Stacey D'Erasmo Quotes.
Music is quicksilver, gossamer; careers are measured in butterfly lifetimes.
‘The Girls,’ by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada.
The much-lauded visual artist Roni Horn got her Master’s in Sculpture from Yale in the Seventies, but in the course of her career she has moved, among other media, from watercolors to photographs to floor-sized installations and mats of poured gold.
I write things in my house, and hopefully there’s a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that’s very different than a performer on stage, where there’s an immediate dance with the audience. It’s incredibly powerful.
I’m embarrassed to reveal that I never went to CBGB’s in the ’80s. I was never cool enough to be a punk, and I wouldn’t have had the stamina, or the discipline, for straight-edge.
Shelley Jackson’s ‘Half Life’ is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.
Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you’re in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.
The knot of intimacy at the center of ‘Ten Thousand Saints’ is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn.
That feeling of being part of a group moving together is very powerful. It feels like it opens up a zone of possibility, a place for another self to form, also a place for a new world to form.
Fiction, at its best, is a radical act of intimacy. It seeks to join, to merge, to know deeply; and, as with intimacy, there is a way in which it cannot be faked.
As readers, we sense when the game is being played for real and when something else is afoot: pride, showmanship, the pursuit of power, self-aggrandizement, revenge, making money. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, but I dislike closing a book with the sense that I’ve been had.
What is the distance between here and there, between now and then, between right and wrong? In Greg Baxter’s pellucid first novel, ‘The Apartment,’ it may be simply the length of a day – but a day in which one travels surprisingly far, literally and figuratively.
In each medium – popular music, literature, and visual art, respectively – the woman has broken form, shed a skin, with each phase of her career, whereas the man has returned to ever-deepening iterations of the sound or sentence or imagery with which he began.
Royalty mostly seem like members of some anachronistic faith, like the Amish, peculiar in gilded buggies.
I don’t go online when I’m writing – that’s the devil’s workshop – but in general, I’m on there as much as any other global citizen.
The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that … and it won’t be what we expect.
I was influenced by big, strong voices – writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.
A performer needs and craves a live audience.
There are more clocks than ever – clocks on computers, on cell phones, on televisions, on any screen available, telling time to the digital second – but they all seem to matter less.
The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend ‘The Third Sex’ an air of scientific authority.
I’m not a parent, but it seems to me the nature of parenting is contingent, full of unexpected challenges – which is one of the wonderful and amazing things about it.
As lightly toned by reality as the women on ‘Sex and the City,’ the bold, soigne characters on ‘The L Word’ suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the entire world is glowing and delectable.
All writers are magpies, right? We’re always stealing bits from different places and then weaving them into our little nest.
The second time is the one we remember, where memory begins. Putting the moments in order is only half the story. What matters is the weight of the moments as they accumulate.
A bit of a theory, more a corner of the eye noticing than an airtight argument: in the course of long artistic careers, women are more likely than men to change form and style, Proteus-like.
I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.
