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Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

-Susan Sontag

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Photographs Alter And Enlarge

Susan Sontag

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Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

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I Was Enthralled And Moved By Azar Nafisi's Account Of How She Defied, And Helped Others To Defy, Radical Islam's War Against Women. Her Memoir Contains Important And Properly Complex Reflections About The Ravages Of Theocracy, About Thoughtfulness, And About The Ordeals Of Freedom-as Well As A Stirring Account Of The Pleasures And Deepening Of Consciousness That Result From An Encounter With Great Literature And With An Inspired Teacher.

To Emphasize Style Is To Slight Content, Or To Introduce An Attitude Which Is Neutral With Respect To Content.

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

Translation Is The Circulatory System Of The World's Literatures

Circulatory System

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.

It's Hard Not To Be Afraid. Be Less Afraid.

Funny Graduation

Literature Usually Begets Literature.

Though Collecting Quotations Could Be Considered As Merely An Ironic Mimetism

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

To Photograph Is To Confer Importance.

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

It Seems Positively Unnatural To Travel Without Taking A Camera Along... The Very Activity Of Taking Pictures Is Soothing And Assuages General Feelings Of Disorientation That Are Likely To Be Exacerbated By Travel.

By Furnishing This Already Crowded World With A Duplicate One Of Images, Photography Makes Us Feel That The World Is More Available Than It Really Is.

Ultimately Ideas Come Out Of A Temperament Or A Sensibility, They Are A Crystallization Or A Precipitation Of Temperament.

To Take A Photograph Is To Participate In Another Person's Mortality, Vulnerability, Mutability. Precisely By Slicing Out This Moment And Freezing It, All Photographs Testify To Time's Relentless Melt.

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

Fear Binds People Together. And Fear Disperses Them. Courage Inspires Communities: The Courage Of An Example - For Courage Is As Contagious As Fear. But Courage, Certain Kinds Of Courage, Can Also Isolate The Brave.

Needing To Have Reality Confirmed And Experience Enhanced By Photographs Is An Aesthetic Consumerism To Which Everyone Is Now Addicted. Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution.

Thinking, Writing Are Ultimately Questions Of Stamina.

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

But When We Are Nostalgic, We Take Pictures

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.

The Two Pioneering Forces Of Modern Sensibility Are Jewish Moral Seriousness And Homosexual Aestheticism And Irony.

Between Two Fantasy Alternatives, That Holbein The Younger Had Lived Long Enough To Have Painted Shakespeare Or That A Prototype Of The Camera Had Been Invented Early Enough To Have Photographed Him, Most Bardolators Would Choose The Photograph. This Is Not Just Because It Would Presumably Show What Shakespeare Really Looked Like, For Even If The Photograph Were Faded, Barely Legible, A Brownish Shadow, We Would Probably Still Prefer It To Another Glorious Holbein. Having A Photograph Of Shakespeare Would Be Like Having A Nail From The True Cross.

We Live In A World Of Copies And We're Fascinated When We Encounter The Originals (in A Museum, For Instance).

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

The Idea Of Content In Art Is Today Merely A Hindrance, A Nuisance, A Subtle Or Not So Subtle Philistinism.

Unfortunately, Moral Beauty In Art - Like Physical Beauty In A Person - Is Extremely Perishable. It Is Nowhere So Durable As Artistic Or Intellectual Beauty. Moral Beauty Has A Tendency To Decay Very Rapidly Into Sententiousness Or Untimeliness.

Life Is Not Significant Details, Illuminated By A Flash, Fixed Forever. Photographs Are.

Like The Effects Of Industrial Pollution And The New System Of Global Financial Markets, The Aids Crisis Is Evidence Of A World In Which Nothing Important Is Regional, Local, Limited; In Which Everything That Can Circulate Does, And Every Problem Is, Or Is Destined To Become, Worldwide.

I Make An Idol Of My Moral Consciousness. My Pursuit Of The Good Is Corrupted By The Sin Of Idolatry.

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

The Last Sentence Of A Book Is, Of Course, Where You Have To Stop.

