Literature is the space of contradiction and ambiguity, and that’s what interests me.
Our time is always apocalyptic, and we are each responsible for the apocalypse. The literary task lies in marking this ‘end of times’ in our work.
These are the basic principles of organizing: you have to have a goal that’s winnable, do-able and reasonable, and you have to have a way of winning it. You can’t repeat strategies that don’t work.
Essays are all about being somewhere else. Not only in space, but somewhere else in time, as well — of having another identity, another persona.
God is often not very dramatic — try sitting through a hundred sermons — but the interiority of considering God, and family, and faith — can be.
Reading theory, like reading poetry, is exhilarating.
In this case, the Internet, as bad a source it can be, is great for seeing if certain people use certain phrases. Like does anybody literally say “Dreams follow the mouth?”
This idea that the Communist legacy is only one of misery and death is a remnant of the Cold War that the Left must abandon.
My imagined Gaza was real to me.
I am always on my way somewhere. I have never reached my destination.