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Part Of The Puzzle, Surely, Lies In The Disconnect Between Official Rhetoric And Lived Realities. Americans Are Constantly Extolling “traditions”; Litanies To Family Values Are At The Center Of Every Politician’s Discourse. And Yet The Culture Of America Is Extremely Corrosive Of Family Life, Indeed Of All Traditions Except Those Redefined As “identities” That Fit In The Larger Patterns Of Distinctiveness, Cooperation, And Openness To Innovation.

-Susan Sontag

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Part Of The Puzzle,

Susan Sontag

...

Part Of The Puzzle, Surely, Lies In The Disconnect Between Official Rhetoric And Lived Realities. Americans Are Constantly Extolling “traditions”; Litanies To Family Values Are At The Center Of Every Politician’s Discourse. And Yet The Culture Of America Is Extremely Corrosive Of Family Life, Indeed Of All Traditions Except Those Redefined As “identities” That Fit In The Larger Patterns Of Distinctiveness, Cooperation, And Openness To Innovation.

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His View Of Time, And Of Change, Has Become That Of Most Elderly People: He Hates Change, Since For Him - For His Body - Any Change Is For The Worse. And If There Is To Be Change, Then He Wants It To Happen Quickly, So It Does Not Use Up Too Much Of The Time Remaining To Him.

Mad People = People Who Stand Alone And Burn. I'm Attracted To Them Because They Give Me Permission To Do The Same.

Surrealism In Painting Amounted To Little More Than The Contents Of A Meagerly Stocked Dream World: A Few Witty Fantasies, Mostly Wet Dreams And Agoraphobic Nightmares.

The Public Voice In The Theater Today Is Crude And Raucous, And, All Too Often, Weak-minded.

One Criticizes In Others What One Recognizes And Despises In Oneself. For Example, An Artist Who Is Revolted By Another’s Ambitiousness.

We Are Told We Must Choose - The Old Or The New. In Fact, We Must Choose Both. What Is A Life If Not A Series Of Negotiations Between The Old And The New?

The Capacity To Be Overwhelmed By The Beautiful Is Astonishingly Sturdy And Survives Amidst The Harshest Distractions.

It Is Not Suffering As Such That Is Most Deeply Feared But Suffering That Degrades.

World Suffering

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

Intelligence Is Not Necessarily A Good Thing, Something To Value Or Cultivate. It's More Like A Fifth Wheel - Necessary Or Desirable When Things Break Down. When Things Go Well, It's Better To Be Stupid ... Stupidity Is As Much A Value As Intelligence.

The Only Interesting Answers Are Those That Destroy The Questions.

Music Is At Once The Most Wonderful, The Most Alive Of All The Arts- It Is The Most Abstract, The Most Perfect, The Most Pure- And The Most Sensual. I Listen With My Body And It Is My Body That Aches In Response To The Passion And Pathos Embodied In This Music.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable.

Physical Beauty

With More People, There Are More Voices To Tune Out.

The Discovery Of The Good Taste Of Bad Taste Can Be Very Liberating. The Man Who Insists On High And Serious Pleasures Is Depriving Himself Of Pleasure; He Continually Restricts What He Can Enjoy; In The Constant Exercise Of His Good Taste He Will Eventually Price Himself Out Of The Market, So To Speak. Here Camp Taste Supervenes Upon Good Taste As A Daring And Witty Hedonism. It Makes The Man Of Good Taste Cheerful, Where Before He Ran The Risk Of Being Chronically Frustrated. It Is Good For The Digestion.

The Truth Is Balance. However The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

Time Eventually Positions Most Photographs, Even The Most Amateurish, At The Level Of Art.

Taste Tends To Develop Very Unevenly. It's Rare That The Same Person Has Good Visual Taste And Good Taste In People And Taste In Ideas.

I Do Not Think White America Is Committed To Granting Equality To The American Negro... This Is A Passionately Racist Country; It Will Continue To Be So In The Foreseeable Future.

Photography Is, First Of All, A Way Of Seeing.

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart.

