#patricia lockwood

[woundgallery]

#poetry #dreamscapes #patricia lockwood #prose poem #poetry inspiration #text

[edlboetie]

I'm not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

"Power and Light" - Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood

#it occurs to me just now that for essay collections like this i should probably add the chapter title before the book title #whatever i'll fix the other ones when i have wifi #memoir #patricia lockwood #quotes #priestdaddy

[campgender]

My father comes home from work and he is exhausted. He winces as he walks on his knee replacements, he hunches under extra weight, feeling always the subterranean throb of his back, sometimes exhaling a distressing sound of pure suffering—never the word “God,” but close: gad. It was always this way. He came home and there was nothing left except a desire to be alone with himself, so he could regenerate the language he needed to speak universally. There is a certain fatigue that comes from always presiding over the baptisms, the weddings, and the burials—the three ceremonies where you are most certain to encounter poetry, even if it is present nowhere else in your life.

A truce, then, between me and my father’s house. I was not made in his likeness, but I have chosen something of his same extremity, his willingness to be available for the questions that knock on the door in the middle of the night. His voice inside the verses was so sweeping, his judgment from the pulpit so black-and-white, that it was hard not to inherit them. It was hard not to inherit the desire to stand over the deceased and say something, and it was impossible, finally, not to inherit his anger. As long as I lived under his roof, I told myself that I had no temper, that I would never speak that knot of heat I felt so often in my throat, forced down into my rib cage, sent flowing into my fingertips. But I belong to myself now, and I can admit it. When I sit down at the desk, the anger radiates out of me in great bronze spikes, like holiness in the old paintings, and a sermon rises up in me as if it had been waiting for breath, and puts itself together bone to bone.

I’m not interested in heaven unless my anger gets to go there too. I’m not interested in a happy eternity unless I get to spend an eternity on anger first. Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried. If we are resurrected at the end of the world, I want us to assemble with a military click, I want us to come together as an army against what happened to us here. I want us to bring down the enemy of our suffering once and for all, and I want us to loot the pockets, and I want us to take baths in the blood.

What do I want? I want him to have a job, and be living in your house. I want us to stop selling heaven as the home we don’t get here. I want an afterlife for my anger; I want levitation, perfection, and white wings for it, and I want an afterlife for my question, which is an answer.

But for now the question just hangs in the middle of the air, halfway up the blue sky, the long unbroken mosquito whine of a why, and the only thing that answers is the voice of my father, saying what he always said, saying the same thing your father always said: “Life isn’t fair, nobody ever said it was going to be, who told you that.”

from Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

#as a pastor’s kid + poet this page got me in a way nothing else ever has #priestdaddy #patricia lockwood #mac’s bookshelf #quotes #parents #rage #mac has another faith crisis #goddamn i am my father’s son #god the father

[firstfullmoon]

Patricia Lockwood, from No One Is Talking About This [ID in alt text]

#w #lit #patricia lockwood #a softer kind of life

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

The day, as I am writing, is like a crystal without faces. I felt Molly in this book, but a different one: the small allotment of her that I had. The people who surrounded Molly share something, maybe – a hesitance to claim her. If we called ourselves her friends, would she reject that? She sent a few people cookies on the day she died. It was the great uncrossed-out thing; it was what she could do. She might roll her eyes at us; so what? Maybe in the end it is better to make the claim. I knew Molly; I walked with her a little ways. Will you roll the dice, and change her again? Flash some other combination? That she would continue to appear in the live studio audience of a Dr Phil taping, or standing before one of her cakes. I have wondered why anyone would like baking. I guess it is like the sun, doing something. In her childhood diary, she wrote: ‘I put food out for fairies but it is still here today.’ Being in water Thinking about how big the universe is Reading other people’s journals That she might like a picture of your crystals, or your cats; that you might like a picture of her imperial chickens. Now and then I still come across something that seems to belong to her, or that might go on her list of things she could write about.

Patricia Lockwood, The Secret Life

#Patricia Lockwood #Molly Brodak

[adz]

"I’m not speaking of the length, or the timelines that Wallace himself couldn’t untangle, or the footnotes that he somehow made famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already. At some point, you will find yourself in a state of pure nystagmus, moving your eyes back and forth across the page without conscious will. Almost the second you find yourself really reading he plucks it from you again. The game is not tennis, or chess-on-the-run, or Eschaton. It is keepaway. The Pale King, put together by note and hint, keeps us in the realm of the readable, whereas Wallace might have imposed a superstructure that made it impossible."

