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'In photographs, Nathalie Sarraute stares out at us with the impassiveness of sculpture. Etched with elegantly weathered lines, her face surrounds a gaze that is frank and, one suspects, unsparing; her assured bearing suggests an impeccable if somewhat mannish grande dame. In her work, likewise, she projected an air of imperiousness, of godlike detachment. In her first book,
Tropisms (1939), she gave birth to a genre wholly her own -- an amalgam of fictional sketch, prose poem, essay, and deadpan transcription of everyday speech. The daring on display in everything she wrote, her cerebral rigor as both novelist and playwright, and the crystalline austerity of her prose style collectively imparted the forbidding aura of a remote, trenchant intelligence. Sarraute's reticence toward her own biography bolstered this impression. Perhaps expecting to be graced with the gnomic utterances of an oracle, first-time visitors to her apartment near the place de l'Etoile could be caught off guard by her lively charm. Sarraute's regal manner made it commonplace, in press features and on dust jackets, for her to be cast as the doyenne of the French avant-garde. But throughout her novels one also finds oblique traces of a scarred child within: Sarraute's obsessive examination of emotion, alert to the rawest of sensitivities, reveals intensities comparable to the agony of one's earliest psychic wounds. She regarded the true artist as both conquering explorer and alienated misfit. Her resounding credo, delivered in a lecture praising Virginia Woolf -- "Every work of literature, like every work of art, consists in revealing an unknown reality" -- finds variant and more complex expression toward the end of her essay "What Birds See": "It can also happen . . . that isolated, maladjusted, lonely individuals, morbidly attached to their childhood, withdrawn into themselves and cultivating a more or less conscious taste for a certain form of defeat, by giving in to an apparently useless obsession, succeed in digging up and laying bare a fragment of reality that is still unknown." The exemplary writer is poised midway between triumph and defeat, agency and passivity, the formative attachments of the past and the unearthing of a new understanding. ...
'Just as Stendhal borrowed the scientific term crystallization to parse the mysteries of love, Sarraute appropriated the term tropism from biology to give a name to those pulses of feeling that course, swell, and churn within her characters, even during their most trivial interactions with others. Indeed, especially during such encounters, Sarraute fixes her gaze repeatedly, one might say obsessively, on scenes of quotidian drabness, on nonevents unfolding against bleak, shabby backgrounds. In Tropisms it's often unclear exactly where we are. Only occasionally does the author specify that we're in Paris; one of the book's twenty-four brief chapters takes place on the outskirts of London, and most occur in a melancholy region drained of vitality, frequently an urban milieu of enervated pedestrians, tawdry shop-windows, dank corridors in anonymous apartment buildings. Sarraute here sketches out yet another enclave in that sprawling rundown metropolis of the modernist imagination, complementing the bedraggled settings of Eliot's
Preludes and Rhys's
Good Morning, Midnight.
'The near-skeletal figures populating
Tropisms contribute as well to the disorientation that accompanies a first reading. The most rudimentary guideposts are absent. Apart from a few glancing references to marginal characters, no one is designated by a proper name or even a bare initial. Placed beside Sarraute's characters, even what she called the "slender prop" of Kafka's
Joseph K. seems bulked-out and hefty. A protagonist's very name, she wrote in her seminal essay "The Age of Suspicion," has become a "source of embarrassment" to the modern writer, who "only reluctantly" furnishes characters with "attributes that could make him too easily distinguishable: his physical aspect, gestures, actions, sensations, everyday emotions, studied and understood for so long, which contribute to giving him, at the cost of so little effort, an appearance of life, and present such a convenient hold for the reader." Using her anonymous types, Sarraute delves into the subterranean zones of personality, probing its shadowy recesses and tracking those "movements which are inherent in everybody and can take place in anybody." Such energized tropisms lurk "behind our gestures, beneath the words we speak, the feelings we manifest, are aware of experiencing, and able to define. They seemed, and still seem to me to constitute the secret source of our existence, in what might be called its nascent state."
'Sarraute's formal stringency was prompted by modernism's restless chasing after the new. Although not a member of any organized movement -- the nouveau roman group with which she was associated was a flowering of writers with affinities of purpose but rather different themes and predilections -- she never wavered in her commitment to the avant-garde as a stance dedicated to being, as Rimbaud had insisted, absolutely modern. By the middle of the twentieth century, the precincts of fiction were overpopulated with characters securely ensconced in the collective imagination -- Rastignac, Sorel, Pip, Bovary, Isabel Archer, Nana, Raskolnikov; the list goes on and on -- to say nothing of the parade of types made familiar through second- and third-rate novels. What need was there, Sarraute reasoned, to contribute redundantly to the tradition, to add yet another fully formed protagonist, yet more nail-biting episodes?