Photographed Images Do Not Seem To Be Statements About The World So Much As Pieces Of It, Miniatures Of Reality That Anyone Can Make Or Acquire

Decline Of The Letter, The Rise Of The Notebook! One Doesn't Write To Others Any More; One Writes To Oneself.

Pornography Is One Of The Branches Of Literature - Science Fiction Is Another - Aiming At Disorientation, At Psychic Dislocation.

Ambition, If It Feeds At All, Does So On The Ambition Of Others.

I Have Always Been Full Of Lust - As I Am Now - But I Have Always Been Placing Conceptual Obstacles In My Own Path.

The Wisdom Of Literature Is Quite Antithetical To Having Opinions. 'nothing Is My Last Word About Anything,' Said Henry James. Furnishing Opinions, Even Correct Opinions - Whenever Asked - Cheapens What Novelists And Poets Do Best, Which Is To Sponsor Reflectiveness, To Pursue Complexity. Information Will Never Replace Illumination.

War Is Elective. It Is Not An Inevitable State Of Affairs. War Is Not The Weather.

Shouting Has Never Made Me Understand Anything.

People Don't Become Inured To What They Are Shown - If That's The Right Way To Describe What Happens - Because Of The Quantity Of Images Dumped On Them. It Is Passivity That Dulls Feeling. The States Described As Apathy, Moral Or Emotional Anesthesia, Are Full Of Feelings; The Feelings Are Rage And Frustration.

Remember When You Hear Yourself Saying One Day That You Don't Have Time Anymore To Read Or Listen To Music Or Look At Paintings Or Go To The Movies Or Do Whatever Feeds Your Head Now. Then You're Getting Old. That Means They Got You, After All.

... Liberal Intellectualstend To Have A Classical Theory Of Politics, In Which The State Has A Monopoly Of Power; Hoping Thatthose In Positions Of Authority May Prove To Be Enlightened Men, Wielding Power Justly, They Are Natural, If Cautious, Allies Of The "establishment.

Photographs Objectify: They Turn An Event Or A Person Into Something That Can Be Possessed.

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World. That Means Trying To Understand, Take In, Connect With, What Wickedness Human Beings Are Capable Of; And Not Be Corrupted - Made Cynical, Superficial - By This Understanding.

A Great Writer Has All 4 - But You Can Still Be A Good Writer With Only 1 And 2.

What, I Ask, Drives Me To Disorder? How Can I Diagnose Myself? All I Feel, Most Immediately, Is The Most Anguished Need For Physical Love And Mental Companionship -

[o]ne Person's 'barbarian' Is Another Person's 'just Doing What Everybody Else Is Doing.

Camp Is A Solvent Of Morality. It Neutralizes Moral Indignation, Sponsors Playfulness.

Moral Indignation

Norman Mailer Records In His Recent Essays And Public Appearances His Perfecting Of Himself As A Virile Instrument Of Letters; He Is Perpetually In Training, Getting Ready To Launch Himself From His Own Missile Pad Into A High, Beautiful Orbit; Even His Failures May Yet Be Turned To Successes.

The Best Emotions To Write Out Of Are Anger And Fear Or Dread. The Least Energizing Emotion To Write Out Of Is Admiration. It Is Very Difficult To Write Out Of Because The Basic Feeling That Goes With Admiration Is A Passive Contemplative Mood.

Despite The Illusion Of Giving Understanding, What Seeing Through Photographs Really Invites Is An Acquisitive Relation To The World That Nourishes Aesthetic Awareness And Promotes Emotional Detachment.

I Guess I Think I'm Writing For People Who Are Smarter Than I Am, Because Then I'll Be Doing Something That's Worth Their Time. I'd Be Very Afraid To Write From A Position Where I Consciously Thought I Was Smarter Than Most Of My Readers.

The Love Of The Famous, Like All Strong Passions, Is Quite Abstract. Its Intensity Can Be Measured Mathematically, And It Is Independent Of Persons.

That's What A Community Is: Taking For Granted Certain Assumptions, Not Having To Start From Zero Every Time. This Is No Longer True.

If Literature Has Engaged Me As A Project, First As A Reader, Then As A Writer, It Is As An Extension Of My Sympathies To Other Selves, Other Domains, Other Dreams, Other Territories.

