Peace. Only the medal for bravery still remained as a reminder of the failed attack on New Orleans. And daily work… for that was now more arduous. So many were missing.

The battle, they said, had been superfluous. Unfortunately, the news of a long-since-concluded peace had arrived too late. But what did ‘too late’ mean? They hadn’t waited for it long enough. That’s what it meant.

The ship was now on its way to England. During the first weeks they still talked about their defeat. Five and a half thousand British against four thousand Americans. But in blindly running against them, the British lost two thousand men at the start, while the Americans, thanks to their secure fortifications, lost only thirteen, and those only because they broke out and wanted to become heroes.

What Franklin had to say about this was amply expressed by his silence. To talk about the senselessness of a battle was to attribute sense to war itself. Then, too, he was still very weak. ‘A few hidden deserters and some contraband,’ one of them said, ‘were not worth a war with the Americans.’ That person could actually imagine aims that might have been worth it.

~ Sten Nadolny, The Discovery of Slowness

The ice screams as it folds over itself. I want the fog to kiss me, but it wraps like a damp scarf, tightening, sliding down my throat and dying in my belly like a sigh. I count rabbits and daisies and pale women. So cold my piss bounces off the ground. My breath ripens and falls. Words crystallize and fail. So cold my God has already said checkmate, has already retired to bed.

~ Tara Laskowski @ Everyday Genius

JM: I could never imagine doing something like this because, beyond that brutalness of exposing yourself, there’s also an honesty that potentially could be hurtful to others, to parents, siblings, old lovers. We always want to believe that people, ultimately, think mostly good of us. Or, at the very least, we want them to lie if they can’t say anything nice. Have you spoken to anyone in the book after the fact, now that it’s out? Has there been any weirdness?

KS: There’s not much weirdness…yet. I’m still waiting for my mom to give me her thoughts. But my personal feelings on it is that most of these things happened twenty years or more ago. People forgive or forget in that time span, I hope. I got a couple of messages from old girlfriends about the book. Erin, who I wrote about in a couple of chapters, said: “I don’t remember doing some of those awful things, but they sound true. I was 19 after all.” To be fair, I tried to own up to my own dumb behavior more than anyone else. I think that’s really the way to do a memoir. You can’t make yourself the victim and you can’t pretend to be a hero.

~ Kevin Sampsell interviewed at JMWW

Think about how stories typically circulate in the world. I write a story, send it to a literary journal, it gets published, and maybe one or two people emails me to mention they read it. One of the perplexing questions I get asked a lot is “How is your book doing?” (Rebecca Brown has a perfect retort for this. She says, “Great! It’s finished!”) I’m never quite sure how to answer this question. I haven’t seen sales figures for either of my books recently, I have no idea who the people are who read them unless they contact me, and I have no idea where in the world individual copies end up. With Found and Lost, I can see where each individual story is and where it has been and who has touched it. I can read comments from that person about the story and what they were doing the day they found it. I can see photos that the person has uploaded, and I get an email alerting me whenever the story has been placed in a new cache or is picked up by someone new. I can send each person a personal email if I wish. And if they seem to enjoy my work, I can let them know about new stuff coming out.

~ Ryan Boudinot on his story geocaching project Found and Lost

Modern materialism has this strange kind of double effect on self-perception. On the one hand, it isolates the individual by (seemingly) dispelling various illusions of communion (the decline of religion being the paradigm example). On the other, progress in social sciences, psychology and neurology, which has seeped into the wider cultural air, encourages us to think about ourselves in various “external” fashions— as the product of genetic resources, social and economic starting position, etc. These modes of thought are uncomfortable, in that they imply that our view of things “from the inside” is illusory or distorted, and that what we experience as central and singular in our personal day-to-day are actually nothing more than instances of general truths about human behavior. To a certain extent, it is healthy to be objective about yourself (you aren’t at the center of the world, despite appearances) but at its limits it becomes dehumanizing. “Flattening” is, for me, exactly the word for describing how the materialist double effect feels when you reach these limits—subjective consciousness is squished between the material barrier separating our inner life from those of others, and the inferential awareness that this inner life is itself the product of a hardwiring that we are subjectively blind to. The deeper way in which Sontag was right when she said that redundancy was the affliction of modern life is that the ascendancy of materialism not only attacks the meaning of this very precious “immaterial” vocabulary we use to talk about what it’s like being human; it breeds biological fatalism, lending weight to the idea that our actions reduce to, and are determined by, dumb physical process—an ultimately pointless set of natural drives. Helplessness is the current running beneath all of Houellebecq’s narratives, the soul-crushing inability to either find what you want or change what you want; to avoid death or believe that death is anything except bad.

