Saturday, October 31, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt six)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

Perhaps in ten years I’ll be able to look back and see why it was better to be just one of the gang. Still, it’s no fun playing the piccolo in the band. It’s no great shakes being the dancer over at the side of the stage, when all the best performers stand in the middle of the stage, microphone in hand. It doesn’t make me beloved to have had sex with a few hot guys. It has never pleased me how slowly I read. In fact, when I think about it, nothing in my life signaled out that I’d be the one. I don’t know why I thought it.



Friday, October 30, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt five)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven’t said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I’ve made for myself that I don’t follow—I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. In fact, apart from being the only person living in this apartment, I’m not sure what distinguishes me.

There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time. When they talk, they are carried on a sea of their own belonging. It is like they were born to be fathers to us all. I should like one day to impale them all on a long stick. But I know I won’t. It will never be one of the gestures by which I am know, so I might as well forget about it. Thinking about it does little to help me inhabit the realm of living.



Thursday, October 29, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt four)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

That night, after spending several hours staring at my miserable play, I shut down my computer in frustration and left my apartment. I went to a party to celebrate the appearance of three more books of poetry in the world.

The party was in a wide and cavernous room with a large stage up front and the ceiling painted brown, draped around the sides with brown velvet. A large disco ball rotates in the center, and everything was polished wood and semiformal and awful.



Wednesday, October 28, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt three)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.

Though I had vowed not to spend more than seven dollars a day, since I was hardly making any money, I went into the store. I actually rushed in, as though everyone else in the city was about to have the same idea as me. I asked the old man what the tape recorder cost, knowing full well that I would buy it, no matter what it cost. I gave him my credit card and signed a slip of paper on which I promised to pay one hundred and twenty-nine dollars and thirty-two cents. Then I went across the street into the oily, red-awninged croissant shop, where I ordered an almond croissant and sat on a tall stool by a wall of windows.



Tuesday, October 27, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt two)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

When we arrived at the park, we discovered the ice cream truck was gone, so we lay on our backs with our heads in the grass and watched the tree branches floats above us. We talked for a while about this and that, then Margaux asked me how my play was going.

If I had known she was going to ask me that, I would never have gone to the park.



Monday, October 26, 2015

the last book I ever read (How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti, excerpt one)

from How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life by Sheila Heti:

Several years ago, when I was engaged to be married but afraid to go through with it—afraid that I would end up divorced like my parents, and not wanting to make a big mistake—I had gone to Misha with my concerns. We were drinking at a party and left to take a walk through the night, our feet brushing gently through the lightly fallen snow.

As we walked, I told Misha my fears. Then, after listening for a long while, he finally said, “The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

So I took what he said to heart and got married. Three years later I was divorced.



Saturday, October 24, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt twelve)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

He had three cells at his disposal. The first was a living cell with a bed, a place to eat and cupboard. The second was a work cell with a typewriter firmly stuck to a table. The third was a workout cell with a treadmill. He was not satisfied with the running machine. He was not a long-distance runner, he had told the prison, but a body builder. Naturally, free weights were out of the question on security grounds, but already on his very first week in prison he had devised ways of toning his body with the help of his own body weight. Then he lost his motivation. Through the autumn of 2012 he lost his spark. ‘A sense of resignation,’ his lawyer called it.



Friday, October 23, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt eleven)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

He was often given only enough butter for two or, at a pinch, three slices of bread, even though they knew that he ate four. ‘This creates unnecessary annoyance because I either have to eat dry bread or be made to feel guilty for asking for more.’ He described the warders’ collection of the plastic cutlery and other items after meals as a form of low-intensity psychological terror. They came so quickly that he felt obliged to hurry his food and drink. And because he was not allowed a thermos flask in the cell, his coffee was cold when he got it, eighty per cent of the time.

In his complaint he alleged that he was considering reporting the prison to the police for breaches of the Norwegian constitution, human rights legislation and the Convention against Torture.



Thursday, October 22, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt ten)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

The relatives sat in silence, heads bowed, listening. The journalists tried to catch every word, some of them tweeting constantly. The moment Holden’s words were out of his mouth, they were on the internet.

A heavily made-up CNN reporter in the first row sat listening with her headset carefully placed over her hair. A sultry, masculine musk spread from the back rows. It was the al-Jazeera reporter, who had just come back in after a live broadcast. Yes, the world was watching today.



Wednesday, October 21, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt nine)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

She could feel nothing, no grief, no fear. Simon is dead, and soon we all will be, she thought. The people who were shooting, would come back and kill them all. The shots were so regular, so loud. Margrethe had lost her will to live; she did not bother to sit out of sight, she had given up. She had gone numb, up there on the rock ledge. Her phone kept lighting up. Dad, said the display, but she did not take his call.