The History Of Art Is A Sequence Of Successful Transgressions.

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The Camera Makes Everyone A Tourist In Other People's Reality, And Eventually In One's Own.

Our Very Sense Of Situation Is Now Articulated By The Camera's Interventions. The Omnipresence Of Cameras Persuasively Suggests That Time Consists Of Interesting Events, Events Worth Photographing. This, In Turn, Makes It Easy To Feel That Any Event, Once Underway, And Whatever Its Moral Character, Should Be Allowed To Complete Itself - So That Something Else Can Be Brought Into The World, The Photograph.

There Are Some Elements In Life - Above All, Sexual Pleasure - About Which It Isn't Necessary To Have A Position.

It Is The Action Of Bodies On Bodies, Not Bodies On Minds, Which The Crowd Enjoys.

Like The Collector, The Photographer Is Animated By A Passion That, Even When It Appears To Be For The Present, Is Linked To A Sense Of The Past.

Writing Is A Little Door. Some Fantasies, Like Big Pieces Of Furniture, Won’t Come Through.

The Writers Or Artists I Write About Are Not Necessarily Those I Care Most About (shakespeare Is Still My Favourite Writer) But Those Whose Work I Feel Has Been Neglected.

The Freakish Is No Longer A Private Zone, Difficult Of Access. People Who Are Bizarre, In Sexual Disgrace, Emotionally Violent Areseen Daily On The Newsstands, On Tv, In The Subways. Hobbesian Man Roams The Streets, Quite Visible, With Glitter In His Hair.

Aids Obliges People To Think Of Sex As Having, Possibly, The Direst Consequences: Suicide. Or Murder.

Today Everything Exists To End In A Photograph.

Art Is Not Only About Something; It Is Something. A Work Of Art Is A Thing In The World, Not Just A Text Or Commentary On The World.

That Even An Apocalypse Can Be Made To Seem Part Of The Ordinary Horizon Of Expectation Constitutes An Unparalleled Violence That Is Being Done To Our Sense Of Reality, To Our Humanity.

In ‘life,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Work. In ‘work,’ I Don’t Want To Be Reduced To My Life.

What We Need Is To Use What We Have.

Use It Or Lose It

I'm Only Interested In People Engaged In A Project Of Self-transformation.

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead. Pay Attention. It's All About Paying Attention. Attention Is Vitality. It Connects You With Others. It Makes You Eager. Stay Eager.

Marriage Is A Sort Of Tacit Hunting In Couples. The World All In Couples, Each Couple In Its Own Little House, Watching Its Own Little Interests And Stewing In Its Own Little Privacy - It's The Most Repulsive Thing In The World. One's Got To Get Rid Of The Exclusiveness Of Married Love.

Illnesses Have Always Been Used As Metaphors To Enliven Charges That A Society Was Corrupt Or Unjust.

My Emotional Life: Dialectic Between Craving For Privacy And Need To Submerge Myself In A Passionate Relationship To Another.

Although Photography Generates Works That Can Be Called Art-it Requires Subjectivity, It Can Lie, It Gives Aesthetic Pleasure-photography Is Not, To Begin With, An Art Form At All. Like Language, It Is A Medium In Which Works Of Art (among Other Things) Are Made.

In America, The Photographer Is Not Simply The Person Who Records The Past, But The One Who Invents It.

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I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

Any Disease That Is Treated As A Mystery And Acutely Enough Feared Will Be Felt To Be Morally, If Not Literally, Contagious.

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Self-exposure Is Commendable In Art Only When It Is Of A Quality And Complexity That Allows Other People To Learn About Themselves From It.

The Easiest Thing In The World For Me Is To Pay Attention.

Religion Is Probably, After Sex, The Second Oldest Resource Which Human Beings Have Available To Them For Blowing Their Minds.

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Most People In This Society Who Aren't Actively Mad Are, At Best, Reformed Or Potential Lunatics.

