phrases I liked:
in “My Father’s Brain”:
- the brain as “lovely and postmodern” p. 10
- “medicalization of human experience” p. 19
- “ever-expanding nomenclature of victimhood”p. 19
- “My sense of private selfhood turns out to have been illusory” p. 20
- “the conviction that we are larger than our biologies” p. 33
in “Sifting the Ashes”
- “a Cold War logic” p. 147
words I didn’t know (i’m sure there were many more, these are the ones I read while had a pen around to mark them):
- ephebe p. 75 — a young man
- Manichaeanism p. 175 — a dualistic philosophy dividing the world between good and evil principles or regarding matter as intrinsically evil and mind as intrinsically good.
- samizdat p 178 — the clandestine copying and distribution of government-suppressed literature or other media in Soviet-bloc countries
- pemmican p 243 — a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious emergency foodstuff
various notes on various essays:
“My Father’s Brain”
the first use of “Pyrrhic victory” I’ve seen outside of Ulysses:
- When Franzen’s mother and father were arguing over his father’s hearing loss, “the battle culminated Pyrrhically in his purchase of a hearing aid that he then declined to wear.” p. 13
“Why Bother?”
linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath after interviewing many readers concluded there are two types of readers: modeled readers and social isolates.
- “There’s the social isolate — the child who from an early age felt very different from everyone around him… What happens is you take that sense of being different into an imaginary world. But that world, then, is a world you can’t share with the people around you — because it’s imaginary. And so the important dialogue in your life is with the authors of the books you read. Though they aren’t present, they become your community.” p.77 [At this point in the essay of course, Jonathan Franzen, who believes he is this type of reader, becomes my community, a fictional character I can relate to. But this fictional character is only fictional in my mind. Meanwhile he exists elsewhere as an actual person, and is not my community at all. But it’s the current story I’m telling myself because that’s what we do.]
- These “social isolate” readers are more likely to become writers, Heath discovers. “What’s perceived as the antisocial nature of ‘substantive’ authors, whether it’s James Joyce’s exile or J.D. Salinger’s reclusion, derives in large part from the social isolation that’s necessary for inhabiting an imagined world.” p. 77-78
One of the better descriptions of depression I’ve read, or at least as it relates to me (–and how can I interpret it any other way since I only know me?):
- “Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression’s actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.” p. 87 [Even when I’m engaging with the world and happy to do so, part of me still sees me as that “perfidiously happy-faced” portion of humanity for doing it.]
on writing (from letter from Don Delillo):
- “Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” p. 95-96
“First City”
about The Encyclopedia of New York City and its failings:
- “I paged to the entry for ‘Sewers’… I found a good historical overview of the subject by no hint of the daily drama of contemporary sewers.” p. 187-88
- It goes through each subject decade by decade, peaking around the ’30s then “finally peters out rather sadly in the present…It’s an odd thing to experience the present, which is, after all, so present, again and again as the dusty terminus of historical spurs. Reviewers of the Encyclopedia have dwelled on what’s missing from it, and their quibbles reinforce the notion of the city as a work completed, rather than a work in progress” p. 188
on malls and city life
- p. 190 Witold Rybczynski, City Life: Urban expectations in a new world, also www.witoldrybczynski.com
“Mr. Difficult”
[member_only]of course, it’s been said many times before. However, [/member_only]i like “arguably”:
- “Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.” p. 258
“Meet Me in St. Louis”
- “The great oak trees that helped Marel ‘to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality’ for the pictures that are stored in one’s memory…” p. 293