[Perhaps this is a good thing. And potentially dangerous for a novelist. The dangers are obvious. A deadening earnestness and political self-awareness that do not meet the delight component that is a story's bottom line. Too much ideological hand-wringing. We've all sat through readings by authors whose politics we admire but whose prose cannot hold us. We are reminded of the definition of] camp ... a seriousness that fails. |
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. |
A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it. |
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. |
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter |
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. |
AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder. |
AIDS occupies such a large part in our awareness because of what it has been taken to represent. It seems the very model of all the catastrophes privileged populations feel await them. |
Al forms of consensus about ''great'' books and ''perennial'' problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of ''what is already known.'' Those great books don't only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies. |
All photographs are memento mori. |
Although none of the rules for becoming more alive is valid, it is healthy to keep on formulating them. |
Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. |
American "energy." . . is the energy of violence, of free-floating resentment and anxiety unleashed by chronic cultural dislocations which must be, for the most part, ferociously sublimated. This energy has mainly been sublimated into crude materialism. |
Anthropology has always struggled with an intense, fascinated repulsion towards its subject. . . . [The anthropologist] submits himself to the exotic to confirm his own inner alienation as an urban intellectual. |
Any critic is entitled to wrong judgments, of course. But certain lapses of judgment indicate the radical failure of an entire sensibility. |