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Tamed As It May Be, Sexuality Remains One Of The Demonic Forces In Human Consciousness - Pushing Us At Intervals Close To Taboo And Dangerous Desires, Which Range From The Impulse To Commit Sudden Arbitrary Violence Upon Another Person To The Voluptuous Yearning For The Extinction Of One's Consciousness, For Death Itself. Even On The Level Of Simple Physical Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles Having An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

To Camp Is A Mode Of Seduction... Behind The 'straight' Public Sense In Which Something Can Be Taken, One Has Found A Private Zany Experience Of The Thing.

Someone Who Is Perennially Surprised That Depravity Exists, Who Continues To Feel Disillusioned (even Incredulous) When Confronted With Evidence Of What Humans Are Capable Of Inflicting In The Way Of Gruesome, Hands-on Cruelties Upon Other Humans, Has Not Reached Moral Or Psychological Adulthood.

In Most Modern Instances, Interpretation Amounts To The Philistine Refusal To Leave The Work Of Art Alone. Real Art Has The Capacity To Make Us Nervous. By Reducing The Work Of Art To Its Content And Then Interpreting That, One Tames The Work Of Art. Interpretation Makes Art Manageable, Conformable.

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

Although None Of The Rules For Becoming More Alive Is Valid, It Is Healthy To Keep On Formulating Them.

War Is A Culture, Bellicosity Is Addictive, Defeat For A Community That Imagines Itself To Be History's Eternal Victim Can Be As Intoxicating As Victory. How Long Will It Take For The Serbs To Realize That The Milosevic Years Have Been An Unmitigated Disaster For Serbia, The Net Result Of Milosevic's Policies Being The Economic And Cultural Ruin Of The Entire Region, Including Serbia, For Several Generations? Alas, One Thing We Can Be Sure Of, That Will Not Happen Soon.

The Need For Truth Is Not Constant; No More Than Is The Need For Repose. An Idea Which Is A Distortion May Have A Greater Intellectual Thrust Than The Truth; It May Better Serve The Needs Of The Spirit, Which Vary. The Truth Is Balance, But The Opposite Of Truth, Which Is Unbalance, May Not Be A Lie.

Many Things In The World Have Not Been Named; And Many Things, Even If They Have Been Named, Have Never Been Described.

Strictly Speaking, It Is Doubtful That A Photograph Can Help Us Understand Anything.

The Romantic Treatment Of Death Asserts That People Were Made Singular, Made More Interesting, By Their Illnesses.

The Principal Instances Of Mass Violence In The World Today Are Those Committed By Governments Within Their Own Legally Recognized Borders.

People Robbed Of Their Past Seem To Make The Most Fervent Picture Takers, At Home And Abroad.

The Taste For Worst-case Scenarios Reflects The Need To Master Fear Of What Is Felt To Be Uncontrollable. It Also Expresses An Imaginative Complicity With Disaster.

Worst Case Scenario

There Is An Aggression Implicit In Every Use Of The Camera.

Do Stuff. Be Clenched, Curious. Not Waiting For Inspiration's Shove Or Society's Kiss On Your Forehead.

Cancer Is A Demonic Pregnancy.

The Fact That Illness Is Associated With The Poor --who Are, From The Perspective Of The Privileged, Aliens In One's Midst --reinforces The Association Of Illness With The Foreign With An Exotic, Often Primitive Place.

You Have To Sink Way Down To A Level Of Hopelessness And Desperation To Find The Book That You Can Write.

There Are More And More Taboos About Calling Something, Anything, Ugly.

Theories That Diseases Are Caused By Mental States And Can Be Cured By Will Power, Are Always An Index Of How Much Is Not Understood About The Physical Terrain Of A Disease.

Books Are Not Only The Arbitrary Sum Of Our Dreams, And Our Memory. They Also Give Us The Model Of Self-transcende Nce.

God, Living Is Enormous!

I Have To Come Out Of The Closet Of The Third Person And Speak In A More Direct Way.

Time Exists In Order That Everything Doesn’t Happen All At Once…and Space Exists So That It Doesn’t All Happen To You.

While A Painting, Even One That Meets Photographic Standards Of Resemblance, Is Never More Than The Stating Of An Interpretation, A Photograph Is Never Less Than The Registering Of An Emanation (light Waves Reflected By Objects) — A Material Vestige Of Its Subject In A Way That No Painting Can Be.

