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Tell Me When I'm Dead

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Steven Ramirez

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“Sometimes I still feel that there are two of me: one clean, flawless picture, the other imperfect and cracked; one boy, one girl; one voice that speaks aloud and one that whispers in my ear; one publicly known to have been troubled but be on the mend, the other who has privately lost something to do with innocence and gained something to do with knowledge and adulthood that can never be undone. I feel sometimes there are things that tear me in two directions, that there are two sets of thoughts that grow side by side. But then I realize that I am whole, whatever that means and does not mean; I am complete without the need for additions or alteration.”

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Book:Golden Boy
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“عندما بلغتُ الخامسة والعشرين احتفلتُ واحتفل بى أصدقائى، وقلت لهم بصوت سكران: أمهلونى حتى الثلاثين، وفى الثلاثين لم أحتفل وأمهلت نفسى حتى الخامسة والثلاثين، وها قد تجاوزت منتصف المهلة الثانية ولا شىء تغير سوى شعرى الذى اكتسب بياضاً وراثياً جاءنى مبكراً كأنما ليزيد من وطأة الزمن، أكبرُ بلا مجد ولا أطفال، وتقولين يا أمى لا تسأل ولا تزور. أى خيبة تريدين أن أحمل إليك؟.”

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Book:سماء أقرب
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“You taste injustice, even if it’s fictional, really taste it,it has a way of doing that. Sometimes, you can never put the shoe on the other foot. We can’t go back in time and know what it was like to be a black person then. Even today, when things are supposed to be so much better, not one of you can understand what it’s like to be black, to live with the knowledge of what happened to your ancestry and still face injustice. But that book makes us taste it and, reading it, we know how bitter that taste is and we know we don’t like it. But that bitter wakes you up, and when you wake up, you open your mind to things in this world, you make yourself think. Then you’ll decide you don’t like the taste of injustice, not for you and not for anyone, and you’ll understand that even though all the battles can’t be won, that doesn’t mean you won’t fight.”

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Book:Golden Trail
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“Outside of the dreary rubbish that is churned out by god knows how many hacks of varying degrees of talent, the novel is, it seems to me, a very special and rarefied kind of literary form, and was, for a brief moment only, wide-ranging in its sociocultural influence. For the most part, it has always been an acquired taste and it asks a good deal from its audience. Our great contemporary problem is in separating that which is really serious from that which is either frivolously and fashionably "radical" and that which is a kind of literary analogy to the Letterman show. It's not that there is pop culture around, it's that so few people can see the difference between it and high culture, if you will. Morton Feldman is not Stephen Sondheim. The latter is a wonderful what-he-is, but he is not what-he-is-not. To pretend that he is is to insult Feldman and embarrass Sondheim, to enact a process of homogenization that is something like pretending that David Mamet, say, breathes the same air as Samuel Beckett. People used to understand that there is, at any given time, a handful of superb writers or painters or whatever--and then there are all the rest. Nothing wrong with that. But it now makes people very uncomfortable, very edgy, as if the very idea of a Matisse or a Charles Ives or a Thelonious Monk is an affront to the notion of "ain't everything just great!" We have the spectacle of perfectly nice, respectable, harmless writers, etc., being accorded the status of important artists...Essentially the serious novelist should do what s/he can do and simply forgo the idea of a substantial audience.”

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Author:Gilbert Sorrentino
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