Thrasher: Skid Row Eskimo/Anthony Apakark Thrasher/1976

11/29/2010

There's an old Eskimo legend that if two people take the same action at the same time it's a sign that something bad will happen. Tommy and I stopped on a piece of ice and we both took a leak at the same time.
"Let's go home," Tommy said, "something bad will happen."
I didn't believe him and we kept on hunting.
About an hour later, when I was trying to hook a muskrat we had shot, I heard Tommy holler. I looked around quickly, and I saw that the hook had caught Tommy, just above his right eye. It had just about pulled it out.
It scared the life out of me, and we turned for home and paddled full blast all the way, some five or six miles. That incident made me a believer in legendary warning signs./pg 43

I wandered from one hotel to another, looking for a drink, sleeping where I could. Most nights it was a little burnt-up shack we called the Sugar Shack. I went there the first time with an Indian girl I met outside the liquor store on 97th Street. She was with the other prostitutes, and winos, waiting for the doors of the liquor store to open at ten o'clock. Her name was Riverbank Mary. Everybody was fucking her down by the riverbank./pg 91

I met many women in Edmonton. Once I met two girls, one Indian and one white. The white girl was Dorothy. She was wild at lovemaking. The Indian girl told me that she was a nymphomaniac, and Dorothy said the Indian girl, Sylvia, was a dirty prostitute. They argued over me, but I satisfied them both the same night./pg 98

We went and bought Cutex and glue at a drug store down the street. The man handed us the Cutex out of a big cardboard box of bottles he had sitting right there on the front counter. Mary and I walked down a dark road and she got a bag and poured some of that stuff into it./pg 108


I laughed at what I saw, but deep down inside I felt sick. Those homosexuals were mixing it up in there./pg 126

I couldn't even escape it when I attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. One night this big half-breed guy came to a meeting and I saw him go into the washroom at the back of the room. Soon a lot of guys were filing in there. They were taking turns with the half-breed./pg 126

The jetliner. It was like a prison without bars. Like one of those ships the niggers in P.A. told me used to carry slaves from Black Africa, only this one sailed the skies and not the seas. All the seats closest to the portholes were filled with prisoners like myself. Fort-eight of us, we were headed for institutions in British Columbia on transfers from penitentiaries across Canada./ pg 139

Democracy/Joan Didion/1984

11/??/2010

In fact they did run into each other.
Here or there.
Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other's presence or untoward interest in each other's activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.
Quick, alive.
Something to think about late at night.
Something private.
She always looked for him.
She did not really expect to see him but she never got off a plane in certain parts of the world without wondering where he was, how he was, what he might be doing./pg 92

By the time I got back to Los Angeles a congressional subpoena had been issued for Jack Lovett and the clip of Inez dancing on the St. Regis roof had made its first network appearance. I have no idea why this particular clip was the single most repeated image of a life as exhaustively documented as Inez Victor's, but it was, and over those few days in January of 1976 this tape took on a life quite independent of the rather unexceptional moment it recorded, sometimes running for only a second or two, cut so short that it might have been only a still photograph; other times presenting itself as an extended playlet, reaching a dramatic curtain as the aide said "Hold two elevators" and Harry Victor said "I'm just a private citizen" and Inez said "Marvelous" and band played "Isn't It Romantic."/pg 231

White Noise/Don DeLillo/1985

11/14/2010

We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic good and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette as I introduced them.
"This is the new austerity," he said. "Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort."/pg 18

We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection./pg 170

"Room behaviour. The point of rooms is that they're inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave on way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a roon is to agree to a certain kind of behavior."/pg 306

Closer/Dennis Cooper/1989

10/12/2010

John had the punk and George lie side by side on the bed. he crawled over their bodies while they masturbated, examining each in great detail and making comparisons. Below the neck they were just about even: smooth, washed-out, skeletal. Facewise the punk wasn't much. His eyes were drab, his nose had been broken, his ears were caked with wax, his skull was shaped like an egg. He would have been nothing without punk. John sympathized at first. Then he realized he'd better not care or he'd never get hard enough./pg 8

Alex is slumped in his wheelchair. "I was asleep for a week. When I woke up I..." He lifts the front of his T-shirt. Using a finger, he draws a jagged line across his stomach. "Below that's the vulture meat," he says. "Go ahead, kick it or shoot it or something."/pg 82

I don't know what to say. We're in bed. George has passed out or gone to sleep. His ass looks like somebody threw a grenade at it. He said he fell on some glass. I covered it with a blanket as soon as he dozed off./pg 117

