April52013
thechekhovreader: Cheever, ever the leisurely gentleman. But he throws down like a stone cold motherfucker in his writing. There’s no overlooking him and he knows it. He’s all, ‘lol u better bring your best shit if you wanna step to this.’

thechekhovreader:

Cheever, ever the leisurely gentleman.

But he throws down like a stone cold motherfucker in his writing. There’s no overlooking him and he knows it. He’s all, ‘lol u better bring your best shit if you wanna step to this.’

(via thesorrowsofgin)
March122013
vintageanchor: “Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark…”So begins John Cheever’s Bullet Park, published on this day in 1969. The novel was reviewed as both a disaster and a masterpiece, some regretting and some applauding that Cheever had stretched himself beyond the short story form. The setting is a familiar one, the opening sentence, above, transporting us to one of the comfortable commuter towns that Cheever so often explores; and, here in the voice of a protesting adolescent, the story soon takes the darker turn that can be found in Cheever’s other suburban tales:“Damn the bright lights by which no one reads, damn the continuous music which no one hears, damn the grand pianos that no one can play, damn the white houses mortgaged up to their rain gutters, damn them for plundering the ocean for fish to feed the mink whose skins they wear. …Damn their hypocrisy, damn their cant, damn their credit cards, damn their discounting the wilderness of the human spirit, damn their immaculateness, damn their lechery and damn them above all for having leached from life that strength, malodorousness, color and zeal that give it meaning. Howl, howl, howl.”Source: http://ow.ly/iNPYW

vintageanchor:

“Paint me a small railroad station then, ten minutes before dark…”

So begins John Cheever’s Bullet Park, published on this day in 1969. The novel was reviewed as both a disaster and a masterpiece, some regretting and some applauding that Cheever had stretched himself beyond the short story form. The setting is a familiar one, the opening sentence, above, transporting us to one of the comfortable commuter towns that Cheever so often explores; and, here in the voice of a protesting adolescent, the story soon takes the darker turn that can be found in Cheever’s other suburban tales:

“Damn the bright lights by which no one reads, damn the continuous music which no one hears, damn the grand pianos that no one can play, damn the white houses mortgaged up to their rain gutters, damn them for plundering the ocean for fish to feed the mink whose skins they wear. …Damn their hypocrisy, damn their cant, damn their credit cards, damn their discounting the wilderness of the human spirit, damn their immaculateness, damn their lechery and damn them above all for having leached from life that strength, malodorousness, color and zeal that give it meaning. Howl, howl, howl.”

Source: http://ow.ly/iNPYW

(Source: vintageanchorbooks)
February32013
Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. —John Cheever, from the preface to The Stories of John Cheever

Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like “the Cleveland Chicken,” sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are. —John Cheever, from the preface to The Stories of John Cheever

(Source: thechekhovreader, via thesorrowsofgin)
January222013
“There would be no point in saying that she looked to me more beautiful than she did on our wedding day, but because I have grown older and have, I think, a greater depth of feeling, and because I could see in her face that night both young and age, both her devotion to the young woman that she had been and the positions that she had yielded graciously to time, I think I have never been so deeply moved.” from ‘Goodbye, My Brother’ by John Cheever (via radiumradiator)

(via thesorrowsofgin)
January172013
theparisreview: Selections from the John Cheever Journals, 1946–1981 “Reading my own stories is like some intensely unhappy relationship with a mirror. The work is done and to return to it seems idle in the strongest sense of the word—a demeaning sense of time squandered, of letting a splendid afternoon parade across the lawns without doing any work, without participating or celebrating in this parade.” “I think of George Orwell on walking.” “Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers and the smell of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by scout-masters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare with him.” “That the exploration of candor in writing does not seem to me a universal domain. There are in literature turning points or feats of discovery—Flaubert and Joyce—that seem universal, but sexual candor I think not. It is the mastery of men like Miller, Roth and Mailer that gives their work its power. These seem to be intimate and singular accomplishments. Now that Roth, not without assistance, has opened up the playing fields of masturbation we find the field thronged with incompetents who feel that self-abuse is, in itself, adventurous, comical and visionary. Phil’s self-abuse is brilliant.” “On my notes for a speech I find that I describe myself as a traveler from the north. That sense of estrangement that seems to me to be perhaps at the heart of literature—that persuasion—quite unspoken as I understand it—that we have seen other worlds than this and will see strange worlds to come.” “I had a dream that a brilliant reviewer pointed out that there was an excess of lamentation in my work. I had, fleetingly, this morning, a sense of the world, one’s life, one’s friends and lovers as a given. Here it all is, comprehensible, lovely, a sort of paradise. That this will be taken quite as swiftly as it has been given is difficult to remember.”

