Malina, Waddell

Strategies/Techniques

• My relationship with ‘today’ is so bad that many people often mistake extreme attentiveness for an absent-minded gaze. My relationship with (abstract concept) is ______.

• this pathological agitation will be part of my ‘today’ until its final hour. Beautiful. Identify a permanent emotional attribute of a character and use fresh language to explain that it is an inescapable part of him/her. 

• I get along well with this city and its small environs which have retired from history and are now disappearing altogether. Anthropomorphize a city/place in order to talk about a character’s relationship with it.

• Critique of Pure Reason, read under 60 watts in the Beatrixgasse, Locke Leibnitz and Hume, befuddling my mind with concepts from all ages in the dismal light of the National Library under the little reading lamps…Blake read under 25 watts in a hotel in Paris, Freud Alder and Jung read at 360 watts in a lonely Berlin street…La com´die Humaine read with a  fairly high fever, weakened by antibiotics…everything from De Rerum Natura to Le Culte de la Raison at thirty French cigarettes a day…Marx and Engels read after washing my hair and V.I. Lenin when completely drunk… Love the way that books are associated with the light in which they were read, specific locations, specific states of mind, specific actions.   

• I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. It must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt. Custis would introduce one of his own thoughts as a “terrible secret” — as privileged insight/knowledge that he thinks will be sinister or life-shattering on some level. Love the idea of language as punishment.

• Adagio, allegro, pui mosso, etc. Tempos and expressive markings used to describe a character’s speech. He spoke in an adagio. Sotto voce.

• All these people renting opinions, and at such high rates, they’ll wind up paying dearly. Think of all the things a character is paying for indirectly, that he is “renting” from society, and the costs associated.

• I ask Ivan whether he once though and what he used to think and what he thinks today about love. Lack of commas and the frenetic piling of similar questions is an effective way to portray a hyper-anxious mind.

• Antoinette laughs with the inimitable Altenwyl laugh she acquired through marriage. Behaviors/Habits (or anything intangible we don’t usually think of as acquired) as “acquired” through a relationship.

Loved Phrases and Ideas

• This little piece of side street is my greatest security.

• I realized beyond a doubt that I could not count on art, technology or this age to help me in any way, and that I would never have anything to do with the thoughts, themes or problems under discussion. 

• we don’t need to talk about our good old days, because our days are getting better and better… I was furious with Malina for having allowed me to squander so much time with other people and things. This conveys the importance of one person to another, like nothing else I’ve ever read. That a person would be furious at another person for allowing them to waste time on anything but him, is such a powerful sentiment. Intoxicating to think about.

• Malina has never lived as convulsively as I have. To live convulsively, what a great way to put it. It sounds appealing and unpleasant at the same time, both exciting and nauseating.

• a sentence which only consists of subject and preposition must be consumed rapidly, a sentence with many appositions must for that very reason be taken at tremendous speed, with the eyeballs performing an imperceptible slalom, since a sentence doesn’t convey anything to itself, it has to convey something to the reader. Love the urgency and voracity with which she reads. It’s reading as a life-sustaining activity, just as important as eating, and she is perpetually starving.

• I am never occupied. An occupation would stunt my growth… I would have occupations outlawed if I could, but I can only outlaw them as far as I’m concerned.

• now I’m expecting more out of a single evening than from all of next year. The absurd expectations we can have for small, singular events.

• Nothing is clearer to me at six in the morning than the immensity of my misfortune, since I am completely and justly stricken with unending pain which hits each and every nerve at each and every minute of the day. The unending quality of depression. Relentless.

• since justice is so oppressingly near and what I’m saying does not exclude the possibility of its being no more than a longing for an unattainable, pure greatness, that’s why it is simultaneously both oppressive and near, but in this nearness we call it injustice. Something can be very near, and still be an impossibility. A concept (or theory) of justice is such an oppressive thought because it is impossible to obtain.  

• Spiritual things demand constant humiliation.

• And if another misunderstanding should ensue, at least it would be a new one. We can never get to the unadulterated truth, speaking and communicating is just one long series of misunderstandings, a chain of signifiers with no signified.

• Problems are invented and passed around, they don’t really exist, you hear people talking about them and so you start talking about them yourself. The degree to which the talk around us influences our perception of reality. If everything is invented (constructed) to some extent, and given a name in a human language, why should our problems be an exception. Not that there are no such things as problems, but that our understandings of them are mistaken or false.

• The initial, original mistrust of a person, unjustified in the beginning, but eventually, one day, always justified. We make reality conform to our preconceived notions, especially when it comes to judging other people.

• It must make a person sick to have so few new experiences that he has to constantly repeat himself, for example a man bites my earlobe, but not because it’s my earlobe or because he’s crazy about earlobes and feels a compulsion to bite them, he bites them because he’s bitten the earlobes of all the other women, whether small or large, purple, pale, sensitive or numb, he doesn’t care what the earlobes think about it. Fuck! I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to nibble an earlobe again without thinking about Malina. This sentence actually makes me feel like I am disrespecting the individuality of a lover on some level when I nibble an earlobe. So many little things we do every day for no other reason than we have seen other people do them and it’s what we’re supposed to do. Sometimes it seems that we are so limited in the things that we can do to each other, sexually and otherwise.  

• But even if there’s nothing to be done, even if we are powerless to intervene, the question nonetheless remains: what is to be done? It would be inhuman to do nothing. Reminds me of Camus/Sisyphus. We have to act, even though we know we are powerless. Action makes us human. This book is Bachmann’s act.

• Me: What makes my self worse than anybody else’s? Malina: Nothing. Everything. Because all your actions are futile. That is unforgivable. We are condemned to futility, and this feels unforgiveable sometimes. How can we forgive ourselves for being worthless, on a grand scale?

Ideas for my story

• Custis can associate a different book with every memory that David brings up. The way his memory works is to associate a time and place, a specific event, with the book he was immersed in at the time. Keep it concise, though, or it will get tiresome to read.

• The degree to which language is the lens through which you see the world. Arturo sees it as a home and safe haven, but Custis sees it as limiting, as a prison that only grants him one unsatisfactory perspective, one small peephole through which to view history, civilization, and the world, and the more languages you learn, the wider your peephole becomes until one day you have a nice big window that is pleasant to sit beside and stare out of for hours.

            “The feeling of a mother tongue in the mouth” –Jorie Graham.