Joe Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took my clothes off and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.
Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill.
Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.
Joe Quotes in Surfacing
From the side he’s like the buffalo on the U.S. nickel, shaggy and blunt-snouted, with small clenched eyes and the defiant but insane look of a species once dominant, now threatened with extinction.
They’re making a movie, Joe is doing the camera work, he’s never done it before but David says they’re the new Renaissance Men, you teach yourself what you need to learn.
What he means is that a man should be handling this; Joe will do as a stand-in. My status is a problem, they obviously think I’m married. But I’m safe, I’m wearing my wedding ring, I never threw it out, it’s useful for landladies.
What impressed him that time, he even mentioned it later, cool he called it, was the way I took my clothes off and put them on again later very smoothly as if I were feeling no emotion. But I really wasn’t.
Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things.
Prove your love, they say. You really want to marry me, let me fuck you instead. You really want to fuck, let me marry you instead. As long as there’s a victory, some flag I can wave, parade I can have in my head.
Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim, why didn’t they just throw it away like the trash? To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill.
Anything we could do to the animals we could do to each other: we practiced on them first.
“You’ll go in beside the dead bird[.]”
From any rational point of view I am absurd; but there are no longer any rational points of view.