theparisreview:

Selections from the John Cheever Journals, 1946–1981

“Reading my own stories is like some intensely unhappy relationship with a mirror. The work is done and to return to it seems idle in the strongest sense of the word—a demeaning sense of time squandered, of letting a splendid afternoon parade across the lawns without doing any work, without participating or celebrating in this parade.”

“I think of George Orwell on walking.”

“Hemingway shot himself yesterday morning. There was a great man. I remember walking down a street in Boston after reading a book of his and finding the color of the sky, the faces of strangers and the smell of the city heightened and dramatized. The most important thing he did for me was to legitimize manly courage, a quality that I had heard, until I came on his work, extolled by scout-masters and others who made it seem a fraud. He put down an immense vision of love and friendship, swallows and the sound of rain. There was never, in my time, anyone to compare with him.”

“That the exploration of candor in writing does not seem to me a universal domain. There are in literature turning points or feats of discovery—Flaubert and Joyce—that seem universal, but sexual candor I think not. It is the mastery of men like Miller, Roth and Mailer that gives their work its power. These seem to be intimate and singular accomplishments. Now that Roth, not without assistance, has opened up the playing fields of masturbation we find the field thronged with incompetents who feel that self-abuse is, in itself, adventurous, comical and visionary. Phil’s self-abuse is brilliant.”

“On my notes for a speech I find that I describe myself as a traveler from the north. That sense of estrangement that seems to me to be perhaps at the heart of literature—that persuasion—quite unspoken as I understand it—that we have seen other worlds than this and will see strange worlds to come.”

“I had a dream that a brilliant reviewer pointed out that there was an excess of lamentation in my work. I had, fleetingly, this morning, a sense of the world, one’s life, one’s friends and lovers as a given. Here it all is, comprehensible, lovely, a sort of paradise. That this will be taken quite as swiftly as it has been given is difficult to remember.”

(via floooooooooom)
December32012
thesorrowsofgin: Dec. 7, 2011. John Cheever.

thesorrowsofgin:

Dec. 7, 2011. John Cheever.

The Sorrows of Gin John Cheever Time art portrait 

November262012
“We are a family that has always been very close in spirit. Our father was drowned in a sailing accident when we were young, and our mother has always stressed the fact that our familial relationships have a kind of permanence that we will never meet with again. I don’t think about the family much, but when I remember its members and the coast where they lived and the sea salt that I think is in our blood, I am happy to recall that I am a Pommeroy - that I have the nose, the coloring, and the promise of longevity - and that while we are not a distinguished family, we enjoy the illusion, when we are together, that the Pommeroys are unique. I don’t say this because I’m interested in family history or because this sense of uniqueness is deep or important to me but in order to advance the point that we are loyal to one another in spite of our differences, and that any rupture in this loyalty is a source of confusion and pain.” opening paragraph of “Goodbye My Brother” by John Cheever (via grouchomac)

(via thesorrowsofgin)
November242012
“There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.” John Cheever (via goofballfortruth)

(via thesorrowsofgin)
November212012
“Many years later, after Cheever had stopped drinking, he often assuaged his melancholy by gorging on cheese and crackers […]” Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey (via heheheheheheheeheheheehehe) (Worth reblogging Tao Lin for.)(Pretty much my life in 30 years.)

(Source: 19841979, via monkfishjowls)
October282012
vintageanchor: THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER was published this week in 1978 (on October 23), winning the Pulitzer, the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Coming just four years before his death, and after four decades of stories, the highly-praised collection secured Cheever’s “coronation” (biographer Blake Bailey) as “the best storyteller living” (John Irving). Read more here.

vintageanchor:

THE STORIES OF JOHN CHEEVER was published this week in 1978 (on October 23), winning the Pulitzer, the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Coming just four years before his death, and after four decades of stories, the highly-praised collection secured Cheever’s “coronation” (biographer Blake Bailey) as “the best storyteller living” (John Irving).

Read more here.

(Source: vintageanchorbooks)
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