Mostly reading, Baxter & Moran

From Charles Baxter's:

There's Something I Want You to Do:

     'The gods laughed easily in the late afternoon, watching human futility fold up for the day.  All poetry, good or bad, made the gods laugh.  To the gods, poems were sour useless editorials, like bitchy letters to Santa.'

     Character in this story is a translator, staying in Italy for a while but working with 'the Bortho-Ugaric dialect.'  As it is a small town, when she goes to buy cigs from the tobacconist, he notes she does not smoke, then says, 'Things are not translating?  Sometimes they do not.  Sometimes they stubbornly stay what they are.  I am sorry.'
(Ain't dat de truth...!)

     Later, coming back to the villa where her son & his bossy girlfriend are waiting, rosy post-sex, 'beautiful and radiant,' she thinks:  'This world was paradise, after all, when your son and his girlfriend, healthy and in love with each other, cook dinner for you inside a cool dark Italian villa, and you could worry all day about a line of poetry that you couldn't translate properly, and you could be annoyed by simpleton American tourists.  To be bothered by trivialities was sheer heaven.'

--from Forbearance

     'He took another sip of his drink as he fought off soul-nausea and the urge to beg.  He would not tell Nan how much he had loved her, the size and mature intensity of that love, its ability to give his life meaning.  A man does not beg to be taken back, he reminded himself.  Begging qualifies as the primary criterion for admission to loserdom, that territory inhabited by platoons of nice vanilla guys who belong in civilized places like Denmark and Sweden, not here in the U.S., where they are held in contempt and trampled.'

     'As the bar grew noisier, Benny and Nana gazed at each other without tenderness, in the hard labor of separation.  He felt the first wellsprings of hatred – liberating, a breeze from the soul's window.  You have to hate them first if you're going to break up with them.  Gathering himself, he nodded at her, stood up with what he hoped was quiet dignity, and left her with the bar bill.'

(You GO, dude!)

     'By morning, he had acquired an atom-smashing headache.  His brain was a particle accelerator, throwing off broken pieces of thought.'

(oh do I know those!)
Baxter has never failed to write riveting, real, deeply human stories; if you can't relate, you need to start living!

From How to Build a Girl, by Caitlin Moran:

     A teenage (ever-nastier-cuz-so-much-(sl)eas(z)ier) music critic (fr'real in real life, so who knows re book, except how much a true enthusiast she is re sex; God I love that about her!):

     'The music where I DO find myself in the songs, all written by sexy, clever, angry freaks.  1992 is full of them.'  Ie, The Manic Street Preachers; Suede; Marc Bolan and David Bowie, laying 'a cluch of dragon eggs in 1973, and they've just begun to hatch.

     'And, most dazzlingly of all, the girly-girls themselves.  Women.

     'For there's a storm in America, and the rain has now blown in over here, just in time for me:  Riot Grrrl.  A bunch of women like some League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen – writing fanzines, putting on female-only gigs, hanging out with each other, trying to make a space in the crowded, swampy jungle of rock that is for women alone.

     'They are all warriors, dressed in petticoats and sturdy boots – Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill paid for her guitar by stripping; Courtney Love punches out people who abuse her.

     'Courtney Love punched K Hanna too, but this is the way of the rock star – let us not forget Charlie Watts punching Mick Jagger after Jagger called him 'my drummer.' 

     'You're MY SINGER,' Watts snarled, before adjusting his cuffs, and walking away.  Sometimes, in the jungle, you fight each other.  The jungle is hot, and you get angry.'

     'The songs they write are like drunken conversations with friends, in pubs, at the point just before you start dancing on the tables.  'Rebel Grrl' by Bikini Kill has K Hanna starting to describe a proud, odd woman as if she hates her, but then explains that this girl is her hero, and she wants to fuck her.'