It was over. This was the end.



Tuesday, October 20, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt eight)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

Norway owns a single police helicopter. And in July, the helicopter service was on holiday. As a consequence of new savings measures, there was no emergency crew cover at the height of the summer. The first pilot nonetheless reported for duty right after hearing about the bomb on the news. He was told he was not needed.

Yet the emergency response unit requested use of the helicopter twice in the hour that followed. The squad was informed that the helicopter was unavailable, even though it was on the tarmac, fully operational and ready to fly. Nor did the police take any steps to mobilise military helicopters or make use of civilian helicopter companies.



Monday, October 19, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt seven)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

At 16.09 the chief of operations in Asker and Bærum, the district through which Breivik was now driving, finally got through to Oslo police district to offer assistance. She was informed about the van and the possible perpetrator. At that point in time, the station at Asker and Bærum had three patrol cars at its disposal; the chief of operations rang the closest one and gave the description. This patrol was on its way to Ila prison to pick up a prisoner who was to be taken to Oslo. The chief of operations asked them to postpone the prisoner transport because of the bomb in Oslo. She also alerted the two other patrols and read over the radio the type of vehicle, registration number and description. Then she once again contacted the patrol at Ila prison, which by then should have been free, and commanded it to go out on observation along the E18.

But the two policemen in the patrol car had chosen to ignore their orders. They had picked up the prisoner from the prison after all and were now on their way into Oslo. They had wanted to ‘get the job out of the way’, they said. In the operation log, the prisoner transport was marked Priority 5, the lowest level. The country’s seat of government had been blown up yet the patrol decided to act on its whim. Asker and Bærum’s second patrol had been busy with a psychiatric assignment and had been given orders to leave it. That order was not obeyed either.



Sunday, October 18, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt six)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

He sat in the farmhouse as evening drew in. There was no question of going out among other people. He kept a polite distance from the neighbours. ‘Welcome to our village,’ the woman who lived nearest had said cheerily the first time they met, holding our her hand, but luckily she had never come to visit. He was on nodding terms with the rest. He had made sure to give the impression that Vålstua was not a place to drop round for coffee.

In the surrounding hamlets, National Day was drawing to a close. Silver brooches and cuff links were put away in pretty boxes lined with cotton wool or velvet, starched blouses were thrown into the washing machine and traditional costumes were brushed and hung away in the wardrobe. Children’s faces were scrubbed clean of ice cream and ketchup, and the national anthem and all those marches could finally take a rest in the music cases of the school band. The delicate wood anemones started to hang their heads in their vases, and at 9 p.m. everyone lowered their Norwegian flags.



Saturday, October 17, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt five)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

Long before the sparse daylight began to show itself on the horizon, the three comrades in their darkened living rooms were jubilant. It felt like such a huge event. A black president, a Democrat, someone with experience of ordinary life, not some rich, privileged type. To the three teenagers miles north of the Arctic Circle on the other side of the Atlantic, at such a distance from the Chicago crowds, Obama somehow felt like one of them.

One day they’d get there, to America, come what may.



Friday, October 16, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt four)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

It took Anders a little over six months of full-time playing to become the leader of the Virtue guild, which did its raiding on the European server Nordrasil.

Anders had been awarded the title Justitiarius. It was a title that took a long time and a lot of killing to achieve.

When Anders was on a raid, he was not to be disturbed on any account. Virtue had decided to mount its raids and conquests between seven and eleven o’clock in the evenings. Everyone was expected to take part. Most members of the guild played around for around twelve hours a day, and a raid required a great deal of planning. They had to lay in provisions and make sure they had enough ammunition and weaponry. The better equipped they were, the greater their chances of beating other guilds in the battle to find the treasure or kill the vampires.



Thursday, October 15, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt three)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

Anders had been exempted from military service because he was registered as his mother’s carer. After a serious herpes infection she had had a drain inserted in her head and she needed nursing for an extended period.

Lene was touched by the care Anders gave his mother. He told her how his mother was faring after her illness. She had changed since the surgical procedure, he said, become more absent-minded, more disorganized and terribly depressed.

Anders had also told Lene about his mother’s unhappy childhood, about his grandmother who went mad and the uncles his mother never wanted him to meet. He told her how self-sacrificing his mother had been when he was growing up, on her own with her two children. But he also criticized her for having lost touch with her relations. He would so much have liked a big family.



Wednesday, October 14, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt two)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

After al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks in America on 11 September 2001 the Progress Party stepped up its rhetoric, in line with world opinion. Muslims were ruthless and dangerous. The Progress Party saw the world as George W. Bush did: us and them.