#david foster wallace #patricia lockwood

[remylong]

“Can ghosts learn new technology?” her sister asked, thinking of what must come next, the endless conveyor of progress to which a whole human history’s worth of spirits must adapt. The two of them were silent for a minute, and then images came crowding in: an elevator ghost pressing every button, feeling its stomach drop out through the bottom of the world; a ghost unzipping its message across long black telegraph wires; ghosts in the portal, reading forever, tenderly holding down hearts. In the group text where they sent her videos back and forth late at night, that’s what they said—thank God, can you believe, that we had the technology.

No One Is Talking About This - Patricia Lockwood

#patricia lockwood #also #en abime

[grandhotelabyss]

In spite of myself (cause I have mixed feelings on him too) I always want to defend DFW, because he really has become someone you hate to show that you’re a right thinking person.* Lockwood does get some good ones in though, particularly the bits about chipmunk speed DeLillo and how Wallace is more clearly the end of a tradition than the start of something new: he borrowed the form of Pynchon, DeLillo and Barth without I think really understanding what they were saying with it or why they used it, and that mismatch haunts his work. I agree with the last anon that cleverness seems to annoy you, but on the other hand surely Don DeLillo is clever if anybody is!

* it’s funny that he basically canonized Updike being cast into the fire because I think disavowing Wallace (at least in my experience of having done it) serves a similar purpose. In a “woke” environ one slams DFW to denounce or clear oneself of suspicion of being  a very particular, and very loathed sort of fellow who doesn’t even have the decency of being a real man as he cheats or throws a coffee table at you. (I say woke, but heading that type of man is a pretty bipartisan or nonpartisan activity really)

What's odious to me in Wallace—the same as what's odious to me in Tolstoy—is the combination of public moralism with private abusiveness. As priest of the imagination, the artist should be an improvement on the mere hypocritical priest of the official churches whom the artist has viciously satirized since at least Boccaccio. The even worse crimes of Burroughs and Mailer bother people—bother me—less because they never promised us they were nice guys, just that they intended to live to the hilt (no stabbing pun intended). That's slim consolation to the people they hurt or even killed in their private lives, but it does mean they never betrayed their audience.

I would class DeLillo among the witty rather than the clever; I keep comparing him to Austen and Wilde as another master of stylized comic dialogue, but it doesn't catch on. I think he satirizes the clever, hence Lockwood's apt line about Heinrich. Also a related point against Wallace is his defanging the political critique in Pynchon and DeLillo. Wallace's overt politics were about as interesting as Morning Joe. He really should have leaned into his misogyny—his apocalyptic hatred of "mother," his ferocious resentment of the bottomless need "mother" provoked in him but would or could not satisfy—a bit more, that is, more self-consciously; he'd have come out the other side with stronger insights. (His tragedy might have been that he was a Jamesian who thought he was a Melvillean, to go back to that binary.)

I think if one is going to be against identity politics in the arts, one has to be all the way against them. I'm not going to pretend I admire him more than I do because he's a white man, even if some people only hate him because he's a white man. Similarly, I loathe this turn in indie publishing toward explicitly "men's literature." I'm with Elizabeth Bishop: just as she refused to be published in female-poet anthologies, I don't write men's literature (or—good Lord!—white literature) but literature without qualification. Literature must be hyper-specific—must go much deeper than the mid-range specificity of social identity—but only because that's the royal and indeed sole road to the universal. But the universal is where we're headed, or else what's the point?

#david foster wallace #don delillo #thomas pynchon #literary criticism #patricia lockwood

[dk-thrive]

The pleasure of writing is derived from the frisson of discomfort.

Everyone who writes, professionally or otherwise, basically already knows this as a matter of instinct. For instance, let’s imagine that I’m someone who really enjoys writing, which I am. I get an idea for a scene, and I write that scene, and then, for technological reasons, the work gets deleted and I have to start again. Depending on how much work has been lost, this can be a very distressing experience. Why? Because I have to do a piece of work again that I supposedly enjoyed doing the first time. If I really enjoyed doing it so much – not the accomplishment of having done it, but the act of doing it – why should it be so painful to have to do it again? (Of course, there are some writers who just hate the whole process of writing, which means they never have to contemplate this contradiction, although there are other downsides to their way of life.) For me, it’s because I already taught myself what I wanted to know the first time. The writing can be enjoyable and exciting when it involves discovery: of character, of language, of technique, etc. But when I’m just typing out something I know already, it’s depressing. So in my experience, there are intrinsic obstacles to growing more formally comfortable in a given genre. The pleasure of writing is derived from the frisson of discomfort.