'Sarraute was one of the last in a line of artists who sought through radical innovation to renew entire aesthetic traditions, shattering the encrustations of threadbare ideas, official commonplaces, conventional and therefore lifeless forms of perception. In her complicated relation to the past she spanned a gaping contradiction 00 or, one might say, she forged her own resolution of a dialectic that had troubled writers since the advent of Romanticism. Abandoning the most fundamental building blocks of storytelling and reconfiguring fiction, so to speak, at the molecular level, Sarraute went further even than James and Proust in attempting to name the ineffable. Her works are as distinct from their predecessors as a head X-ray is from an ornately framed painted portrait. And yet, for all her originality, it was evident from Tropisms on that she'd absorbed more than a century's worth of fiction, and not just those moderns she singled out as influences: Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Tropisms begins to yield familiar readerly pleasures once you get your bearings. In a few terse phrases, Sarraute can create a scene in as realistic a mode as Balzac: "The place had a cold, dingy glitter," runs a description of a cafe that might be found anywhere in France; "the waiters ran about too fast in a rough, indifferent manner, the mirrors gave back harsh reflections of tired faces and blinking eyes."'
-- James Gibbons, Artforum___
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FurtherNathalie Sarraute's Foreword to 'Tropisms''Nathalie Sarraute, The Art of Fiction No. 115''Nathalie Sarraute by Hannah Arendt''Lessons with Nathalie Sarraute''Nathalie Sarraute and England' by Barbara WrightInterview with Nathalie SarrauteNathalie Sarraute obituary @ The Guardian'Re: THE USE OF SPEECH BY NATHALIE SARRAUTE''Le bout de la langue: A propos de Nathalie Sarraute'Nathalie Sarraute @ goodreads'Synthese sur "Enfance" de Nathalie Sarraute''Cycle Sarraute' @ France Culture'Silence, tropisme et stéréotype chez Nathalie Sarraute''Lieux et figures de la sensation dans l'œuvre de Nathalie Sarraute''Éthique et esthétique dans l’oeuvre de Nathalie Sarraute'____
ExtrasUn siècle d'écrivain 1995 Nathalie SarrauteExtrait de la lecture de Nathalie Sarraute "Pour un ui, pour un non"Nathalie Sarraute QuotesTombe de Nathalie Sarraute au cimetière de Chérence______
Interview![]()
It seems that even in the 1930's when you wrote your first book, Tropisms
(Tropismes), you had already found your own voice, and your own style. What are the literary, social and political currents that have influenced your development.Nathalie Sarraute: Social and political currents--there were none. Literary currents that influenced me go back to Flaubert, Madame Bovary, to Dosotevsky, and later to Proust and Joyce.
Could you explain the effect these writers had?Sarraute: After the appearance of Proust and Joyce, there came about a huge upheaval in literature. I must also mention Virginia Woolf, who not only wrote very modern things, she also had ideas on the transformation of the novel. She made a strong impression on me. So when I began to write, I felt that one could no longer imitate these writers, one couldn't imitate the classics. As a result, I had to look for something, a substance, a form that belonged to me personally. These writers had shown us that the framework of the old novel could no longer meet modern needs, and I thought that it would be interesting--actually I didn't even think about it, I did it without thinking--to show interior movements existing all alone, without characters, without a plot.
These are called tropisms?Sarraute: These are called tropisms because they are instinctive movements taking place on the subconscious level that are provoked like plant tropisms, which are provoked by external stimulii, by exterior objects.
There were no other influences? I was thinking of social influences, perhaps what was going on in the world.Sarraute: No. Because what I write has a absolutely nothing to do with social or political events, whatever they might be. No more than in the work of Proust. It's totally removed from that. These are simply the seekings of art that have nothing to do with sociological novels. This is not littérature engagée.
In your works you seem to emphasize psychology, but you are very far removed from the traditional psychological novel.Sarraute: It's not exactly psychology because when you say psychology, you think immediately of the classic categories of psychology. That is something very out-of-date--to analyse feelings, etc. Mine is rather a mental universe where psychological terms are not introduced. What my characters experience, what happens--let's say jealousy or love--occurs before the feelings. I show something that happens inside ourselves, in the midst of happening, something I don't analyse. In the psychological novel, there are analyses of one's feelings. In my work, there are movements that are not named, which do not enter into the category of psychology. These are interior movements at the moment that we experience them.