Tuesday, October 13, 2015

the last book I ever read (One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, excerpt one)

from One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Ǻsne Seierstad:

The two boys learnt to trust themselves early on. From Year 1 at school they went off on their own across the garden, up the lane to the main road, then along to the crossroads where the school bus stopped. In winter, when the polar night descended on northern Norway, it was mostly pitch dark, as neither the lane nor the main road had street lights. One morning Tone was standing at the window with her coffee when she saw a shadow in the early-morning gloom. A huge bull elk was bearing down at top speed on Simon, who was ploughing along, head down, through the squally wind and snow. The elk and the seven-year-old were on course to blunder straight into each other. Tone cried out as she lost them both from sight in the snowy storm. She rushed out in her slippers and yelled.



Monday, October 12, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt ten)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

I promised to take him to a party of “straight people,” kids from my school living in New York. Everyone drank gimlets and the hostess hired an oyster shucker to come up from Baltimore with crates and crates of oysters. The most famous person at the party was the jazz composer Charles Mingus, who was in a fat, paranoid phase. Even so, he talked to us all in his intense, original way. He turned off the music and asked us to listen to the layers of silence. He insisted that total silence didn’t exist and that he could even score all the hums and swishes of the city night. Then the music came back on (it was “My Guy”) and the hostess and I grabbed large wooden ladles from Mexico and held them in front of us like penises and danced our famous spoon dance—you had to be there. We were very drunk.



Sunday, October 11, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt nine)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

I was medically disqualified from the army. The idea that my place would be taken by someone else, perhaps even a gay man too nervous to admit to his “tendencies,” didn’t trouble me in the least. A belief in morality is based on a belief in the group. I distrusted everyone. Hawthorne’s dim view of human nature confirmed mine, although I did not believe in Original Sin, only sin, far too common to be original. Of course I pretended to entertain normal scruples; I didn’t want people to look down on me.



Saturday, October 10, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt eight)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

I could never speak as fast as these editors. The little knowledge I had I wore heavily. It had never occurred to me until now that almost all the news got made and reported by a small elite who’d met each other at a few Ivy League schools.



Friday, October 9, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt seven)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

Maria called me from Chicago to tell me that Paul had killed himself—Paul, the painter I had so much admired when I was at Eton and who’d told me, “Someday you’ll have more freedom than you’ll want.” Maria had heard the story from Paul’s girlfriend, who’d found Maria’s phone number in Paul’s address book. Apparently Paul had moved to the Brooklyn suburb of Sheepshead Bay, where he’d rented the attic in someone’s old wooden house. He’d painted a bit but grown so despondent that he’d thrown himself off the Staten Island ferry. There was talk of organizing a memorial show of his work at the Eton museum.



Thursday, October 8, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt six)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

Late, very late at night, he’d start raving. He’d try to convince me of some absurdity that appealed to him only because it was the opposite of what all right-minded people believed. He’d oppose divorce because it put asunder what God had joined. Yet I was sure his opposition was inspired by the beauty of the word asunder. He wanted the chance to say it, and to say it in the only proper way, with Old Testament fury. Or he’d fulminate against travel and insist that everyone should stay in his own country, nourished by his native soil. He decided that Soviet-style censorship was defensible, even commendable, since people had no need to know what was happening in other lands.

One hot summer night, so late all the neighboring apartment windows were very dark, he decided we should go out in search of jazz. He showered and combed his wet black hair back, tore a new short out of its Brooks package, and put on a perfectly pressed suit. He looked elegant and vulnerable, his eyes edging away from contact and set into a face of exquisite unhealthiness. He smoked as he did everything else, consciously, looking at the cigarette as though he didn’t quite know what it was for, testing it experimentally.



Wednesday, October 7, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt five)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

Ezra Pound was his true Penelope, and even Pound’s criminal politics and weird economics Lou was able to justify when it suited his mood. For Lou, Pound was strategic in any dismissal of Eliot’s absurdly English posturing, and both men rose serenely above the local American battle between the Beats and Academics. Lou couldn’t be an Academic. His fear and hatred of schools forbade that, as well as his contempt for sterile exercises. But the Beats, despite their appealing cult of drugs and Whitmanian sincerity, lacked the cool elegance Lou venerated. The values he really embraced were those of Negro jazz musicians who divided the world into what was square and what was cool. Things labeled cool were highly controlled if sometimes arbitrary and decorative, an expression of a narrow range of feelings: happy-guy exuberance, cerebral noodling, or a foggy but anxious melancholy.

