I don’t know if this has any relevance, but when I was writing Metropolitan I would stop and read passages of Pride and Prejudice as a palette cleanser.
When will we notice that childhood spankings are a seed and potent fertilizer of rape culture?
I often have to think about Brecht: “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”
“I can’t fucking do this anymore.”
The default world of literary fiction is a very professional class, with occasional sprinkles of They Closed the Mill and Now We’re All on OxyContin. I wanted to be more matter of fact about post-industrial small town life.
Don Quixote is a novel about how sure we humans are about what we know to be true, how dreadfully wrong we can be, and how incredibly funny that fact is.
There is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies, and where individuals are so oblivious to facts
One can call for interdisciplinarity all one wants, but if one is not actually engaging people in practices that allow them to embody the capacity to be interdisciplinary, then it’s not going to work.
Paradoxically one way to cover a conspiracy is to present it as a conspiracy theory and count on the fact that it will not be taken seriously.
Any art is a sacrifice. Such an investment. So much time spent alone. So little praise. It’s not legitimized as a profession. Money is scarce. It’s not something that even if you’re immensely successful most people will be aware of.