How do you react to the accusation that the novel is dead?Sarraute: I have often heard this accusation that the novel is dead. Bretson said it in 1925. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well.
Do you have any misgivings at turning people away from the content of your writing because of its form?Sarraute: Of course I have misgivings. I've always had them. As long as the readers are still searching for the character, and for a plot, sometimes they miss what I've tried to show them, because they are trying to see if the characters are married, who said what, are they the same people who spoke in the first chapter, when I don't care. I put two people, maybe they're brother and sister, maybe they're anyone. I don't care. The important thing is what they are saying, what they are feeling. But people try and see, "Oh, but it's a married couple and they met in the first chapter." They go on caring about things that I don't care for.
Do you feel that there has arisen, then, a sort of tension between the writer and the reader that occurs while a reader is going through a book?Sarraute: There is a tension. I think it's a good thing. I think when something is too easy, it's bad. The reader doesn't have to make an effort, he himself doesn't have to create. But the reader has to be creative, when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. But if you give him something easy that's just an amusement for him, he is gliding on the surface and not working. I think a good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading.
But all the same, there are readers who won't make this effort.Sarraute: Naturally there are readers like that. So what? One can't write for all readers. For example, a poet cannot begin to write for people who don't like poetry. He writes for a limited public who loves this type of thing, who are interested in it.
___
BookNathalie Sarraute
TropismsGeorge Braziller'The term "tropism" Sarraute had taken from biology, where it names the reactive, almost imperceptible movements that living organisms make, towards or away from whatever impinges on them. Sarraute's are tropisms with a human face, the buried, never quite conscious to-ings and fro-ings of the psyche that accompany all social contact, which she turns pitilessly yet very gracefully into words as she delves into the unspoken and quite often unspeakable root-system of polite conversation. Politeness is shown cruelly up in Sarraute, as the mask for aggression on the part of some and for a corresponding anxiety on the part of others. She is the unforgiving zoologist of our dissembling species, as observed in the habitat she shared with it, of "civilised" Paris.'
-- The Guardian_____
ExcerptXI
She had understood the secret. She had scented the hiding-place of what should be the real treasure for everybody. She knew the ‘scale of values.’
No conversations about the shape of hats and Rémond fabrics for her. She had profound contempt for square-toed shoes.
Like a wood-louse she had crawled insidiously towards them and maliciously found out about ‘the real thing’, like a cat that licks its chops and closes its eyes before a jug of cream it has discovered.
Now she knew it. She was going to stay there. They would never dislodge her from there again. She listened, she absorbed, greedy, voluptuous, rapacious. Nothing of what belonged to them was going to escape her: picture galleries, all the new books… She knew all that. She had begun with ‘Les Annales’, now she was veering towards Gide, soon she would be going to take notes, an eager, avid gleam in her eye, at meetings of the ‘Union for Truth’.
She ranged over all that, sniffed everywhere, picked up everything with her square-nailed fingers; as soon as anyone spoke vaguely of that anywhere, her eyes lighted up, she stretched out her neck, agog.
For them this was unutterably repellent. Hide it from her – quick – before she scents it, carries it away, preserve it from her degrading contact… But she foiled them, because she knew everything. The Chartres Cathedral could not be hidden from her. She knew all about it. She had read what Péguy had thought of it.
In the most secret recesses, among the treasures that were the best hidden, she rummaged about with her avid fingers. Everything ‘intellectual’. She had to have it. For her. For her, because she knew now the real value of things. She had to have what was intellectual.
There were a great many like her, hungry, pitiless parasites, leeches, firmly settled on the articles that appeared, slugs stuck everywhere, spreading their mucus on corners of Rimbaud, sucking on Mallarmé, lending one another Ulysses or the Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, which they slimed with their low understanding.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said, opening her eyes in which, with a pure, inspired expression, she kindled a ‘divine spark’.
XII
During his very well-attended lectures at the Collège de France, he amused himself with all that.
He enjoyed prying, with the dignity of professional gestures, with relentless, expert hands, into the secret places of Proust or Rimbaud, then, exposing their so-called miracles, their mysteries, to the gaze of his very attentive audience, he would explain their ‘case’.
With his sharp, mischevous little eyes, his ready-tied cravate and his square-trimmed beard, he looked enormously like the gentleman in the advertisements who, with one finger in the air, smiling recommends Saponite, the best of soap-powders, or the model Salamander: economy, security, comfort.
