A Quote by Sam Lipsyte
Kamby Bolongo Mean River is an original and fearless fiction. It bears genetic traces of Beckett and Stein, but Robert Lopez's powerful cadences and bleak, joyful wit are all his own.
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In Kamby Bolongo Mean River damage and delusion walk hand in hand, and everything we think we know is gradually called into question. Reading like a cross between Samuel Beckett's 'The Calmative' and Gordon Lish's Dear Mr. Capote, Robert Lopez's new novel gets under your skin and latches on.
When, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolf-like, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him. And his cadences were their cadences, the cadences which voiced their woe and what to them was the meaning of the stillness, and the cold, and dark.
Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.
People often say Beckett is difficult or bleak, but engaging with it is the most life-affirming, uplifting thing. It's his use of language. The music of the words works on your subconscious. You end up deeply moved but don't know why. That's where the magic lies.
I love an underdog. No, I don't necessarily mean the cartoon. I mean like David, as in Goliath, or the Bears, as in The Bad News Bears.
In the original language, 'Fear the Lord' doesn't mean be afraid. It means sustaining a joyful, astonished awe, and wonder before Him.
To the lost man, to the pioneer penetrating a new country, to the naturalist who wishes to see the wild land at its wildest, the advice is always the same - follow a river. The river is the original forest highway. It is nature's own Wilderness Road.
Because no matter how much money we spend there [in Iraq], as long as the people there see this money as... as assistance that is unwelcome, as long as they continue to be humiliated in their own country by us... I mean, the future looked bleak, and the future after that was in fact very bleak.
Fearless doesn't mean careless. There is a thin line between fearless and careless. I think we need to play fearless.
Jesus and Shakespeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit.
Most of us float with the river and there are a few people who move the river. Robert DeNiro is definitely one of them.
When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your experience or all the great feelings you have, I tell them. Although poetry may be good for you, it's not therapy. You're making something with words which are visceral, muscular, active, not just markers of how you feel. And we have classes studying William Blake, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stein.
By wit we search divine aspect above,
By wit we learn what secrets science yields,
By wit we speak, by wit the mind is rul'd,
By wit we govern all our actions;
Wit is the loadstar of each human thought,
Wit is the tool by which all things are wrought.
As a science fiction and fantasy writer, I used to love writing bleak, grimdark futures full of bleak, grimdark people. But I've found that as the world around me darkens, all I really want to do is grasp for more light.
A poet should leave traces of his passage, not proofs. Traces alone engender dreams.
The holy, all-loving, all-powerful, all-mighty, perfectly peaceful and joyful Life of God is waiting to be ours. It is a priceless gift that comes with only one condition: His Life can only be had in exchange for our own.
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