This migration was a singular, watershed moment in American history because it was the first time people who had been legally, forcibly held back for centuries were actually able to make a decision on their own, to leave, and to have the potential to live out their God given gifts.
But literary academia is especially funny, and especially the study of the novel. You are in the world as a person but your job is studying. It is a very comic situation, but also sad. It is like the Russian novel, sad and funny at the same time.
That impulse, which is a great impulse, is one of the things that rock is about: you want to be authentic. I think that’s why it’s so hard to be an aging rocker. Aging is all about concession: concession to the body, concession to other people.
Whereas writing, you know, you’re alone, fucking nailing yourself to the cross on that lonely white page with every word. Trekking your lonely footsteps across that virgin white snow, that endless tundra.
The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things.
Nothing seems more uncanny than death. You know the story they tell about the Dredgeman where he’s literally ripped out of the Universe? I think that speaks to the horror and the shock of death, there’s nothing we can ever imagine to be more truly uncanny than that.
We live in a culture that has never really encouraged artists; that has never prioritized art as something worthy to do with your life. …. Any movement that can encourage people, that says, “Yeah, you can do this,” is worthwhile.
I could see the magic of these adult faces becoming children, reflecting the pathos of the stage, being so unguarded. It’s a magical thing when that happens. They’ve lost their self-consciousness and they are breathing literally as one person in the audience.
I can try to tell the facts, but I still end up with fictions. (I believe history is a many-layered fiction.) I can’t include all the pertinent details, and without them, I can only tell a partial truth. But does it matter? Yes, I think it matters. I wish I could do more justice to the world.
For Lucretius, the idea of a “swerve” was what secured the idea of human freedom. All you needed was the tiniest movement of the atoms …. It’s tiny, but it actually turns out to have huge consequences.