—  Sally Rooney, from ‘I always secretly wonder which of us is the real artist’: Sally Rooney in conversation with Patricia Lockwood (The Guardian, June 4, 2022)

#write #writer #writing #Sally Rooney #patricia lockwood

[lazyydaisyyy]

What did we have a right to expect from this life? What were the terms of the contract?

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This

#patricia lockwood #no one is talking about this #words #lit #quote #quoteoftheday

[the-most-sublime-fool]

Would it change her? Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but still she went on about the weather.

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This

#no one is talking about this #patricia lockwood #quotes #on living #to save

[procedurally-generated-hellscape]

- Patricia Lockwood, about Molly Brodak

#poetry #Molly Brodak #patricia lockwood

[imathers]

‘We are writing about it,’ I told Hope at the very beginning. How do you do it? You find some sort of frame, or an occasion for pattern recognition, and the corresponding colours fall into your hands like gems. You might step through a doorway and find anything. Yesterday we walked into a random basilica that housed the body of Catherine of Siena – well, everything except her head. ‘The people of Siena wished to have Catherine’s body,’ I learn. Don’t we all.

Knowing that they could not smuggle her whole body out of Rome, they decided to take only her head, which they placed in a bag. When stopped by the Roman guards, they prayed to Catherine to help them, confident that she would rather have her body (or at least part thereof) in Siena. When they opened the bag to show the guards, it appeared no longer to hold her head but to be full of rose petals.

This is constantly happening to me.

#litterachoor #aesthetics #religion #patricia lockwood #don't love that tumblr isn't great at representing block quotes inside of quotes but oh well

[i-was-made-for-another-planet]

When Patricia Lockwood said, "a trick I often use, when I feel overwhelming shame of regret, or brokenness beyond repair, is to think of a line I especially love, or a poem that arrived like lightning, and remember that it wouldn’t have come to me if anything in my life had happened differently. Not that way. Not in those words."

Damn, I felt that.

#text post #patricia lockwood

[asfearlessasamango]

"There was a certain freedom in admitting I was not the intended reader – one of my signature talents, then as now, is for never knowing when something is based on Hamlet. Still I began. James O. Incandenza’s head took up residence in my microwave. At times I was high on cough syrup; that helped. Occasionally I lifted my eyes to rest them on a canal with actual gators in it. My main sense memory is of it digging into my pussy when I propped it on my lap; one can only think this was by design. And maybe it wasn’t good for obsessive thinkers, or people prone to go into trance states while lip-biting. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that possibly it drove me crazy. You see, one corner of the back cover of my copy was torn, and I thought I could just even it out with an X-Acto knife – Lucky Jim’s sheet-snipping logic – and when my husband came home from work one afternoon he found me sitting in a pile of confetti, with a look like a dog that had just exploded all his friends in the henhouse, and he took the X-Acto knife from me without a word and hid it where I could never find it again. But there was something in me that saw this – correctly – as the only possible way to approach it: with a weapon."

-- an incredible paragraph from patricia lockwood on infinite jest

#words #infinite jest #david foster wallace #patricia lockwood

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

She would still like a picture of a geode if I posted it, because that’s what she loved too, grains of sugar in the earth. She would like a picture of my cats, and I would like a picture of her chickens, as if they wouldn’t chase each other in the real world. I would like a picture of her and Blake, high on LSD and grinning, sitting in the studio audience of a Dr Phil taping. Perhaps we respected each other as people who could not be close to others. She had a Master List of Things I Like and Might Write About: Cookies Interesting rocks What’s under the ground Most of them, in the end, were crossed out. ‘Everything tastes weird lately,’ she wrote, in one of her final diary entries, ‘like aspirin.’ And then: ‘I swear someone really could save my life right now.’

Patricia Lockwood, The Secret Life

#Patricia Lockwood #Molly Brodak