Etymologically, 'patient' Means Sufferer.

...to Be A Poet, Requires A Mythology Of The Self. The Self Described Is The Poet Self, To Which The Daily Self (and Others) Are Often Ruthlessly Sacrificed. The Poet Self Is The Real Self, The Other One Is The Carrier; And When The Poet Self Dies, The Person Dies.

Lying Is The Most Simple Form Of Self-defence.

The Question Of The Social Uses Of Photography Opens Out Into The Very Largest Issues Of The Self, Of The Relationship To Community, To Reality.

Intelligence Is Really A Kind Of Taste: Taste In Ideas.

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

Guns Have Metamorphosed Into Cameras In This Earnest Comedy, The Ecology Safari, Because Nature Has Ceased To Be What It Always Had Been - What People Needed Protection From. Now Nature Tamed, Endangered, Mortal - Needs To Be Protected From People.

Photographs May Be More Memorable Than Moving Images, Because They Are A Neat Slice Of Time, Not A Flow. Each Still Photograph Is A Privileged Moment Turned Into A Slim Object That One Can Keep And Look At Again.

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

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.

The Creative Phase Of An Idea Coincides With The Period During Which It Insists, Cantankerously, On Its Boundaries, On What Makes It Different; But An Idea Becomes False And Impotent When It Seeks Reconciliation, At Cut-rate Prices, With Other Ideas.

To Read Was Precisely To Enter Another World, Which Was Not The Reader's Own, And Come Back Refreshed, Ready To Bear With Equanimity The Injustices And Frustrations Of This One. Reading Was Balm, Amusement Not Incitement.

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.

Detachment Is The Prerogative Of An Elite; And As The Dandy Is The Nineteenth Century's Surrogate For The Aristocrat In Matters Ofculture, So Camp Is The Modern Dandyism. Camp Is The Answer To The Problem: How To Be A Dandy In The Age Of Mass Culture.

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

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.

Self-respect. It Would Make Me Lovable. And It's The Secret To Good Sex.

Life Is A Movie; Death Is A Photograph.

Each Of Us Carries A Room Within Ourselves, Waiting To Be Furnished And Peopled, And If You Listen Closely, You May Need To Silence Everything In Your Own Room, You Can Hear The Sounds Of That Other Room Inside Your Head.

So Successful Has Been The Camera's Role In Beautifying The World That Photographs, Rather Than The World, Have Become The Standard Of The Beautiful.

Industrial Societies Turn Their Citizens Into Image-junkies; It Is The Most Irresistible Form Of Mental Pollution. Poignant Longings For Beauty, For An End To Probing Below The Surface, For A Redemption And Celebration Of The Body Of The World. Ultimately, Having An Experience Becomes Identical With Taking A Photograph Of It.

Self-censorship, The Most Important And Most Successful Form Of Censorship, Is Rampant. Debate Is Identified With Dissent, Which Is In Turn Identified With Disloyalty. There Is A Widespread Feeling That, In This New, Open-ended Emergency, We May Not Be Able To 'afford' Our Traditional Freedoms.

It Is Not The Position, But The Disposition.

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.

I Certainly Identify Myself As A Feminist.

My Library Is An Archive Of Longings.

God, Living Is Enormous!

Chris Marker Has A Brilliant Mind And Heart And Appetite For Life, And It's A Privilege To Travel With Him To Whatever He Chooses To Remember And To Evoke. He Is One Of Cinema's All Time Greats - The Most Important Reflective Or Non-narrative Filmmaker After Dziga Vertov.

Appetite For Life

Norman Mailer In His Writings Is Ultimately More Concerned With Success Than With Danger; Danger Is Only A Means To Success.

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.

Nature In America Has Always Been Suspect, On The Defensive, Cannibalized By Progress. In America, Every Specimen Becomes A Relic.

You Can Go Into All Sorts Of Situations With A Camera And People Will Think They Should Serve It.

In The Valley Of Sorrow, Spread Your Wings.