‘There is nothing,’ he said, ‘you see I went to look for myself, because I won’t be bluffed; nothing that I myself have not already studied clinically countless times, that I have not catalogued and explained.
‘They should not upset you. Look, in my hands they are like trembling, nude little children, and I am holding them up to you in the hollow of my hand, as though I were their creator, their father, I have emptied them for you of their power and their mystery. I have tracked down, harried what was miraculous about them.
‘Now they hardly differ from the intelligent, curious and amusing eccentrics who come and tell me their interminable stories, to get me to help them, appreciate them, and reassure them.
‘You can no more be affected than my daughters are when they entertain their girl friends in their mother’s parlour, and chatter and laugh gaily without being concerned with what I am saying to my patients in the next room.’
This was what he taught at the Collège de France. And in the entire neighbourhood, in all the nearby Faculties, in the literature, law, history and philosophy courses, at the Institute and at the Palais de Justice, in the buses, in the métros, in all the government offices, sensible men, normal men, active men, worthy, wholesome, strong men, triumphed.
Avoiding the shops filled with pretty things, the women trotting briskly along, the café waiters, the medical students, the traffic policemen, the clerks from notary offices, Rimbaud or Proust, having been torn from life, cast out from life and deprived of support, were probably wandering aimlessly through the streets, or dozing away, their heads resting on their chests, in some dusty public square.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Damien Ark, Hey, man. Oh, wow, that's so awesome of you! For various reasons, I didn't look at the comments over the weekend until this morning, so I missed the chance for an actual on-site listening fest on the b'day itself, but I'll be able to score today. Really, thanks a lot, I'm excited! Lots of love back! ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! Lovely to see you, buddy, and thank you for the good wishes in the recently passed holidays. Well, a birthday is kind of a holiday, I guess. Your Xmas sounds to have been really nice, and, yeah, I'm happy about how things have so turned so around for you. You deeply deserve it, my brilliant friend. Hugs back in multiples. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben! Thank you, sir! I don't think I've experiences a Vines. I think I know what it is, or maybe I don't precisely and, in fact, I've been indoctrinated already. Excited for yours. Share the word. ** Lee, Hi there, Lee! Sweetness to lay eyes on the words that form your mini-self-portrait by default. My b'day was nice. 'Like a shit Proust', ha ha. Yeah, let me know what's going with you in a more detailed fashion when the opp arises. Take care, major dude. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you kindly! So generous! ** Bernard Welt, Yay, I get to see Bernard on my birthday even if it's a bit after the fact. My imagination can do the retrieval. Aw, thank you, you're so sweet, you are, sorry. Do let me know about the Recollets app. I'm finally being evicted from here after all these years in the next couple of months, but I think I'll still have big sway 'cos it's nothing personal from them. Re: 1) Yeah, I literally have imposed a ban for the time being on reading almost anything written/ commented from anywhere outside of France on what happened and is happening here because virtually everything I was reading had absolutely no grasp of or respect for the personal and emotional effect here, and which is an extremely important part of what happened here, and, without that substance, it comes off like a bunch of clatter. I'm not sure that no one is going to learn anything productive from this. At the higher levels, yeah, logic says you're right, but on the ground, amongst people here, I see signs and I feel hope. 2) I keep coming back to the conclusion that James Franco is doing the obvious, but gosh, maybe not. It's less obvious than what Shia LeBoeuf is doing at the very least. What are you assigning/ showing in the Sex in American Cinema class this time? Dude, I don't think you did a Frankenstein post, but, even if you did, I would slobber if you wanted to make one. Literally slobber, and it wouldn't even get on your clothes. We have to see each other for more than a tiny bypass in a venue lobby soon. Might you come over this year, 'cos that would help? Let's Skype! ** Will C., Hi, Will. Thanks, man. I didn't go crazy, I don't think, but it was cool. ** xTx, Yay! Hi! I've missed you hugely! How are you? You can not even begin to remotely imagine how incredibly excited I am for your book! Are you good and even great? Well, I mean, you're incredibly great, but are you also good? Big, big love! ** Cobaltfram, Hi. No, Bresson wasn't gay. He was French. That might explain it. A conundrum of a city: novel-worthy already. Thanks for the b'day wishes! ** Derek McCormack, Derek! Thank you, thank you, it was a very pleasant birthday. ** Dungan, Whoa, Sean! This is fucking great! Man, I've missed