Jim: A Life With AIDS/June Callwood/1988

9/26/2010

For a while only one funeral home in Toronto -- Humphreys -- would bury a person with AIDS. Those of the gay community who attended the AIDS funerals became experts at finding their way around that funeral home. They knew where to find the coffee maker and where the extra sugar was stored. Most of them had only one suit appropriate for funerals, so even the wardrobes became familiar./pg 224

Tracer/Frederick Barthelme/1985

9/??/2010

We drove for forty minutes to a town called Lullaby that had one street that was about half-and-half abandoned and not-quite-abandoned buildings -- a drug store, a gas station with yellow globes on the pumps -- then we ran into a beach and the road swerved along the water. In a couple of minutes things opened up and that was it -- buildings on one side of the road, Gulf on the other. On the beach side there were a couple of jetties and a restaurant with a neon bird for a sign./pg 8

Painted Desert/Frederick Barthelme/1995

9/10/2010

We started at a local computer store, a big discounter like CompUSA but with another name. All the people in there seemed peculiar, just off normal -- wrong size, wrong color, wrong shape, wrong posture/pg 52

"I'll try the Net," she said, logging off CIS and running her Internet front end./pg 239

Ratner's Star/Don DeLillo/1976

9/11/2010

"I never claw without uttering sounds. Otherwise what's it all for? Never underestimate the value of clawing. But never simply claw. As you claw, utter whatever sounds seem appropriate. Nonverbal sounds work best, I find. Otherwise why bother? This is a cruel brand of work."
"Why are you digging and clawing? Why do you claw?"
"Let me see if I'm up to answering that question. There are any number of ways I might reply. Could say the larvae are tastier the deeper I dig. Could answer naturalistically and say I am creating a shelter from the elements. Could, if I cared to, make a series of enigmatic remarks concerning man's need for metaphysical burrows that lead absolutely nowhere. But I believe I'll stick to the answer I gave before you asked the question."/pg 90

Gradually the elevator slowed down, steadying its descent. Then it fitted into its housing, a sort of armored toy-box located on a platform about a dozen feet off the ground. The riders stepped out and walked down makeshift wooden stairs to the very bottom of the vast excavation. An awful lot of trouble, the boy thought, just to fulfill a concept.
A short distance away was a series of cubicles for working and sleeping. Larger units included a first-aid room, a kitchen, a primitive toilet, some field telephones. Everything was set on a slightly curved surface of clay and rock and there was nothing above but darkness. Oil drums, wooden crates and natural debris were set around the cubicles to keep dislodged rocks from bouncing in. A generator droned nearby. Water dripped, splashed and occasionally cascaded in the distance. It was cool down here but not uncomfortably so. The smell of earth was firm and gripping, mineral-rich, and humid air could be felt on the tongue like the taste of a lead penny./pg 283

Anagrams/Lorrie Moore/1986

8/28/2010

I got an abortion. Later I suffered from a brief heterosexual depression and had trouble teaching my class: I would inadvertently skip the number three when counting and I would instead call out, "Front-two-four-five, Side-two-four-five." Actually that happened only once, but later, when I was living in New York, it seemed to make a funny story./pg 38

Gravity's Rainbow/Thomas Pynchon/1973

8/??/2010

There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries -- since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air./pg 407

"Do you find it a little schizoid," aloud now to all the Achtfaden fronts and backs, "breaking a flight profile up into segments of responsibility? It was half bullet, half arrow. It demanded this, we didn't. So. Perhaps you used a rifle, a radio, a typewriter."/pg 453

Less Than Zero/Bret Easton Ellis/1985

8/16/2010

I decide to bring Blair to Daniel's party. I drive to her house in Beverly Hills and she's wearing a pink hat and a blue miniskirt and yellow gloves and sunglasses and she tells me that at Fred Segal today someone told her that she should be in a band. And she mentions something about starting one, maybe something a little New Wave. I smile and say that sounds like a good idea, not sure if she's being sarcastic, and I grip the steering wheel a little tighter./pg 54

The Selected Stories/Gordon Lish/1996

7/30/2010

I like talking about people sitting on toilets. It shows up in the bulk of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at stories I have had printed to see that I am telling the truth. People on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person on a toilet in it, forget the name that's signed as author -- no one but me could have written the thing. Indeed it is inconceivable to me that I didn't./pg 79

That story ends here. But this one goes on for a bit./pg 37