"One of the oddities of human discourse, when we stop to think about it, is the discrepancy between the way we talk about ourselves and the way we talk about other people. Discussing other people, we are quite happy to explain their behavior and motivation. She has writer’s block because … He goes out with alpha-women because … Typically we have no trouble finishing these sentences when they concern our friends and acquaintances. But where we ourselves are concerned, we can talk until the cows make their leisurely way home about why we have writer’s block, or why our most recent partner is less than satisfactory (though in a completely different way, of course, from his or her predecessor), without reaching any firm conclusions. We see other people as known territory, ourselves as the uncharted country. In writing fiction, I think great characters come from exercising both this facility for interpretation, which we bring to bear on others, and this willingness to enter into mystery, which we bring to bear on ourselves. And one of the principal virtues of reading fiction has always been that — more than biography or memoir, more than history — it allows us to pour our own inchoate lives, our own confused and confusing experiences, into those of another, and in so doing to begin to organize that experience, and to have a larger life. Reading good fiction is the opposite of escapism.

In 1956, the same year as Nabokov published Lolita, the British writer Rebecca West published a novel, The Fountain Overflows. The Fountain Overflows is set in Edwardian England and concerns a couple, Piers and Clare Aubrey, and their four children. Piers is a brilliant pamphleteer and newspaper editor with a passion for gambling matched only by his lack of luck. His wife, who before their marriage was a concert pianist, now spends her days trying to keep the household together and bring up their four children. The novel is narrated by one of the daughters. In an extraordinary scene, West describes the day when an unfortunate man comes to the house to confront Piers about his affair with his wife; but Piers is out, and instead the man ends up talking to Clare. Soon after the man leaves, his wife arrives; she, too, talks to Clare. Left alone at last, Clare sends her children to find a copy of Madame Bovary, and, by the time her husband comes home, she is engrossed in the novel; the two of them have a lively discussion about the comparative virtues of Madame Bovary and A Sentimental Education. ‘But then Clare put her hand to her forehead. “How did I come to start reading this book?” she asked us, and then drew a deep breath. “Oh, I had quite forgotten. I like the book so much that I had quite forgotten. I am really very heartless,” she cried, rising to her feet. “But art is so much more real than life. Some art is much more real than some life, I mean."

Margot Livesey, in her introduction to the fall 2002 edition of Ploughshares. (via Alexandra)

colorasbeginning:

Char / Charlotte / Pasithee

There is something neurotic about listening to the same song repeatedly. A part of me hates when I get in a rut like that. It’s like memorization, trying not to forget - a waste of time and energy.
I’ve never grown out of it either. I was a weird child because I would play the same records again and again. Not for lack of other things to play, but because when I heard a song that glowed I wanted to carve it into my brain. One time my mama got angry because “Just Like A Woman” was blasting through the doors and walls, the end morphing into the opening. It must have been annoying for everyone.

There is never a book I wish to spend my whole life reading and rereading or even a television program or movie I’d watch on a loop. Only music, only a melody. I wonder how that works, why our brains can only tolerate something rather simple, short in comparison to a film. Must be the wiring, must be the flow of a song.
I wonder who the first human being was to hum or whistle to themselves? I imagine Adam and Eve bored out of their mind in the garden, tired of sex, tired of peace. Adam says something to Eve and she wants to communicate how frustrated she is with being cooped up in a wall of a trees with a man she didn’t have any say in choosing. Maybe Eve was the first woman to make a song. Or maybe it was Adam, because he must have been equally as annoyed.

This evening I finally scanned the two portraits I did of Charlotte.
She is a dear, wonderful person to talk to, tell things to. I cannot say why she is one of my favorites that I have met through here, only that she is. She’s magic, she’s captivating. Like a secret that gets whispered and lost, fragmented. It is up to the listener to paste it all back together. That is how I think of all of this, the internet, a smashing up of a portrait of a stranger’s life. It remains smashed for a long time and then a group treks through it, makes the effort to make sense of it. Almost as if they are inventing a language. Trying to attach meaning to matter.

Whatever the case I hope you and you and you like it.
Mostly I hope you like it, Char.

x

Angela is so wonderful, she does paintings of people like me (Me!). It just makes me swoon. And I love her Nick Cave painting; he looks so cross as he does most of the time. (I once Googled ‘Nick Cave smiling’ and it broke the Internet.)