perfect hearts press

The children of the gentrifying generation are traumatized not by their parents’ neglect but by their parents’ consumerism. They are another in the ceaseless parade of objects their parents acquire in order to prove their moral and ethical superiority to their parents

I think maybe the worst thing I could have done would’ve been to get a well-paying job at a young age that I then got locked into because I got used to a higher standard of living. I think moving out at seventeen and living on so little meant I got used to a low standard of living and I know if I had to, I could always go back to that.

Pure masculinity, which I have been exposed to a lot in life, is tedious and inadequate. It’s great to listen to men talk about sports or fights or war or even hunting sometimes, but the presence of the other, the presence of art and beauty, which crude masculinity seems to discount, is essential.

Quick confession: my dad invented the genre of radio commercial where a kid wins a spelling bee by spelling Quality with letters that make up the name of a business and I’m sad about it but in spite of hardship, I’ve had my fair share of innocent thoughts in my life. Here’s one right now: being warm can be fun sometimes but other times not so much.

When I was nineteen, I went to a yearlong course in creative writing. There, some simple rules dominated, and the most important one dealt with quality: if a sentence was bad, you removed it. If a scene was bad, you removed it. The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be? I then did the same thing with every other rule. Show, don’t tell? What happens if you do tell, really try to tell EVERYTHING, and don’t give a damn about subtext? Something else happens, something you can’t control. No matter how explicitly you describe a person or a scene, there is always a shadow in the text, a kind of tone or sound, and that tone or sound is the important thing. When I freed myself from these restrictions and started to insist on quantity instead of quality, my texts started to get long. Not necessarily good, but long! With a big canvas, there are possibilities that don’t exist with a smaller one.

The male/female binary floats throughout the system of higher education, the creative writing program and postwar fiction alike: one can point… to the distinction between feminized “caring” institutions (e.g., the hospital) and the masculinized “disciplinary” ones (e.g., the army). The school is neither a “feminine” nor a “masculine” institution per se but it is rather the scene of countless micro-struggles between “maternal” love and punitive “paternal” judgment as two different forms of institutional authority.

Camps and universities are natural subjects for the bourgeois novel of the moment because they have become expensive ways of replicating privilege, of falling in with the right sort of people, of learning the prerequisite social codes.

Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.