One Man Thinks Before He Acts. Another Man Thinks After He Acts. Each Is Of The Opinon That The Other Thinks Too Much.

Superficial To Understand The Journal As Just A Receptable For One's Private, Secret Thoughts - Like A Confidante Who Is Deaf, Dumb, And Illiterate. In The Journal I Do Not Just Express Myself More Openly Than I Could To Any Person; I Create Myself. ... The Journal Is A Vehicle For My Sense Of Selfhood. It Represents Me As Emotionally And Spiritually Independent. Therefore (alas) It Does Not Simply Record My Actual, Daily Life But Rather - In Many Cases - Offers An Alternative To It.

The Process Of Building A Self And Its Works Is Always Too Slow. One Is Always In Arrears To Oneself.

Even More Than Comparing Society To A Family, Comparing It To A Body Makes An Authoritarian Ordering Of Society Seem Inevitable, Immutable.

One Can Know Worlds One Has Not Experienced, Choose A Response To Life That Has Never Been Offered, Create An Inwardness Utterly Strong And Fruitful.

One Set Of Messages Of The Society We Live In Is: Consume. Grow. Do What You Want. Amuse Yourselves.

The Appetite For Thinking Must Be Regulated, As All Sensible People Know, For It May Stifle One's Life.

Authoritarian Political Ideologies Have A Vested Interest In Promoting Fear, A Sense Of The Imminence Of Takeover By Aliens And Real Diseases Are Useful Material.

To Me, Literature Is A Calling, Even A Kind Of Salvation. It Connects Me With An Enterprise That Is Over 2,000 Years Old. What Do We Have From The Past? Art And Thought. That’s What Lasts. That’s What Continues To Feed People And Give Them An Idea Of Something Better.

What Interests Me Is To Understand The Nature Of The Modern.

Knowing A Great Deal About What Is In The World Art, Catastrophe, The Beauties Of Nature Through Photographic Images, People Are Frequently Disappointed, Surprised, Unmoved When The See The Real Thing. For Photographic Images Tend To Subtract Feeling From Something We Experience At First Hand And The Feelings They Do Arouse Are, Largely, Not Those We Have In Real Life. Often Something Disturbs Us More In Photographed Form Than It Does When We Actually Experience It.

Courage Is Morally Neutral.

Photography Is A Kind Of Overstatement, A Heroic Copulation With The Material World.

Again: There Is Nothing Inherently Superior About Resistance. All Our Claims For The Righteousness Of Resistance Rest On The Rightness Of The Claim That The Resisters Are Acting In The Name Of Justice. And The Justice Of The Cause Does Not Depend On, And Is Not Enhanced By, The Virtue Of Those Who Make The Assertion. It Depends First And Last On The Truth Of A Description Of A State Of Affairs That Is, Truly, Unjust And Unnecessary.

To Photograph People Is To Violate Them, By Seeing Them As They Never See Themselves, By Having Knowledge Of Them That They Can Never Have.

I Don’t Care About Someone Being Intelligent; Any Situation Between People, When They Are Really Human With Each Other, Produces ‘intelligence.

Most Writers I Know Have Switched To Word Processors. I Haven't But I'm Very Curious About Why People Like It So Much. I Think It Has Something To Do With The Fact That At Last Writing, Which Has Been Such An Old-fashioned, Artisanal Activity, Even On A Typewriter, Has Now Entered The Central Domain Of Modern Experience Which Is That Of Making Copies, Being Involved In The World Of Duplicates And Machine-mediated Activities.

I Think That There Is Generally Less Of A Community And That The Fragmentation Of The Left Is A Symptom. I Think That It Is Less And Less Possible To Take For Granted Certain Cultural References.

The Aim Of All Commentary On Art Now Should Be To Make Works Of Art - And, By Analogy, Our Own Experience - More, Rather Than Less, Real To Us. The Function Of Criticism Should Be To Show How It Is What It Is, Even That It Is What It Is, Rather Than To Show What It Means.

Sanity Is A Cozy Lie.

