A Minor Chorus Quotes

Death itself wasn't nearly as devastating as what the human drive to stay alive causes us to accumulate over time … the world devastates us without end and still we are hungry and hungrier. What dazzling logic.

What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?

Maybe early on I determined I didn't have to live … I just had to be alive.

write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property

Graduate school is hardly the place to end white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism.

Rather than change the world, a novel could index a longing for something else, for a different arrangement of bodies, feelings, and environments in which human flourishing wasn't inhibited for the marginalized, which seemed as urgent an act of rebellion as any.

What if I wrote something that sounded like dozens of people in protest?

How instead to make a novel into a bomb? How to plant a novel in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation? How to write sentences that go tick, tick, tick?

Could a place have a soul?

I write because I've read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I've loved and been loved. I want to find out what "we" or "us" I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

I asked Micheal if he’d ever felt empty, like something was missing, to which he said emptiness wasn’t something to run from. We all begin with emptiness, he argued: an empty name, an empty house, an empty life. Mine is a life of beginnings, he said. Every morning I start over.

For all he knew, I was a small town he could get lost inside of; for all I knew, he was a cliff I could hurl myself from.

There was a lot I didn't know, but I knew that with total certainty.

The late summer sun was already quite low in the sky as I continued driving. It was red, like an apple. I was a red man. My longing was red. My heart was a ripe fruit.

They were boys who knew only how to fail at boyhood … It was like an ethnographic spectacle.

Something inside me dilated like a pupil at the sight of a shame-drenched man.

If anything would save two Cree boys from the throes of a world that wasn't built for them it would be love and little else.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah? Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff. Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

In the German Middle Ages, too, singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under this same Dionysian impulse. In these dancers of St. John and St. Vitus, we rediscover the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their prehistory in Asia Minor, as far back as Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea. There are some who, from obtuseness or lack of experience, turn away from such phenomena as from “folk-diseases,” with contempt or pity born of the consciousness of their own “healthy-mindedness.” But of course such poor wretches have no idea how corpselike and ghostly their so-called “healthy-mindedness” looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers roars past them.

In E-CENT counselling, we teach our clients to explore the stories they are living, which mainly come from their family of origin. Even some novelists understand this process, as illustrated by Donna Tartt, writing about the family of Charlotte Cleve: “…the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history – repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before… … (T)hese family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruellest and most random disasters … were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth”. Donna Tartt, 2003. The Little Friend, London: Bloomsbury. Pages 3-4.

I now admit, with something of an apology, that I made my first appearance at the Copa Club in August of 1953 with the secret opinion that I was doing something slightly disreputable. I think I expected every member of the audience to be drunk, and that all chorus girls led scarlet lives. But I soon learned that life upon the wicked stage wasn't so wicked after all. I found that most entertainers were pretty average, hardworking citizens, and many of them simply went home to a husband or wife and children. They were often civic-minded, voted in elections, observed traffic laws, helped old ladies across the street, went to church, and gave innumerable benefit performances for no pay. The public only heard about the prodigals who were in the minority, as the virtues of the others simply weren't very interesting. Today, it makes me laugh to think that I was such a great moralist, and often branded as a questionable commodity myself, that I was so abundantly guilty of being a prude.

Write poems, eat ass, & dismantle private property.

On November 15, 1977, Barthes wrote this in his Mourning Diary: “I am either lacerated or ill at ease / and occasionally subject to gusts of life.” My hypothesis on the morning of August 6 was this: a novel is a gust of life from another world. August 6, midnight. I tossed my body at a stranger as if he were a gust of life. August 7, dawn. Googled: reasons to live. Approximately nine billion results. Googled: how to write a novel. Eight hundred million results. That was almost a trillion arguments against death.

Love, he realized, can be oppressive simply because it illuminates everything one has turned their back on.

much of my adolescence was spent estimating how much or little of myself I would have to render invisible in order not to gravely expose my otherness.

We fucked again and then another time, both agreeing to make with our bodies a cathedral of distraction.

What seems to be resonant with everyone I interviewed is the belief that we have to tell our stories, that storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely.

A common enemy, in other words, is another name for social cohesion.

I was struck, though I didn’t mention it, by this “we,” a pronoun as vast and emotional as history. Lena, on account of having been on the rez her whole life, could marshal this collective voice. She was one of many in a chorus that sang of flourishing and grief.

The other day, he told me, it occurred to him that the anger he directed at his son was, in actuality, anger at himself, for failing to open up space for his son to experiment and make mistakes and challenge the adults around him.

When I was growing up, everyone around me was in a relationship. Some of the couples in my family had been together for decades. No one was single, and if they were, they were treated with circumspection. Loneliness was a curse, something to be avoided at all costs. I’ve always felt desperate to be in love, even as a closeted teenager, especially as a closeted teenager.

guarded each other’s peace and solitude when we did come together, which is Rilke’s trusted definition of love.

A fetish is a fetish because of its aura of unattainability. What if part of me refused love as much as I ached for it? What if I wanted to destroy myself as much as I wanted to be saved?

Remember when that professor told me that I was lucky to be able to write from lived experience, that that made me more valuable on the job market these days? I asked. He said it with such nonchalance and exactitude. I walked away. I didn’t want to cause a commotion, but I wish I would’ve said, Do you know what you’re saying to me? That my suffering is an economic privilege?

closeness with a queerer notion of motherhood. I was mothered by biological kin as well as by friends and lovers and strangers and myself. This was what I suppose the writer Maggie Nelson means by the “democratization of the maternal function,” a more egalitarian distribution of the labor of caretaking, less a gendered burden and more so a collective undertaking that is reciprocal. We are both caring and cared for.

