How Literature Saved My Life Read Online Free PDF

banality of nonfiction (the literalness of ‘facts,’ ‘truth,’ ‘reality’), turns that banality inside out, and thereby makes nonfiction a staging area for the investigation of any claim of facts and truth, an extremely rich theater for investigating the most serious epistemological and existential questions: What’s ‘true’? What’s knowledge? What’s ‘fact’? What’s memory? What’s self? What’s other? I want a nonfiction that explores our shifting, unstable, multiform, evanescent experience in and of the world.”
Real life
    D AVID FOSTER WALLACE came to like country music by imagining that the singer of each song was actually singing about him/herself. Many country songs were thus transfigured for Wallace into the battle of a self against itself. When Patsy Cline sings “I’m crazy for loving you,” it’s a statement of self-loathing. Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” is self-indictment. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night.” Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind.” Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Come On, Come On.” Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places.”
    Kurt Cobain wore a T-shirt with the album cover of “outsider” musician Daniel Johnston’s
Hi, How Are You?
on it. It’s as if Johnston—bipolar, schizophrenic—has found a way to hot-wire his feelings directly into his tape recorder. He presents zero façade, only the inscape of his tortured self. The music, raw beyond raw, is the very definition of lo-fi. Emerson: “The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.” Johnston never had any arrows to begin with. He has always had only himself and a microphone.
    In “River,” “Blue,” and “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell opens a map of pain, regret, and an ego trying to stitch itself back together. She wrote these songs while traveling in Europe after a bad breakup with Graham Nash. The nakedness also manifests itself in herstark instrumentation.
Blue
is the sound of Mitchell healing, though there are still signs of blood in the wounds.
    On an orange Post-it note attached to the upper right corner of my computer screen is Denis Johnson’s admittedly melodramatic advice
Write yourself naked, from exile, and in blood
.

2

LOVE IS A LONG, CLOSE SCRUTINY

    In which I characterize love as a religion w/ fallible gods
.
     
Negotiating against ourselves
    T wo OF THE ACTORS John Cameron Mitchell auditioned for his film
Shortbus
were boyfriends. Mitchell suggested that they improvise: meeting for the first time, one is a former child star doing research to play a prostitute in a TV movie, and the other is a real prostitute. One person’s goal is to find out how to play this role, and the other person’s goal is to have sex. The improv was going well (one actor was talking about his child stardom, and the other was portraying a drug-addicted street hustler), and Mitchell thought the scene might actually become sexual. They were friends of Mitchell’s, but he nevertheless found it nerve-racking—just the two of them and him in a room. The two friends did indeed start having sex, and Mitchell quickly grew bored, because the goal had been reached. Sex in and of itself wasn’t interestingto Mitchell, or, rather, “for porn, good sex might be interesting to watch because you can project stuff onto it, but what I was looking for in this film was bad sex, because it’s revealing and funny. So I whispered to one of them, ‘You need to come as soon as possible.’ And to the other I said, ‘If he touches your left nipple, think of your mother.’ And then I said, ‘Continue.’ ”
Love is a long, close scrutiny
    I N O TTO P REMINGER ’ S
Laura
(my wife’s name is still
Laurie
), a body is discovered in the apartment of Manhattan socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). The corpse is at first assumed to be Hunt, since the body was dressed in her clothes and the deceased’s