Second novel

A 90-year-old man is publishing his first novel this year. I read it in the Times. McSweeney's is publishing it. I forget the name. Something about cherries or grapes, I think. He is working on his second novel, the article said.

The Making of Americans

"I write for myself and strangers. No one who knows me can like it.
At least they mostly do not like it that everyone is of a kind of men
and women and I see it. I love it and I write it.'

"I want readers so strangers must do it. Mostly no one knowing me can
like it that I love it that every one is a kind of men and women, that
always I am looking and comparing and classifying of them, always I am
seeing their repeating. Always more and more I love repeating, it may
be irritating to hear from them but always more and more I love it of
them."

That, of course, is Gertrude Stein.

I can read and have read Gertrude Stein, and William Burroughs, and
Herman Melville, and I have relished such moments with a kind of
obsession.

I prefer the two screens simultaneously of Chelsea Girls to virtually
any single-image narrative movie out of Hollywood.

To think one needs to (or even can) understand is antithetical to
pleasure.

What could be more boring than understanding something at first glance?

Echo

The world is going to end in five years. I am constructing crossword puzzles of some wit and elegance. It is more fun than writing my novel. When the end comes, perhaps the cats of the world, turned feral, will learn over centuries how to do crossword puzzles and hold erasable pens. We don't need friends. That's the beauty of it.

THE PROBLEM WITH BIGOTRY

When the gatekeeper of the list
in front of the entire list
asked if I wanted to rejoin the list
anticipating (subconsciously, to be sure, because
that's the way the passive-aggressive, right-hands-don't-know-left-handers do it)
that I would be humbled
or cowed
or otherwise posed in submission,
accepting the historical position of inequality,
the deal was off.
These things do take decades.
Privilege grips so
only rust can matter.

Responsibility, by Grace Paley

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time.

-Grace Paley