~ Hard Feelings: The Novels of Michel Houellebecq

If he could have contented himself with his artistic triumphs — “Conquerers of the Trail” at the Hotel Monticello, the Venetian panels in the Liberty Theatre — then his fading image as the Nature Man might not have mattered as much. But it is apparent from Knowles’s writing that for him the wilderness, and his own part in it, was paramount.

But to succeed as a nature writer, Knowles would probably have had to get a bit more of the poetry of the woods into his work. The naturalists whose work resonated with the public — Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson later on — all wrote beautifully, and captured a bit of the transcendent in their work. Knowles was impatient with the majesty of the silent forest; he wanted to skip to the particulars. Rather than contemplate the grand designs in the animal kingdom, he chose to chronicle individual animal behavior. That’s valuable, too, of course, but Knowles would get so caught up in his observations that he’d lose the thread of the story.

~ Jim Motavalli

Q: Is there anyone alive today who you think resembles (not literally) Buffalo Bill?

A: I think the answer is no, and yes. Cody was a warrior who became an entertainer by reenacting a version of his own exploits and scripting them in a popular story of heroic achievement. In that sense there is nobody like him. Since his death, there have been few if any who could convey that sense of authenticity and action as well as Cody did. But even if there had been some, as I conclude in the book, the public’s diminished faith in social progress after World War I made it much harder for a single individual to claim to live a life of continual self improvement and advancement. What went missing was not just the man, but the story he acted out.

But then, in another sense, today there are many people like Buffalo Bill. In his day, he was unusual for envisioning his life as an ongoing story to be lived for the amusement of an audience. This idea became less strange in the twentieth century. Most movie stars try to project their on-screen personas back into their off-screen lives as a means of conveying their authenticity, of being believable to audiences.

But even more, in today’s world of the TV camera, hand-held video, and now digital internet cameras, the idea of life-as-performance has come to typify at least some aspects of everyday existence for a great many people. Newscasters and other television commentators play themselves every day. Reality shows invite us to believe we are watching real people engage real challenges (although they are nothing of the sort). Beyond that, the information revolution brought us new kinds of performance, in which people put cameras in their houses and allow viewers to watch them in their private homes. Of course, what is still missing from these examples is a heroic story of the sort Cody performed. These days, people play themselves, but I don’t think we would call their ongoing “stories” heroic, or even progressive.

I suspect most of us try to keep our public and private personas separate. But the idea of having a public persona that takes over your entire life is no longer so strange as it was in Cody’s day. In that sense, there’s a little Buffalo Bill in all of us.

~ Louis S. Warren

what the book does then is protect us from the flashing baubles and shiny lights of the beautiful internet vaudeville: that latest email, “friend” request, tweet, jezebel/craigslist/nytimes update… dwelling in the carnival for so long, we tend to forget that there’s another option possible: meadows free of noise.

or if the pastoral gags you: then the book as fortress, a portable monastery keeping aflame the capacity for contemplation in our current digital dark age…

~ Eugene Lim

That was all, he held his peace. And since Seraphin was no longer speaking either, around the two men there slowly grew a strange thing, inhuman, and in the end unbearable — Silence. A silence of the high mountains, a silence of unpeopled spaces, where man comes but rarely, and where if by chance he falls silent himself, he may listen all he will, but all that he can hear is that there is nothing to hear.

It is as if nothing exists any more anywhere, from us to the other end of the world, from us to the furthest reach of the sky. Nothing, the abyss, the void; the annihilation of self; as if the world were not yet created, or had ceased to exist; as if it was before the beginning of the world, or after its end. And anguish dwells in your throat, and a hand is slowly contracting around your heart.

A lucky chance if just then the fire starts to crackle, or a drop of water falls, or perhaps a little wind brushes the roof. The slightest little sound is a great sound. The drop of water reverberates as it falls. The burning wood cracks like a pistol shot, and the brushing of the wind is enough all by itself to fill the immensity of space. All the tiny sounds that are really loud… they recur… they fill the cup of silence. Life begins again because of the living sounds.

~ CF Ramuz, When The Mountain Fell

For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon et compagnie redrew the map of what fiction might offer and aspire to, what its ground rules should be – so much so that some have found their legacy stifling. Michel Houellebecq’s response has been one of adolescent rejection, or, to use the type of psychological language that the nouveaux romanciers so splendidly shun, denial: writing in Artforum in 2008, he claimed never to have finished a Robbe-Grillet novel, since they ‘reminded me of soil cutting’. Other legatees, such as Jean Echenoz, Christian Oster and Olivier Rolin, have come up with more considered answers, ones that, at the very least, acknowledge an indebtedness – enough for their collective corpus to be occasionally tagged with the label ‘nouveau nouveau roman’. Foremost among this group, and bearing that quintessentially French distinction of being Belgian, is Jean-Philippe Toussaint.

~ Tom McCarthy @ LRB (via Conversational Reading)