Essay |
“The Latest Scar in Time”
“May I clarify more of the ‘crack-up’? The non-speaking self draped itself with a different garter and gown, of the reading and reflective self — a near impossible person to share with others in mixed company …”
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“Filling In the Shadows”
“Perhaps our unconscious need to reclaim our identity — our sense of self — explains why we go to great lengths to replace the body’s lost accessories — the ones we can live without but often define us in others’ eyes.”
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“Maggot and Tare: From Elegy to Self-Elegy”
“The separation between the dead and the living becomes, if only fleetingly, no longer ‘definitive and fateful.’ It is instead a frail telepathy, a murmured voice at a séance, a portal between life and afterlife …”
Essay |
“In the Beginning: the Importance of Wildlife in the Development of Human Thought”
“He named man and woman but left the animals nameless. A horrific act — not to be named. But left the naming to Adam as a stronghold against the void.”
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“Remembered Bodies”
“I hear the last lines of ‘Leaflets,’ which Adrienne Rich published in 1969: I’m thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need. And all my body’s forces of animation try to tell me, still, that the task to need better ought to be our common business.”
Essay |
“This Lviv”
“Your memories of the Holocaust, did they produce any true anguish in me at the time, or did I feel they were sad fossils imprinted in bygone air? Yet those memories give rise to the rough gnarls in me that hurt my gut.”
Essay |
“At The Dakota”
“So I stripped a lot of paint — and later, upon becoming a principal in the firm and eventually the president (a title which simply indicated that I did everything myself), I restored a number of the larger apartments in the building to their former 19th-century glory.”
Essay |
from How To Steal A Culture
“Don’t go to her house. Don’t visit her neighborhood. You can’t be around too many black people at once — you should hit just the right note of not racist, slightly ignorant.”
Essay |
“Art of Revision / Act of War”
“A Russian colleague took me to a restaurant with Soviet decor and menu. He entertained me with stories from his Soviet past. A show for the visiting American.”
Essay |
“One Word Makes A World”
“ ‘Every word matters’ goes the truism, which ought to prove true with the greatest poems (or at least the greatest lyric poems); but does it, if put to the test? … I’m thinking about writing in which one word releases an entirely new way of reading it, otherwise unavailable.”
Essay |
“The Novella: Some Thoughts About the Uncanny Genre”
“When we’ve finished reading a novella, we may be left a bit bereft, even bewildered. Yet if the novella were any longer, the plot might lose the ambiguity, the stroke of irrationality, the heightened state of tension that novellas make possible.”
Essay |
“Washington, DC” and “Mars”
“Although today they aren’t as central to his legacy, Noguchi sculpted many heads. In the early years, they made up the greater part of his practice.”
Essay |
Uncanny Pretending: on Keith Kopka’s Count Four
“He makes us ‘test’ not only ‘the materiality of the phenomena,’ as Freud writes, but also the morality of it … where — especially for a privileged white man — beauty and mastery are not the product of repressed, animated atrocity.”
Essay |
“Going to the Mall”
“The mall felt like a place where dreams came true. The mall promised new shoes for school each year, a new toy if I was ‘good.’ The mall was a place where I could have ice cream at 2:00 pm …”
Essay |
“The Hours, Passing”
“Always, even when so ill with depression that I could hardly lift my head, I have looked for what shines around me — a ditch of spring rain in Oregon, filled with the light of reflected stars and hundreds of new frogs singing …”