Something I began thinking about in your class is that writing is fundamentally a social act. I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved. I want to find out what “we” or “us” I can walk into or build a roof over. To hold hands with others, really. To be less alone.

All I'm good for is love, I think.

Ending the Year in Praise Praise the Lord! Praise God in his heavenly dwelling; praise him in his mighty heaven! Praise him for his mighty works; praise his unequaled greatness! Praise him with a blast of the trumpet; praise him with the lyre and harp! . . . Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:1-3, 6 What a way to end the year—praising the Lord for his mighty works, his unequaled greatness. This psalm, also called the last hallelujah, invites us to join the praises to God in the holy place. The praise is not half-hearted; it is full-force praise with musical instruments—tambourine, stringed instruments, the lyre, the cymbals—and dancing, praise from everyone. When we offer God praise, we’re doing what we were created for, even if we’re not the best musician or dancer. All of us can raise our voices singing hymns, choruses, and new songs to the Lord. How has God blessed you, your family, friends, or church this year? What mighty works has he accomplished? What progress have you made in an area in which you’ve struggled? What prayers has God answered? What new attributes or aspects of God have you discovered or experienced in the past year? Lift up your voice or whatever instrument you play, and praise the Lord for these specific things as you pray this psalm aloud.   LORD, I join those in your heavenly dwelling to worship you for your mighty works. I praise your unequaled greatness. I praise you with my whole heart for how you’ve sustained me in the year that is ending, for your faithfulness, love, and provision. Thank you for how you’ll be with me each day in the new year. Let everything that lives sing praises to the Lord!   TO THE EAR OF GOD EVERYTHING HE CREATED MAKES EXQUISITE MUSIC, AND MAN JOINED IN THE PAEAN OF PRAISE UNTIL HE FELL, THEN THERE CAME IN THE FRANTIC DISCORD OF SIN. THE REALIZATION OF REDEMPTION BRINGS MAN BY WAY OF THE MINOR NOTE OF REPENTANCE BACK INTO TUNE WITH PRAISE AGAIN. Oswald Chambers (1874-1917)

began. A chief element in positioning the new Barbie was her promotion. In 1984, after a campaign that featured "Hey There, Barbie Girl" sung to the tune of "Georgy Girl," Mattel launched a startling series of ads that toyed with female empowerment. Its slogan was "We Girls Can Do Anything," and its launch commercial, driven by an irresistibly upbeat soundtrack, was a sort of feminist Chariots of Fire. Responding to the increased number of women with jobs, the ad opens at the end of a workday with a little girl rushing to meet her business-suited mother and carrying her mother's briefcase into the house. A female voice says, "You know it, and so does your little girl." Then a chorus sings, "We girls can do anything." The ad plays with the possibility of unconventional gender roles. A rough-looking Little Leaguer of uncertain gender swaggers onscreen. She yanks off her baseball cap, her long hair tumbles down, and—sigh of relief—she grabs a particularly frilly Barbie doll. (The message: Barbie is an amulet to prevent athletic girls from growing up into hulking, masculine women.) There are images of gymnasts executing complicated stunts and a toddler learning to tie her shoelaces. (The message: Even seemingly minor achievements are still achievements.) But the shot with the most radical message takes place in a laboratory where a frizzy-haired, myopic brunette peers into a microscope. Since the seventies, Barbie commercials had featured little girls of different races and hair colors, but they were always pretty. Of her days in acting school, Tracy Ullman remarked in TV Guide that she was the "ugly kid with the brown hair and the big nose who didn't get [cast in] the Barbie commercials." With "We Girls," however, Barbie extends her tiny hand to bookish ugly ducklings; no longer a snooty sorority rush chairman, she is "big-tent" Barbie.

Some boys are as fleeting as the memory of rainwater during a wet spring. Many of us are relics of an impossible future, too drenched in the past to gesture to anything but loss. We are questions first and foremost, then children. Which means we are half-truths; we are where the boundary of the real intersects with that of the unreal. Children of an invisible war are essentially ghosts.

Lower Third demoed “The London Boys,” which they considered a standout song, but Hatch and Pye turned it down at their weekly sales meeting. According to Hatch, the main reason was not the downbeat subject matter or the references to pill popping but that “it takes too long to get going. It would never make a single.” Its replacement was far more concise, with a simple three-chord chorus once again lifted shamelessly from “Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.” But while “Can’t Help Thinking about Me” thieves exactly the same three-chord trick as “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” it makes far better use of it, with that punchy chorus allied with a subtle verse whose minor-key chords perfectly match the foreboding lines of a “question time that says I brought dishonor.

What this meant was that I was a gay man listening to a gay man who hadn't been listened to.

Suppose a body were trapped between two parentheses, I thought, made out to be an aside, a distraction, a trace of another narrative possibility. Would you set it free, set it loose on the world?

That felt as inevitable as literature.

A mother is a library seconds before the tornado hits.

Still, I loved my mother with the fortitude of a line break.

sometimes when I have sex it feels like I'm a photograph a man takes off the wall and puts back somewhere else and for the rest of the night I feel a little crooked Imao

My novel, then, would be a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility.

I was interested in how a singular voice, when heard from a sociological distance, implicated a larger population, in how the autobiographical was rarely an individualistic mode; all of its wonder and devastation was social.

the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daisies and singing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s Messiah?6 Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. We’d just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.

I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

I was going to make something that was the opposite of a country: beautiful.

In a matter of days, I confirmed a number of interviewees, all of whom were amiable and eager to participate, a symptom, to my mind, of an urge to perform the novelistic as a kind of abstract moral value (an urge I found relatable). During the phone calls, it occurred to me that so few of us are given permission to theorize about our lives, so many are bound to the register of everyday chitchat. It made me wonder: If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one’s mouth, would it taste like the earth?