Pynchon

"Somewhere further along, she'd been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being-God at play."


December 22, 1999

Ondaatje

"John Robichaux! Playing his waltzes. And I hate to admit it but I enjoyed listening to the clear forms. Every note part of the large curve, so carefully patterned that for the first time I appreciated the possibilities of a mind moving ahead of the instruments in time and waiting with pleasure for them to catch up. I had never been aware of that mechanistic pleasure, that trust."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"She grins. And there is my grin which is my loudest scream ever.

In the water like soft glass. We slide in slowly leaving our clothes by the large stone. Heads skimming along the surface.

As long as I don't hurt you or Jaelin. As long as I don't hurt you or Jaelin, she mimics. Then beginning to imitate the loons and swimming deeper, her head sliding away from me. Below our heads all the evil dark swimming creatures are waiting to brush us into nightmare into heart attack to suck us under into the darkness into the complications. Her loon laugh. The dull star of white water under each of us. Swimming towards the sound of madness."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"The photographs of Billocq. HYDROCEPHALIC. 89 glass plates survive. Look at the pictures. Imagine the mis-shapen man who moved round the room, his grace as he swivelled round his tripod, the casual shot of the dresser that holds the photograph of the whore's baby that she gave away, the plaster Christ on the wall. Compare Christ's hands holding the metal spikes to the badly sewn appendix scar of the thirty year old naked woman he photographed when she returned to the room-- unaware that he had already photographed her baby and her dresser and her crucufix and her rug. She now offering grotesque poses for an extra dollar and Bellocq grim and quiet saying No, just stand there against the wall there that one no keep the petticoat on this time. One snap too quickly catching her scorning him and then waiting, waiting for minutes so she would become self-conscious towards him and the camera and her states, embarrassed at just her naked arms and neck and remembers for the first time in a long while the roads she imagined she could take as a child. And he photographed that.

What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remembering all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand. Then he paid her, packed and she lost her grace. The picture is just a figure against a wall."


December 14, 1999

Ondaatje

"On his last night Webb went to hear Bolden play. Far back, by the door, he stood alone and listened for an hour. He watched him dive into the stories found in the barber shop, his whole plot of song covered with scandal and incident and change. The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story."


December 14, 1999