you! Thank you so much! How are you? What's up? Inquiring mind/heart combo wants to know? ** Sypha, Hi, James. I'm really sorry about your grandmother. I hope you're hanging in there. Take care, okay? ** James, Wow, two Jameses in a row. Thank you for the song! Or for the lyrics of the song that my imagination filled in appropriately. Oh, William Carlos Williams was the original reference when we started that doctor/writer combo talk, so he was old news by the time I did the list. I'm safe over here, thanks. Oh, sure, that has happened to me all the time at certain conducive life points, yeah. It's healthy to build things and then forget them. ** Keaton, Aw, ha ha, your birthday thing is the funniest, loveliest unexpected little thing. Thank you! Aw! Robert Merton, I don't know him. I know Thomas Merton. Know
of him. ** Aaron Mirkin, Hi, Aaron! Yeah, I've seen you across the landscape of FB, and I've typically been a bad message responder there because I just sort of am in general for some reason, but yay for you popping in! Oh, wow, Will Patton! Um, yeah, that's crazy. I haven't thought about that in years. In the early 80s, maybe in '84, Richard Hell commissioned me to write a play that was intended to co-star him, John Lurie, and Will Patton. He gave me carte blanche, and maybe he shouldn't have, ha ha, because I wrote this kind of insane play that I can hardly remember, and which I don't I have a copy of anymore, sadly. I mostly remember that it was in three acts, and that in one of them, Hell and Lurie and Patton would have been sitting in three speedboats suspended in the air, side by side, with their motors revving at full blast, having some very strange conversation with each other, but it could well be that they ate children at some point or something. Anyway, I wrote it, and then Hell, Lurie, Patton, and I had a meeting, and Hell and Lurie were, like, 'Let's do it', and Patton was, like, 'No fucking way. So the project died. It would have been really cool if it had happened, obviously. But yeah, Will Patton. Brilliant actor. I feel like he's never been given the great opportunities that his talent deserves. That's hilarious, that story. Thank you for it. ** Heliotrope, My dear Mark! Oh, my goodness, you're always so incredibly kind and generous on the subject of me. Thank you, thank
you for everything! Are you good? ** Slatted light, Hi, David. Aw, thanks so much, man, and ditto and double ditto and infinite ditto. Love you a ton too, man. For the reasons I mentioned on Friday and to Bernard up above, I've copied and paste your thoughts on the stuff going on here in a doc, and I will read them when I'm capable of and interested in trying to look at what has happened here and might happen from afar. Right now it feels important to experience this with people who are in the immediate emotional impact zone and whose atmosphere, social dealings, politics, feelings, whole persons are sorting through this in personal ways. But I know for sure that I will be tweaked and enlightened by your thoughts when I'm ready to experience them, which will no doubt be quite soon. ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. Thank you. I had a good one both within and without all the stuff going on here. ** Kier, Hi! Oh, shit, I hope the two days since we last spoke has caused your sickness to get the hell out of you. Has it? Holy shit, your birthday present is insane! I mean insanely great and welcome! Wow! We should do a collab. gif short story. That's so beautiful. Even if you didn't order them particularly, the order was super interesting. Gif combos can make these really interesting 'narratives' by accident a lot. In fact, letting those accidents happen and then working with them is really important to writing fiction with gifs. Thank you so, so much! And the Lynch thing is great and so perfectly put. My weekend: On my birthday, the plan had been for Zac and I to go meet up with Kiddiepunk and Oscar B. at the CDG airport during their stopover twixt Australia and the UK, but their plane got delayed 7 hours, so that didn't happen, sadly. Instead, Z. and I hung out. He gave me some amazing chocolate things. We went and checked out the new Fondation Louis Vuitton building/shows. The building, a typically overdone, boring Frank Gehry thing was meh. There was a big Olafur Eliasson show/ installation. There was one small fountain/strobe-light piece that was very cool, and the rest was incredibly expensively made and blah. He seems like he has kind of lost it in recent years. And there were a few cool artworks there amidst the so-so. But it was fun. Then we went to Hard Rock Cafe and stuffed ourselves with nachos, and that was really fun. So, my b'day itself was great. Hanging out with Zac is always a huge gift. Yesterday, I wasn't necessarily going to go to the big march/rally, but Gisele called and said that she, Jonathan Capdevielle, and our friend the artist Dominique Gonzales-Foerster were going. So I decided to meet up with them at a cafe a ways away from the rally and then maybe go look at it. As you may have read, there were at least a million and a half people there, and probably closer to 2 million, and the streets were completely jammed