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Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

1.5K followers 550 following 97 posts

The Loneliest Band in France (Texas Review Press, 2020) ¶ Colorado Book Award, American Library in Paris Coups de Cœur, Clay Reynolds Prize ¶ www.dylanfisher.net ¶ he/him ¶ T1D ¶📍PDX

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Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

So tell me ... why is the John Templeton Foundation (an org with a history of financing conservative/libertarian/anti-science projects and think tanks) funding literary magazines?

June 2, 2025 at 2:49 PM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

From Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute: “It seemed certain that, for as long as possible, she would have to wait, remain motionless like that, do nothing, not move, that the highest degree of comprehension, real intelligence, was that, to undertake nothing, keep as still as possible, do nothing.”

It appeared certain, when you opened the door and saw the stairway filled with relentless, impersonal, colorless calm, a stairway that did not seem to have retained the slightest trace of the persons who had walked on it, not the slightest memory of their presence, when you stood behind the dining room window and looked at the house fronts, the shops, the old women and little children walking along the street, it seemed certain that, for as long as possible, she would have to wait, remain motionless like that, do nothing, not move, that the highest degree of comprehension, real intelligence, was that, to undertake nothing, keep as still as possible, do nothing.

May 22, 2025 at 3:46 PM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Today’s dog photo. Sisters on a rainy day.

May 7, 2025 at 5:25 PM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Leonard Cohen (via @zackamenetz.bsky.social at Emory’s 2025 Science on Spiritual Health Symposium): “I would say categorically at this moment that in any junkie's kitchen there is a greater contact with the spiritual world than any given synagogue on the North American continent.”

“Judaism is a secretion with which an eastern tribe surrounded a divine irritation, a direct confrontation with the absolute. That happened once in history and we still feel the warmth of that confrontation, divorced as we are from the terms of it. That happened a long time ago.

Today we covet the pearl but we are unwilling to support the irritation, the burning nucleus, and our spiritual life today has the exact consistency of an unclean oyster, and it stinks to heaven.

I would say categorically at this moment that in any junkie's kitchen there is a greater contact with the spiritual world than any given synagogue on the North American continent.”

April 27, 2025 at 7:40 PM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Today’s dog photo. A tired dog.

April 22, 2025 at 1:18 AM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Flannery O’Connor: “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. But for this occasion, we may leave such misappli- cations aside and consider the kind of fiction that may be called grotesque with good reason, because of a directed in- tention that way on the part of the author.

In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to ob- serve everyday, or which the ordinary man may never expe- rience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ig- nored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone try- ing to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters in these novels are alive in spite of these things. They have an inner coherence, if not always a coher- ence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the un- expected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider.

All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality.

April 20, 2025 at 9:20 PM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Caught the dogs frolicking in the grass this afternoon! Good for them!

April 19, 2025 at 12:54 AM

Dylan Fisher

@dylanfisher.bsky.social

Italo Calvino on his Invisible Cities: “The desire of my Marco Polo is to find the hidden reasons which bring men to live in cities: reasons which remain valid over and above any crisis.”