A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays And Arguments Quotes
"College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home."
"Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light."
"My flirtation with tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive math than it did with athletic talent."
"I was at my very best in bad conditions."
"The wind had a personality, a (poor) temper, and, apparently, agendas."
"Most people in Philo didn’t comb their hair because why bother."
"The sound of wind had become, for me, silence."
"The terrain’s strengths are also its weaknesses."
"I found I felt best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved corners."
"Tornadoes, for me, were a transfiguration."
"Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration."
"The only time I ever got caught in what might have been an actual one was in June ’78 on a tennis court at Hessel Park in Champaign, where I was drilling one afternoon with Gil Antitoi."
"This was the sort of stuff that went through my head when I drilled."
"A kind of fugue-state opens up inside you where your concentration telescopes toward a still point and you lose awareness of your limbs and the soft shush of your shoe’s slide."
"The air temperature dropped so fast you could feel your hairs rise."
"I could not tell you why we kept hitting."
"The air always smells of mowed grass before a bad storm."
"Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses."
"But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious."
"Television does a lot of our predatory human research for us."
"We can see Them; They can’t see Us. We can relax, unobserved, as we ogle."
"Lonely people are usually lonely not because of hideous deformity or odor or obnoxiousness."
"Joe Briefcase fears and loathes the strain of the special self-consciousness which seems to afflict him only when other real human beings are around, staring, their human sense-antennae abristle."
"But lonely people, at home, alone, still crave sights and scenes, company."
"This charge turns out to be untrue, but it’s untrue for interesting reasons."
"We’re not voyeurs here at all. We’re just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone: E Unibus Pluram."
"One reason fiction writers seem creepy in person is that by vocation they really are voyeurs."
"It’s undeniable, nevertheless, that watching television is pleasurable."
"People in the U.S.A. watch so much television basically because it’s fun."
"I watch for fun, most of the time, and that at least 51% of the time I do have fun when I watch."
"Television’s greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving."
"The ads succeeded as parodies of how oily and Satanic car commercials are."
"The ironic tone of TV’s self-reference means that no one can accuse TV of trying to put anything over on anybody."
"The assumptions behind early postmodern irony, on the other hand, were still frankly idealistic: it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a revelation of imprisonment led to freedom."
"Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage."
"The ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny."
"The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy."
"As a steady diet, though, it can’t help but render my own reality less attractive."
"The next real literary 'rebels' in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching."
"Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval."
"You can always trust a man with multiple pens."
"An excellent heifer from a profile standpoint."
"Here we have a low-volume heifer but with exceptional mass in the rear quarter."
"Certainly the most extreme heifer out here in terms of frame to depth."
"Illinois farmers call their farms ‘operations,’ rarely ‘farms’ and never ‘spreads.’"
"We do this for pride," she says. This is more like it. Pride, care, selfless expense."
"Midwesterners lack a certain cunning. Under stress they look like lost children."
"The State Fair here is For-Us. Self-consciously so. Not For-Me or -You."
"The faces in this sea of faces are like the faces of children released from their rooms."
"The real Spectacle that draws us here is Us."
"I’ve never before realized that ‘cacophony’ was onomatopoeic: the noise of the Poultry Bldg. is cacophonous and scrotum-tightening and totally horrible."
"We come up to work, see some folks. Drink a beer. Bring our own goddamn food. Mother packs a hamper."
"I can’t go in there. Listen to the untold thousands of sharp squawking beaks in there, I say."
"A neat inversion of the East-Coast’s summer withdrawal."
"Governor Edgar’s state spirit rhetoric at the Main Gate’s ribbon rings true."
"Why pay money to cause something to occur you will be grateful to survive?"
"I lose my nerve, in my very last moment at the Fair—I recall my childhood’s serial nightmare of being swung or whipped in an arc that threatens to come full circle."
"David Lynch really gives much of a shit about whether his reputation is rehabilitated or not. The impression I get from rewatching his movies and from hanging around his latest production is that he doesn’t, much."
"A recent homicide in Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian."
"For me, Lynch’s movies’ deconstruction of this weird 'irony of the banal' has affected the way I see and organize the world."
"Lynch’s movies are indeed—in all sorts of ways, some more interesting than others—'sick.'"
"The big problem is that her eyes are too opaque and her face too set and rigid to allow her to communicate effectively without dialogue."
"This is a man with every button on his shirt buttoned and highwater pants: it’s like the only thing missing is a pocket protector."
"The experience taught me a valuable lesson. I learned I would rather not make a film than make one where I don’t have final cut."
"Lynch’s passionate inwardness is refreshingly childlike, but I notice that very few of us choose to make small children our friends."
"In the painting, what’s moving is that the text of the note is superimposed such that parts of the mother’s head obscure the words."
"Lynch’s loyalty to actors and his homemade, co-op-style productions make his oeuvre a veritable pomo-anthill of interfilm connections."
"It has been said that the admirers of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari are usually painters, or people who think and remember graphically. This is a mistaken conception." - Paul Rotha
"Certainly plenty of critics have observed, with Kael, that in Lynch’s movies 'There’s very little art between you and the filmmaker’s psyche… because there’s less than the usual amount of inhibition.'"
"Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and 'personal expression' is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer."
"The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate."
"In fact, Lynch is neither—though nor is he any kind of genius of visual coding or tertiary symbolism or anything. What he is is a weird hybrid blend of classical Expressionist and contemporary postmodernist, an artist whose own 'internal impressions and moods' are (like ours) an olla podrida of neurogenic predisposition and phylogenic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop-cultural iconography—in other words, Lynch is sort of G. W. Pabst with an Elvis ducktail."
"You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard."
"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage."
"I dont know whether you are like me in these regards or not… though from the characterizations and moral structures in the U.S. movies that do well at the box-office I deduce that there must be rather a lot of Americans who are exactly like me."
"Playing two professional singles matches on the same day is unheard of, except in Qualies."
"The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic."
"The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be."
"I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh."
"No matter what I do I cannot escape my own essential and newly unpleasant Americanness."
"Jet Skis are the mosquitoes of Caribbean ports, annoying and irrelevant and apparently always there."
"I take a certain unkind comfort in this as I watch blond guys with washboard stomachs and sunglasses on fluorescent cords buzz around making hieroglyphs of foam."
"I am tired of Jet Skis already and have never even been on a Jet Ski."
"It's a case of mildly enjoyable annoyance rather than the terrified loathing I feel for Mr. Dermatitis."
"In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction."
"This despair reaches its peak in port, at the rail, looking down at what I can’t help being one of."
"Whether up here or down there, I am an American tourist."
"The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn’t that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all."
"The hypnotist’s boredom and hostility are not only undisguised, they are incorporated kind of ingeniously into the entertainment itself."