“William Wells Brown is one of the great American patron saints of dodginess.”
“I just want to help people get closer to the feelings they want to feel.”
It was important to understand Toussaint Louverture’s importance as an icon in people’s hearts today, and for that I had to be in Haiti.
For me if desire were not so impossibly complicated I would not be interested in writing about it. Perhaps pushing desire toward death is a way to banalize, to some extent, what is so incredibly complicated.
Recommend edits and hope that doesn’t lose you some friends.
The Best Interviews from 2016
I wanted a structure that could consider the experience and ethics of that sick time—trapped on a couch before a screen, world’s helpless observer—and could comprehend whatever healing occurred in nonredemptive terms.
The country’s obsession with the true, its preference for non-fiction over fiction is symptomatic of two things — a lack of cultural imagination and a fear of the unknown. As if nonfiction can make you feel at ease and the world a safe place if you can KNOW this world. It’s not and you can’t.
Albert Murray went so far as to redefine race in terms of idiom — he sought to redefine ethnic difference as idiomatic difference.
I think that understanding a particular philosophical position means that you try your best to understand the particular geographical and cultural space it emerges from.