jannotes

“I enjoy Stein most as a theorist: her ideas startle me, in whatever form they appear. (I call myself an inexpert.) One of those ideas was that becoming a classic could kill a work of art. Readers’ responses should shift, like Ida, with changing times, to make a book new(er); otherwise it doesn’t truly live in the present. If Stein becomes an endpoint for literary invention — a classic — her work can’t be read in the present tense.”  Lynne Tillman on Gertrude Stein

Whether it’s Homer, Lao Tse, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Camus their immediacy is my spark.  They’re not classics, they are the perennial human voice. What use can I have with a classic?  Stare at it and nod?  Stagnate in static stuckness?    It needs to liven me, quicken my step, animate and inform me forwardly, nudging my budge from behind.  If I want a moral crypt, let me die first.  Now is my favorite place because it is in constant and imperceptible motion.  You only realize you’re traveling when you look back.  My greatest wish is to desire where I am now, now, and put all aspirations behind me. My best advice to myself:  Stay in place.