who makes her way to the city, where she becomes a mistress and an actress. Like Carrie, Audrey was destined for a fate crueler and stranger than that prescribed for a woman of her era.
“I like putting really long silences into my plays. Crazy stuff happens during silences at the theater. The audience suddenly becomes aware of itself, and a little weirded out and uncomfortable, and maybe someone coughs and whispers, but if the silence goes on long enough eventually people adjust to it and get kind of comfortable and zen and find their own way back into the reality of the play. And that moment—when an entire audience is relaxed and breathless together in a silence, when time slows down and then starts to speed up again—is very magical to me.”
Annie Baker’s Author’s Note for her play BODY AWARENESS
Some Sontag:
“So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has
with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that
ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art,
with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric” Silence is the artist’s ultimate
other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which
appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.”
(…)
“Committed to the idea that the power of art is located in its power to negate, the
ultimate weapon in the artist’s inconsistent war with his audience is to verge closer and closer
to silence. The sensory or conceptual gap between the artist and his audience, the space of the
missing or ruptured dialogue, can also constitute the grounds for an ascetic affirmation.
Samuel Beckett speaks of “my dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence and
too proud for the farce of giving and receiving.” But there is no abolishing a minimal
transaction, a minimal exchange of gifts, just as there is no talented and rigorous asceticism
that doesn’t produce a gain (rather than a loss) in the capacity for pleasure.”
“Silence is a prophecy, one which the artist’s actions can be understood as attempting
to fulfill and to reverse.”
The Swedish Academy gave English readers a gift in 2014 when they awarded Patrick Modiano
the Nobel Prize in literature.
Up until that point, only about three of his novels had been
translated into English–four if you count some very rare editions (priced well
above $100) that Ring Roads published in the 70’s and early 80’s in
England.
Now, however, its a
good time to become a Modiano completest. Since he received the award
there have been four new publications of his works, including one
collection of three novellas. Eight more will be published in the next year.
“For her latest movie, By the Sea, which she also wrote, Jolie Pitt could skip the meet-and-greets with at least two of her actors. She stars in the film with Pitt. It’s about a deeply unhappy couple on vacation in France who becomes involved with a pair of newlyweds staying at their seaside inn. “I’d be directing myself and him in a scene where we’re having a fight, and I’d be pulling out the parts [of him] that have an aggression toward me or when you’re frustrated with each other—it was very heavy,” says Jolie Pitt. “We kept joking that all of the crew felt like they were living in a house where the parents were fighting and you don’t know where to stand or where to look.””
— Filing away for my big project, which I am two days away from starting.
“To embark on an endeavor that has no clear aim — to amble through a city, or to spend an entire afternoon conversing in a restaurant, or to lie in bed and read a book chosen at random from the shelf, or to major in English literature, for that matter — has come to be seen as wasteful.”
Elisabeth Donnelly is the coauthor of THE MISSHAPES, the first book in a kickass YA superhero trilogy (it opens with a Pulp quote, so you know it’s good). She and Stu Sherman write under the pseudonym Alex Flynn. Elisabeth is constantly giving me amazing book recs that I never would’ve found on my own, and her book crush–a National Book Award nominated surf-noir that served as the inspiration for Point Break–does not disappoint:
“Imagine what it’s like to spend 20 years in a small brick room, with one window that looks into an empty hall, knowing that you are going to die. Denied anything approaching what we call life, you’re marooned in a brick-walled purgatory, with one twin bed, one toilet, and one sink. Your only friend: a bodiless voice through the vents. Some days people shuffle away, chained at their hands and their ankles, through the doors, towards certain death.”
I care desperately about what I do. Do I know what product I’m selling? No. Do I know what I’m doing today? No. But I’m here, and I’m gonna give it my best shot.
“Even if the Highlander theory is thrust upon us all the time, even if pop culture wants us to look at females and minorities as competition, we know more than they do: they’re our teammates. We can respond to the Highlander theory: we can identify it as bullshit, and then we can ignore it. Try it for a minute. The results could be very powerful.”
— Me on Highlander, Pop Culture, and Taylor Swift’s famous friendships
Feeling a bit stressed out and the only thing I would like to be working on right now is Marky Mark Has a Cold, my dream piece about a week at Wahlburgers, catching wind of all the Wahlberg-related hanger-ons (of which there is a lot, obviously, see Entourage).
Why it is a boring time to be a cultural journalist in some ways: it’s because culture is migrating to the whims of the internet, which is its own set of desires. No more are you advocating for truly excellent works of art, human stories of triumph and perseverance — rather, it’s the crowd’s urges taking you down a slipstream of thoughts, and it’s very difficult to get anything beyond those ideas. It basically turns everything into niches, but you have to be sitting at the cool kids’ table, or your niche of choice simply doesn’t exist. Especially if it caters towards adults (oh god, I’m A.O. Scott, but it’s true).
Imagine how many articles you’d read about UnREAL, which is great, if it was on HBO. Seriously. It is a show that’s sort of discombobulating to watch because it’s on Lifetime.
