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.
I think you can’t really have a philosophy of pessimism, you can only have the reverse. It’s something that questions the philosophical enterprise itself, but it does so from inside—pessimism is against philosophy, but in the “key” of philosophy.
Book readers miss the disposable nature of newspaper comics. It was a free public utility. They miss seeing the strips surrounded by classified ads placed by actual suffering people.
I’ve always marveled at the architectural lexicon and the placid furiousness with which it names every feature, every ornament, every force.
I think the South has yet to reconcile itself to its own complexity. It’s not exclusive to the region, but I think we have this sense that we need to hold onto one single narrative.