Sheer Literariness

("During the Apartheid years Coetzee’s novels were regularly passed by the South African censors not because they did not deal with material that might be construed as critical of the state, but because their potential threat was thought to be ameliorated by their sheer literariness." - from TLS)

Flaubert in 'Memoirs of a Madman':
"I've never liked schedules, set times, a tick-tock existence, in which thought stops with the ringing of the school bell, and everything is wound up beforehand, for centuries and generations."

From Frederick Brown's fucking teriffic biography: "The only straight line for which [adolescent] Gustave seemed to display enthusiasm was the one that traced the progress of a civilization wearing itself out as it scraped its bourgeois way toward oblivion."

"After wearing out its feet on city pavements," Flaubert wrote, "man will die on forest floors. This vapor of blood must cool..."

Awesome, awesome. 'Wild mares and she-wolves' await man in his exile, and 'a great guffaw of despair' will issue 'when men behold the void'. He thought of these things sitting, like, in study hall and wandering the corridors between classes. He was bored. "For this darkly eloquent collegian, the end of time was more agreeable to contemplate than the doomsday of graduation." Why do people read literary biographies? I could be e-trading right now or polishing my resume, or volunteering at the dog hospital across the street.

Ecce puer!

Anyway and ergo, civilization was already exhausted for the sensitive splenetic by 1838.
Today we have gangsta rap and stuff and like beer, but it's still all so annoying and it sucks dick to punch clocks. To wit, record of a corroded intelligence wedged in tight between 'leisure' and productive labor:

• "It's the monotony of the work--not being absorbed, so I get drawn into all the theatre of everything in my own lightless brain. Then, I become sad and mysterious, longing for death, or I get very angry that I'm spending all my time alive and my faculty for human feeling to perform these tasks, and then at myself for being incapable and at 'everyone' for colluding in the great regime of common sense, self-discipline, and bourgeois respectability."

[these are all verbatim from post-its and little scraps: an indulgence since forever]

• "I'm overmastered by a lot of thoughts that don't come from anywhere. -What would his ideal life look like? IT WOULD LOOK LIKE SOMEONE DESCRIBING SOMETHING."
• "ANGER: Can't remember what I wrote down. What if you took a whole cocktail of focus drugs? Just a big handful. With something else to take the edge off and smooth the bumps out, a draft beer. One wonders, is it faster to take the 1 all the way to 66th? The alternative is to transfer at 14th, 2 stops to Times Square, and get back off, ride 3 or 4 stops. Possibly, because there are about 5 local stops between 14th and Times Square (18, 23, 28, 34) so that the added time would be greater than 2 intervals of waiting for the express."
• "INFINITY: Why do I write in this small, shitty thing? Every task and each record made this way--my familiar process of living--seems pointless and stillborn: the effect is like vertigo but very immanent and plastic. Dizziness but in a firm way, it feels good--not as goodness exactly, but positive in a little way. (Drugs) That the dizziness and the ridiculousness of everything is so frontal, so unconcealed, such a monolithic emergency that it is possible to relax in its presence, like a Marxist wearing a fine silk tie."
  

• "What will be the next step I take? I thought, ---to avoid lingering around if nothing else comes along that I may turn my hand to. --Taking control of my life and living. For ten minutes this morning on the subway I was happy and felt like a soul, I had taken drugs. Happiness of the world to feel itself, it blossoms collectively like an anemone."
• "To sense: That there is nothing to ADJUST to. 'It is silly for me to keep coming in and having episodes of mental illness. Who does this.' (Another thing I describe over and over:) I have worked so long to be so sensitive, it is to be expected that I founder and wreck like this. (SHOUT:) Point to the problem! Where is it? Where is the physical stress, the physical sign of weakness? -Mostly, it is embarrassing. Another little thing to the list of little things: shame or whatever.
  
• "I do have a kind of ADD. I am aware that I do at certain times, in public spaces, I have behaved outwardly like a crazy person. I'm slightly aware at the time of this, and afterward it's very clear. (I would be treated as a matter of course like a person in the grip of craziness.) I feel this is very different to the way I actually appear, and feel, through the great part of my daily life. But there is a full checklist, a full gamut of symptoms and bad indicators. What sort of clinical language, or language of productiviy-psychology, or American cliché, do I find to narrate with? The condition needs narration. To be sure: it is ITSELF NARRATION."
• "I, I SAY I: I have bizarre ways to indulge myself, then. Sort of a neurotic, dramatic personality. Dealing with the anxiety of social exposure, the traps and doubling. -But to create art you have to step outside the world a little bit! Check yourself--Restrain your involvement, fight the seduction to enter and discourse and slake and perform!"
• "And you find quiet again so easily, as soon as it's a nice day and you change your environment a little."
• "Write a lively little thing, like James Thurber! Sweet, honey-drenched irony and warbling humility."
• "EVERYDAY HUSSERL: You can stop (finish) the cycle at any time. Any conscious time. Conscious conclusion."
  
• "For a long time, I was really miserable. For a couple years. I guessed I would just have to wait for a different world."
• "LET EM CLUTCH-FOR ME-AT STRAWS"