For Those Who Live Neither With Religious Consolations About Death Nor With A Sense Of Death (or Of Anything Else) As Natural, Death Is The Obscene Mystery, The Ultimate Affront, The Thing That Cannot Be Controlled. It Can Only Be Denied.

Love Words, Agonize Over Sentences. And Pay Attention To The World.

I Don't Want To Express Alienation. It Isn't What I Feel. I'm Interested In Various Kinds Of Passionate Engagement. All My Work Says Be Serious, Be Passionate, Wake Up.

As Objects Of Contemplation, Images Of The Atrocious Can Answer To Several Different Needs. To Steel Oneself Against Weakness. To Make Oneself More Numb. To Acknowledge The Existence Of The Incorrigible.

The Western Memory Museum Is Now Mostly A Visual One.

The Photograph Is Like A Quotation, Or A Maxim Or Proverb. Each Of Us Mentally Stocks Hundreds Of Photographs, Subject To Instant Recall.

The Shock Of Photographed Atrocities Wears Off With Repeated Viewings, Just As The Surprise And Bemusement Felt The First Time One Sees A Pornographic Movie Wear Off After One Sees A Few More.

What I Expect From Writers-and From Myself As A Writer-is To Articulate A Complex View Of Things. To Incite Us To Be More Compassionate. To Orchestrate Our Mourning. And To Celebrate Ecstasy.

One Of The Author's Most Ancient Roles Is To Call The Community To Account For Its Hypocrisies And Bad Faith.

Instead Of Expecting All And Being Lowered Into Despair Each Time I Get Less, I Expect Nothing Now And, Occasionally, I Get A Little, And Am More Than A Little Happy.

One Task Of Literature Is To Formulate Questions And Construct Counterstatements To The Reigning Pieties. And Even When Art Is Not Oppositional, The Arts Gravitate Toward Contrariness. Literature Is Dialogue: Responsiveness. Literature Might Be Described As The History Of Human Responsiveness To What Is Alive And What Is Moribund As Cultures Evolve And Interact With One Another.

In The Final Analysis, Style Is Art. And Art Is Nothing More Or Less Than Various Modes Of Stylized, Dehumanized Representation.

The Only Transformation That Interests Me Is A Total Transformation - However Minute

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives.

What Pornography Is Really About, Ultimately, Isn't Sex But Death.

Images Anesthetize. An Event Known Through Photographs Certainly Becomes More Real Than It Would Have Been If One Had Never Seen The Photographs ... But After Repeated Exposure To Images It Also Becomes Less Real. ... 'concerned' Photography Has Done At Least As Much To Deaden Conscience As To Arouse It.

A Personality Is Our Way Of Being For Others. We Hope That Others Will Meet Us Half Way Or More, Gratify Our Needs, Be Our Audience, Soothe Our Fears.

The Particular Qualities And Intentions Of Photographs Tend To Be Swallowed Up In The Generalized Pathos Of Time Past.

I Want To Save My Soul, That Timid Wind.

All Struggle, All Resistance Is -- Must Be -- Concrete. And All Struggle Has A Global Resonance. If Not Here, Then There. If Not Now, Then Soon. Elsewhere As Well As Here.

I Think Part Of The Success Which Structuralist Or Post-structuralist Thought In Critical Theory Has Had In Literary Studies In American Universities Is Due To A Theoretical Vacuum.

American Universities

As One Passion Begins To Fail It Is Necessary To Form Another, For The Whole Art Of Going Through Life Tolerably Is To Keep Oneself Eager About Anything.

When You Are Writing, You Are - From Society's Point Of View - Only Producing The First Version Which Will Then Be Processed And Recycled.

On The Level Of Simple Sensation And Mood, Making Love Surely Resembles An Epileptic Fit At Least As Much As, If Not More Than, It Does Eating A Meal Or Conversing With Someone.

Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

Compassion Is An Unstable Emotion. It Needs To Be Translated Into Action, Or It Withers.

The Highest Vocation Of Photography Is To Explain Man To Man.

To Be An Artist Or A Writer Is To Be This Weird Thing - A Hand Worker In An Era Of Mass Production.

Any Critic Is Entitled To Wrong Judgments, Of Course. But Certain Lapses Of Judgment Indicate The Radical Failure Of An Entire Sensibility.