Each of those few times Lou wanted to like someone over fifty, he repeated Pound’s phrase about “old men with beautiful manners.” Only twenty years later did I stumble across the line and realize Pound was mocking the statesmen who brought on World War I. Lou had no sense of irony or history and none of comedy save the grand guignol of his indignation. At about this time, a homosexual magazine, One, began to be published in California. Lou was appalled. “Why should a bunch of criminals be allowed to have a magazine, for chrissake. They might as well let thieves publish The Safecracker’s Quarterly. One, indeed …”



Tuesday, October 6, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt four)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

In the sweaty Chicago night we’d squat bare-chested inside the holds of semis, stacking cartons. Our sweating hands and arms would leave phantom brown prints on the tan cardboard boxes. My partner, a beer-bellied man whose five-o’clock shadow had deepened to midnight by dawn, never spoke to me; I could imagine marrying him, living in a trailer with him, and cooking him meatloaf. On the third night we worked together he finally opened up. He told me that when he was a teenager his father, a young doctor, had died suddenly of a heart attack. No insurance. My partner had been the oldest boy and had gone to work to support his mother and to send the three younger kids through college. “But I got stuck. Now they’re all in professions with nice homes in the suburbs and they’re ashamed of me, don’t like me coming around. So I’m stuck in this shit job.”

We talked about books. He liked Stefan Zweig and Nelson Algren. And he liked Beethoven, especially the symphonies. When he talked about books and music, his flat Midwestern voice (he pronounced milk as “melk” and wash as “warsh”) warmed up, almost as though through the smoked window of his face I could see a young man approach, smile, then go away.



Monday, October 5, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt three)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

William Everett Hunton was one of the first handsome homosexuals I’d ever met, a small, neatly made little guy who would flounce and languish around me but turn gravely masculine around the other law students. Even though he was hoping to reform himself and was quite optimistic about a cure, at least for a while he had been gay, and could still be considered at least a transitional case. Annie and I would sit around his room in the law quad and listen to his adventures, presented as evidence of his depravity but with a suggestion that his scarlet sins, at least, had been mink-linked.

We were alone, he and I, for a moment. He was shaving and dressing and I watched him as a child might, as though I myself didn’t perform these same rites every morning (or in the case of shaving, every third morning). When I told him in which Midwestern city I’d been born, he laughed and said, “But that’s where my patron lives, the real Everett Hunton.”

“Come again?”



Sunday, October 4, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt two)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

We found ourselves in her dormitory room. Like everything else in the art academy, her room had a distinctive odor I’ve never encountered since except once, recently, in the Chanel boutique of a Paris department store. I almost asked the saleswoman what the smell could be, but the most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.



Saturday, October 3, 2015

the last book I ever read (Edmund White's The Beautiful Room is Empty, excerpt one)

from The Beautiful Room is Empty by Edmund White:

Things were simpler, clearer then. On one side were the painters, a few taunted, poor, scrawny kids, and on the other the philistines, the fat-cat majority. Certainly the painters felt justified at striking back at what they called the “boor-zhwah-zee,” but Maria hated all sorts of cruelty, especially to other women and to animals. A little bit later, just a year or two later, and she’d never have insulted that Sunday photographer. She’d have said, “Who knows, maybe he’s a genius in disguise. After all, Rousseau was just a Sunday painter.” She thought some sort of American Revolution would have to break out to equalize wealth, but she prayed it would be bloodless.



Friday, October 2, 2015

the last book I ever read (On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks, excerpt twelve)

from On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks:

My sense of England as “home” took a beating in 1990, when my father died and the house on Mapesbury Road—where I was born and brought up and which I revisited and often stayed in when I returned to England, the house of which every inch was suffused for me with memories and emotions—was sold. I no longer felt I had a place to go back to, and my visits thereafter felt like visits and not like returns to my own country and people.



Thursday, October 1, 2015

the last book I ever read (On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks, excerpt eleven)

from On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks:

In 2006, an aneurysm in Michael’s other leg blocked up, and here again he made no complaints, though he was well aware of the dangers. He had been getting more disabled generally and knew that should he lose the leg or become more bronchitic, Ealon House would no longer be able to care for him. If this happened, he would have to be moved to a nursing home, where he would have no autonomy, identity, or role. Life under these circumstances, he felt, would be meaningless, intolerable. I wonder, then, if he willed himself to die.

The last scene of Michael’s life was played out in a hospital emergency room, waiting for the operation which this time, he thought, would probably take his leg. He was lying on a stretcher when he suddenly raised himself up on an elbow, said, “I’m going outside to have a smoke,” and fell back dead.