Words&Dirt

“Implausible truth can serve one better than implausible fiction.” ––Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, pg. 49

In this novel’s table of instructions, Julio Cortázar states that Hopscotch “consists of many books, but two books above all.”  The reader is given a choice: read the book in normal fashion and stop at the end of Chapter 56 (in which case a large portion of the book will remain unread), or jump between […]

“‘We’d all like to have a millenary kingdom, a kind of Arcadia where it would probably be much more unhappy than here, because it’s not a question of happiness, Doppelgänger, but where there wouldn’t be any more of this dirty game of substitutions that occupies us for fifty or sixty years, and where we could […]

“Emmanuèle lay down on the floor of the truck, face down and wailing, and Oliveira put his feet on her behind and settled himself comfortably on the bench.  Hopscotch is played with a pebble that you move with the tip of your toe.  The things you need: a sidewalk, a pebble, a toe, and a […]

Amidst the excitement of learning a new skill, it can be easy to forget that the acquisition of novel perspectives and behaviors is just the beginning.  The rest is repetition––reinforcement.  Physically, our bodies need time to generate neural maps that initiate, guide, and solidify unfamiliar motions.  Psychologically, competence can only be reached by revisiting an […]

This book’s title might connote a tense battlefield, with ruler-brandishing teachers firmly entrenched against the remonstrations of an angry citizenry.  But, like any serious student of history, author Dana Goldstein knows such simplistic images belie the messy truth about wars, which is that they are rife with broken borders, double crossings, unexpected victories, and crushing […]

“All pain attacks me with a double-edged sword: it makes me aware as never before of the divorce between my ego and my body (and its falseness, its consoling invention) and at the same time it brings my body close to me, dresses me in it as pain.  I feel it to be more mine […]

“‘Why fool ourselves?  It’s impossible to live with a puppeteer who works with shadows, a moth-tamer.  Someone who spends his time making pictures out of the iridescent rings the oil makes on the Seine is unacceptable.  Me, with my padlocks and keys that I make out of the air, me, writing with smoke.  I’ll save […]

“The real dream was located in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake; he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, eliminate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didn’t mean a thing, locate himself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would […]

“Now he realized that in his highest moments of desire he had not known how to stick his head into the crest of the wave and pass through the fabulous crash of his blood.  Loving La Maga had been a sort of rite from which one no longer expected illumination; words and acts had succeeded […]