Photographs Trade Simultaneously On The Prestige Of Art And The Magic Of The Real.

Everyone Who Lives In An Industrialized Society Is Obliged Gradually To Give Up The Past, But In Certain Countries, Such As The United States And Japan, The Break With The Past Has Been Particularly Traumatic.

I Am Profoundly Uncertain How To Write. I Know What I Love And What I Like, Because It's A Direct Passionate Response. But When I Write, I'm Very Uncertain Whether It's Good Enough. That Is, Of Course, The Writer's Agony.

The Becoming Of Man Is The History Of The Exhaustion Of His Possibilities.

Growing Older Is Mainly An Ordeal Of The Imagination-a Moral Disease, A Social Pathology.

In Good Films, There Is Always A Directness That Entirely Frees Us From The Itch To Interpret.

We Live Under Continual Threat Of Two Equally Fearful, But Seemingly Opposed Destinies: Unremitting Banality And Inconceivable Terror. It Is Fantasy, Served Out In Large Rations By The Popular Arts, Which Allows Most People To Cope With These Twin Specters.

As Photographs Give People An Imaginary Possession Of A Past That Is Unreal, They Also Help People To Take Possession Of Space In Which They Are Insecure.

I Don't Consider Devotion To The Past A Form Of Snobbery. Just One Of The More Disastrous Forms Of Unrequited Love.

Unrequited Love

A Good Book Is An Education Of The Heart. It Enlarges Your Sense Of Human Possibility What Human Nature Is Of What Happens In The World. It's A Creator Of Inwardness.

Sight Is A Promiscuous Sense. The Avid Gaze Always Wants More.

Some Of The Exuberance Of My Essay-writing Has Gone Because I'm Worried About The Uses They Could Serve.

Rules Of Taste Enforce Structures Of Power.

Because Each Photograph Is Only A Fragment, Its Moral And Emotional Weight Depends On Where It Is Inserted. A Photograph Changes According To The Context In Which It Is Seen: Thus Smith's Minamata Photographs Will Seem Different On A Contact Sheet, In A Gallery, In A Political Demonstration, In A Police File, In A Photographic Magazine, In A Book, On A Living-room Wall. Each O These Situations Suggest A Different Use For The Photographs But None Can Secure Their Meaning.

Talking Like Touching. Writing Like Punching Somebody.

To Travel Is To Shop.

Camp Taste Turns Its Back On The Good-bad Axis Of Ordinary Aesthetic Judgment. Camp Doesn't Reverse Things. It Doesn't Argue That The Good Is Bad, Or The Bad Is Good. What It Does Is To Offer For Art, And Life, A Different - A Supplementary - Set Of Standards.

Modern Discussions Of The Possibility Of Tragedy Are Not Exercises In Literary Analysis; They Are Exercises In Cultural Diagnostics, More Or Less Disguised.

I Believe That Courage Is Morally Neutral. I Can Well Imagine Wicked People Being Brave And Good People Being Timid Or Afraid. I Don't Consider It A Moral Virtue.

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All Possibility Of Understanding Is Rooted In The Ability To Say No.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

The Tradition Of Portrait Painting, To Embellish Or Idealize The Subject, Remains The Aim Of Everyday And Of Commercial Photography, But It Has Had A Much More Limited Career In Photography Considered As Art. Generally Speaking, The Honors Have Gone To The Cordelias.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images — As, According To Proust, Most Ambitious Of Voluntary Prisoners, One Can't Possess The Present But One Can Possessthe Past.

The Likelihood That Your Acts Of Resistance Cannot Stop The Injustice Does Not Exempt You From Acting In What You Sincerely And Reflectively Hold To Be The Best Interests Of Your Community.

Most Men Experience Getting Older With Regret, Apprehension. But Most Women Experience It Even More Painfully: With Shame. Aging Is A Man's Destiny, Something That Must Happen Because He Is A Human Being. For A Woman, Aging Is Not Only Her Destiny . . . It Is Also Her Vulnerability.

If I Thought That What I'm Doing When I Write Is Expressing Myself, I'd Junk The Typewriter. Writing Is A Much More Complicated Activity That That.