with people everywhere, even far, far away from Republique, which is where the march started, so even way over at the cafe where we decided to meet it was so crowded so you could hardly move. I eventually found them, and we tried to walk to Republique, but we barely got anywhere because there were so many people. So, basically, we just ended up standing packed in with all these people, barely moving and unable to escape for a couple of hours. It was pretty amazing and powerful. So many people, and of every age and ethnicity imaginable, and everyone was really ... connected, it really felt like it. It was exciting and beautiful. Oh, maybe I should add that, despite all the stuff I've seen on the news about the rally, the '40 world leaders' did not march and participate in the march. They just posed in a clump miles away from the rally for a few minutes in a photo op to look like they were marching. Then they were bussed to where the march was destined to end and sat in some backstage area until the crowd arrived, and then they just came out and 'entertained' everyone. Anyway, eventually we moved far enough along that there was a tiny opening, so we escaped the densest part of the crowd and walked forever until we found a cafe that wasn't too crowded to enter. Literally everywhere was packed with people. I've never seen anything like it, and I guess no one here has since the size of the crowd was the largest in France's history. After a coffee, they all decided to continue and march the whole route to Nation, and I decided to go home, which took a long time since all the metro stations were closed and the streets were very jammed up all the way to the Recollets, which was pretty far away from the rally, so it took over a couple of hours to walk a route that usually takes me about 15 minutes. And then I mostly just followed the rally's progress and happenings on the news for the rest of the night. It was an intense and powerful day. And now it's Monday! What happened on your side of things? ** Cal Graves, Hi. Thanks, man. My birthday was cool and fun, yeah. For my birthday? Ideally? Retroactively? Hm. How about a billion euros. Simple. ** Brendan, Hey, B! Very cool! I miss you too! I'm doing quite well, thank you! I think I saw a pic on FB of maybe the work in your imminent show (?) and it looked fantastic, whatever it was that I was looking at. Love, me. ** Gary gray, Hi. Yeah, I think you would know if you had frostbite. I think it's pretty intense. Good, man, I'm glad happiness has been hanging out with you. Is moody hip? Is moody ever not hip? Wait, maybe. I would read your cleverbot blog if you restarted it. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. It was good. How's it? ** Thomas Moronic, Thank you for the b'day kindness. ** Steevee, I listened to couple of Sleaford Mods songs. Yeah, pretty nice and intriguing. I'll get a collection. I hope the doctor visit this morning is the least hellish thing possible. ** Misanthrope, Wtf, indeed. I got some great chocolates from Zac, and some great Sadaharu Aoki almost cake-like pastries from Yury, so my stomach was covered on the birthday front. Thanks, G. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thank you, Jeff. Mm, once I finally get back into my text novel, I'll see. No doubt, but the gif form is really so different that I think any effect will likely be just some kind of newer grasp of what text can and can't do. I'm curious to find out. The only effect of my text novel on the gif novel is that they're both to be part of the novel cycle I'm working on, so there was obviously a lot of cross-thinking involved due to that. ** Statictick, Hi, Nick. Thanks, man. Glad you got the sale done, assuming there are no glitches, like you said. Thanks a lot about 'Elevator'! ** Chris Dankland, Hi, Chris! I hope you like Bresson when you get to him, obviously. Fantastic and thank you for the alert and link re: the new Zachary German story! That completely escaped me. That's very exciting. Whoa, cool. He's so great. Thank you for the good birthday thoughts. I might even pick up 'Gilead' as early as this afternoon, should my path cross paths with a certain bookstore here, which I think will happen. How's your writing going? ** Rewritedept, My weekend was ... yeah, fun seems like a solid enough adjective. Curious to hear how your first day of work goes, obviously. Good luck! I will happily share your thing.
Everyone, here's Rewritedept in his own words. I urge you to do what he asks. Here he is: 'hey everyone. my words and art page on facebook is SO CLOSE to having 100 likes, and it would mean the world to me of those of you who haven't liked it would do so. it is here for you to do so. i am creating some sort of present to send out to the lucky dude or dudette who is number 100, but i don't know what yet. a poem? a collage? a jar of my semen? you'll just have to like the page and find out. you can also send friend requests to chris gugino if you're into that networking shit. thanks!' Radical Monday on your end too! ** Okay. I start the blog week with a spotlight on a great book by the great Nathalie Sarraute. Be there. See you tomorrow.
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