Ten Quotes on Writing, Courtesy of Barbara Jane Reyes

Your mission, folksies, is to find and post ten quotes on writing. I'm supposed to tag someone, but in the interests of spreading love and knowledge, I tag everyone, just like Barb did.

I dedicate the last two quotes to "experimentalism," and "high editorial standards." May the privileged editors and writers who adhere to these false religions be stricken with severe and uncontrollable flatulence, followed by insatiable itching on both ears.

Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.
--Plato, The Republic

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
--Ernest Hemingway

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.
--Sylvia Plath

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.
--Mark Twain, in a letter to Orion Clemens, March 1878.

A writer's life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don't have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection - unless you lie - in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.
--Harold Pinter, from his 2005 Nobel Prize lecture.

I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.
--June Jordan, from the essay "For the Sake of People's Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us," which appears in her books On Call and Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan.

"Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace."
--James Baldwin

"A poetry articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record."
-Denise Levertov

"The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek - it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language - all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas."
--Toni Morrison, from her 1993 Nobel Prize lecture.

"I am glad that my contemporaries and the younger ones that came after who are all my friends, most everybody in letters, Chicano-Latino letters in this country somehow have touched my life or I have touched them, they are all my friends, they are my relatives. And I embrace them and I love them and I want success for all of them. I hurt and I pain for some of them because I somehow have a different understanding of the system and the brutality of it that I know they will get eventually sucked up and they'll be writing for an editor in New York who is dictating and demanding the changes without any sensitivity at all to the culture, to the trends, to anything. And so we are still caught up in their definition of good writing. But being the ideal dreamer that I am, I still have hopes that someday it'll be better."
-raúlrsalinas, from "Una Plática con Raúl Salinas: An Interview by Ben Olguín and Louis Mendoza," 1994. Collected in raulrsalinas and the Jail Machine: My Weapon Is My Pen, Louis Mendoza, ed.

Big and Tall REPOST!

A repost for y'all:

This blog entry, believe it or not, was published in a small Tasmanian literary journal called Famous Reporter, #31, from November 2005. Google your little hearts out if you want a paper copy...

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March 9, 2005.

Hey Hey! I'm TALL, Not Big.

Shopping for a suit over the weekend, I discovered an area of Syms where the clothes are for those of us of the…ahem…larger persuasion. The section?

Portly.

You know, I think I'd rather shop in a section called "Fatasses" then anywhere called "Portly." I refuse to be portly. When I think of ports, I think of places where you dock ships. I'm a big dude, but you can't moor an oil tanker on me.

At least with a Fatass section, or as they are euphemistically called, "Big and Tall," you kinda know where you stand...everything is marked with multiples of XL instead of the superfluous S, M, or L. No need to separate the portlies from the non-portlies. In the big-and-tall section, everyone has a shot at superstardom.

This is my little snapshot of life shopping in big-and-talls.

First of all, I truly don't understand the idea calling something "Big and Tall." Come on now. The vast (and I do mean, VAST) majority of people who walk into a big-and-tall are there for being big, not tall.

And dig this. The most popular big and tall store is called Casual Male, a place I know quite well. I went into the one in Nanuet and was horrified (not surprised though) to find nothing but horizontal-striped polo shirts, and the navy blue Dockers to match. I assure you, there is nothing casual about a fat man standing uncomfortably in horizontal stripes.

Luckily, not every store is fashion-challenged. Indeed, when you walk into these places, you are immediately fooled into a sense of belonging. It is soon squashed of course. "Hey," you think, "these clothes look nice! Perhaps I'm not as portly as everyone seems to think I am. Why, just observe this mannequin"….and you foolishly make your way behind the damn thing and discover, of course, that the 2X button-down is too big for the normal-sized dummy, and they've pinned the garment back to it like a sail. You don't get this luxury once the shirt is on your torso. You get to wear every yard of the extra fabric like a badge of honor.

I was embarrassed about my shirt size for a long time. That is, until I saw pieces of a documentary about Big Punisher. Specifically, the part about his wife having to sit with his 6X t-shirts and stretch them out with her feet before she gave it to him. For those not familiar with big and tall store parlance, 6X is the biggest size they carry. Anything after that and the clerk sends you to Boeing to have steel plates fitted to your ass, because at that point, you have graduated from Fat Man to Aircraft.

And ultimately, this is what Big and Tall does for regular gorditos like me. It makes us feel not quite as freakish. It's hard enough walking around tired and having to walk sideways through turnstiles, so even sensitive men such as I need occasion to say, "Wow, brotherman is fucked" at the sight of a gargantuan dude plodding down the aisle of Casual Male toward the neck extenders and "one size fits all."

And they are there, trust me, those massive 6X Big Pun types, who tip the scales at 600 pounds plus, the ones who waddle more than walk. For the sake of simplicity, let's call them "Tanks."You'd think they'd be bashful about shopping for clothes at a Big and Tall, but one forgets that these kinds of stores were BUILT for them, a fact which never escapes a Tank.

If you've ever seen video of sumo in training, you know that the culture surrounding the sport is one that nurtures them in their stoutness, with men who wait on the sumo hand and foot, feeding them rice at a pace that would threaten the average village's yearly ration. Well, picture that kind of primadonna treatment, but in a retail clothing store that sells pants the size of drapery. Tanks are pampered…more so, I think, than the average Lancome customer. Three people work on their order at the same time. Alterations are recommended. Small talk ensues. The unassuming wife or shopping companion makes furtive suggestions, but the dressing room and the entire Big Daddy t-shirt section have been taken over by a force more powerful than the local tides.

Let us take you now into the average exchange of conversation at a Big and Tall store, just to get an idea of how their money is made.

"Well sir," coos the saleslady, "I think you should consider the cream-colored jacket. It's more slimming."

"Do you really?" responds the customer. "I mean, the 6X DID look a little big. Perhaps I should try the 5X?"

And here's the kicker. The catchphrase. The one thing every shopper at Big and Tall hears at least once in his life….

"Nah. Stay with the 6X. After all…YOU WANNA BE COMFORTABLE, RIGHT?"

$500 dollars and a chucklechuckle later, the fat man has found himself a comfort zone. He will return to drop hundreds of dollars into the coffers of his new fortress of retail solitude. And a nation is born.

Welcome to my life.

That's all folks.

By the way, the suit I bought? Bangin. I feel MAD comfortable in it!

peace out….