Our Task Is Not To Find The Maximum Amount Of Content In A Work Of Art, Mush Less To Squeeze More Content Out Of The Work Than Is Already There. Our Task Is To Cut Back On Content So We Can See The Thing At All. The Aim Of All Commentary On Art Now Should Be To Make Works Of Art - And, By Analogy, Our Own Experience - More, Rather Than Less, Real To Us.

Illness Is The Night-side Of Life, A More Onerous Citizenship. Everyone Who Is Born Holds Dual Citizenship, In The Kingdom Of The Well And In The Kingdom Of The Sick.

War Tears, Rends. War Rips Open, Eviscerates. War Scorches. War Dismembers. War Ruins.

Along With People Who Pretty Themselves For The Camera, The Unattractive And The Disaffected Have Been Assigned Their Beauty.

Never Worry About Being Obsessive. I Like Obsessive People. Obsessive People Make Great Art

Art Is The Most General Condition Of The Past In The Present. ... Perhaps No Work Of Art Is Art. It Can Only Become Art, When It Is Part Of The Past. In This Normative Sense, A 'contemporary' Work Of Art Would Be A Contradiction - Except So Far As We Can, In The Present, Assimilate The Present To The Past.

We Fret About Words, We Writers. Words Mean. Words Point. They Are Arrows. Arrows Stuck In The Rough Hide Of Reality. And The More Portentous, More General The Word, The More They Can Also Resemble Rooms Or Tunnels. They Can Expand, Or Cave In. They Can Come To Be Filled With A Bad Smell. They Will Often Remind Us Of Other Rooms, Where We'd Rather Dwell Or Where We Think We Are Already Living. They Can Be Spaces We Lose The Art Or The Wisdom Of Inhabiting. And Eventually Those Volumes Of Mental Intention We No Longer Know How To Inhabit Will Be Abandoned, Boarded Up, Closed Down.

Taste Governs Every Free - As Opposed To Rote - Human Response. Nothing Is More Decisive. There Is Taste In People, Visual Taste, Taste In Emotion - And There Is Taste In Acts, Taste In Morality. Intelligence, As Well, Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

[t]he Visibility Of Styles Is Itself A Product Of Historical Consciousness. ... The Very Notion Of "style" Needs To Be Approached Historically. Awareness Of Style As A Problematic And Isolable Element In A Work Of Art Has Emerged In The Audience For Art Only At Certain Historical Moments - As A Front Behind Which Other Issues, Ultimately Ethical And Political, Are Being Debated.

Our Appreciations, It Was Felt, Could Be So Much More Inclusive If We Said That Something, Instead Of Being Beautiful, Was 'interesting'.

The Quote Is Always Fascinating Because It Changes Out Of Context, Becomes Different And Sometimes More Mysterious. It Has A Directness And Assertiveness It May Not Have Had In The Original. I Think The Quality Of Inaccessibility, The Mystery, Is Important - That Whatever Matters Can't Be Taken In On Just One Reading Or One Seeing. This Is Certainly A Quality Of The Little Of Art That Lasts.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean Algebra, Shakespeare, Parliamentary Government, Baroque Churches, Newton, The Emancipation Of Women, Kant, Balanchine Ballets, Et Al. Don’t Redeem What This Particular Civilization Has Wrought Upon The World. The White Race Is The Cancer Of Human History.

It's So Effortless To Let My Loneliness Defeat Me, Make Me Mold Myself To Whatever Would (in Some Way - But Not Wholly) Relieve It. I Must Never Forget It... I Want Sensuality And Sensitivity, Both... Let Me Never Deny That... I Want To Err On The Side Of Violence And Excess, Rather Than To Underfill My Moments.

I Write Essays First Because I Have A Passionate Relationship To The Subject And Second Because The Subject Is One That People Are Not Talking About.

It's A Pleasure To Share One's Memories. Everything Remembered Is Dear, Endearing, Touching, Precious. At Least The Past Is Safe Though We Didn't Know It At The Time. We Know It Now. Because It's In The Past; Because We Have Survived.

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Carrie Brownstein

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