Halo halo

The mountains that have been destroyed still exist in the mind of God …  I said that as a way of addressing my own grief about what we have lost.  Perhaps the most disheartening thing in this struggle against mountaintop removal is not the power of the coal industry.  It is that if President Obama should issue a proclamation this very afternoon saying that mountaintop removal would no longer be allowed, we would still have lost five hundred mountains that aren’t coming back.  And yet.  And yet I said that years ago, and I repeat it today.  Those mountains still exist in the mind of God.

— Denise Giardina, memorial service for Judy Bonds, excerpted from Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco

photographs:  Moss Beach, CA, 4 March 2013

The wife wants our next vacation to be in either Asia or space

SODERBERG:  Do you just tend to dream up fucked up stories or are those the ones you see through?  Do you ignore the inspiration in your head that thinks of more “pleasant” ideas?

SIMMONS:  These are the stories I feel compelled to do right now.  Most of my ideas lean toward the horror thing at the moment.  But I don’t feel obligated to do them.  I don’t only like super freaked-out shit just for the sake of it being super freaked-out.  It’s got to be good and smart and original and well-made, too.  I’ll appreciate the shit out of some down-to-earth, subtle, low-key classic shit.  I’ll watch the fuck out of Tokyo Story.  I don’t give a shit.  Ultimately, I’m interested in quality and honesty over who can do the freakiest shit.  But yes, generally happy or pleasant stories don’t come to me.

— “Sometimes, You Get Your Throat Cut While a Clown Is Pulling Your Pants Down”: an Interview with Josh Simmons, Brandon Soderberg, The Comics Journal, 18 Oct 2012

Here is the crux of the problem, the single greatest obstacle to American literature today: guilt. Guilt leads to the idea that all writing is self-indulgence. Writers, feeling guilty for not doing real work, that mysterious activity—where is it? On Wall Street, at Sloane-Kettering, in Sudan?—turn in shame to the notion of writing as “craft.” (If art is aristocratic, decadent, egotistical, self-indulgent, then craft is useful, humble, ascetic, anorexic—a form of whittling.) “Craft” solicits from them constipated “vignettes”—as if to say: “Well, yes, it’s bad, but at least there isn’t too much of it.” As if writing well consisted of overcoming human weakness and bad habits. As if writers became writers by omitting needless words.

American novelists are ashamed to find their own lives interesting; all the rooms in the house have become haunted, the available subjects have been blocked off.

— Elif Batuman, n+1, 1 June 2006