Ours Is A Culture Based On Excess, On Overproduction; The Result Is A Steady Loss Of Sharpness In Our Sensory Experience. All The Conditions Of Modern Life - Its Material Plenitude, Its Sheer Crowdedness - Conjoin To Dull Our Sensory Faculties

Try Not To Live In A Linguistic Slum.

A Family's Photograph Album Is Generally About The Extended Family And, Often, Is All That Remains Of It.

Volume Depends Precisely On The Writer's Having Been Able To Sit In A Room Every Day, Year After Year, Alone.

The Unanimously Applauded, Self-congratulatory Bromides Of A Soviet Party Congress Seemed Contemptible. The Unanimity Of The Sanctimonious, Reality-concealing Rhetoric Spouted By American Officials And Media Commentators In Recent Days Seems, Well, Unworthy Of A Mature Democracy.

The Purpose Of Art Is Always, Ultimately, To Give Pleasure - Though Our Sensibilities May Take Time To Catch Up With The Forms Of Pleasure That Art In A Given Time May Offer.

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.

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; It Turns People Into Objects That Can Be Symbolically Possessed. Just As A Camera Is A Sublimation Of The Gun, To Photograph Someone Is A Subliminal Murder - A Soft Murder, Appropriate To A Sad, Frightened Time.

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.

It's Not That You Make Up Your Ideas To Justify Your Temperament But That It's The Temperament First.

A Photograph Is Both A Pseudo-presence And A Token Of Absence. Like A Wood Fire In A Room, Photographs-especially Those Of People, Of Distant Landscapes And Faraway Cities, Of The Vanished Past-are Incitements To Reverie. The Sense Of The Unattainable That Can Be Evoked By Photographs Feeds Directly Into The Erotic Feelings Of Those For Whom Desirability Is Enhanced By Distance.

The Whole Point Of Camp Is To Dethrone The Serious. Camp Is Playful, Anti-serious. More Precisely, Camp Involves A New, More Complex Relation To "the Serious." One Can Be Serious About The Frivolous, Frivolous About The Serious.

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.

All My Life I've Been Looking For Someone Intelligent To Talk To.

My Skull Is Crammed With Quotations.

All Understanding Begins With Our Not Accepting The World As It Appears.

The Only Interesting Ideas Are Heresies

A Thing Is A Thing, Not What Is Said Of That Thing.

The Really Important Thing Is Not To Reject Anything.

Important Things

Love Is Friendship On Fire -- Anonymous

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

Read A Lot. Expect Something Big, Something Exalting Or Deepening From A Book. No Book Is Worth Reading That Isn't Worth Re-reading.

One Could Plausibly Argue That It Is For Quite Sound Reasons That The Whole Capacity For Sexual Ecstasy Is Inaccessible To Most People - Given That Sexuality Is Something, Like Nuclear Energy, Which May Prove Amenable To Domestication Through Scruple, But Then Again May Not.

Cameras Began Duplicating The World At That Moment When The Human Landscape Started To Undergo A Vertiginous Rate Of Change: While An Untold Number Of Forms Of Biological And Social Life Are Being Destroyed In A Brief Span Of Time, A Device Is Available To Record What Is Disappearing.

Why Wouldn't You Write To Escape Yourself As Much As You Might Write To Express Yourself? It's Far More Interesting To Write About Others.

The Two Ideas Are Antithetical. Insofar As Photography Is (or Should Be) About The World, The Photographer Counts For Little, But Insofar As It Is The Instrument Of Intrepid, Questioning Subjectivity, The Photographer Is All.

She Felt Herself Needing More And More Sleep. When She Awoke In The Morning, She Thought Of When She Might Lie Down Again - And When She Would Sleep. She Started Going To The Movies.

My Urge To Write Is An Urge Not To Self-expressionism But To Self-transcendence. My Work Is Both Bigger And Smaller Than I Am.

Images Are More Real Than Anyone Could Have Supposed.

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.

Loeb Has Been Doing Wonderfully Patient Work, Exploring The American Conscience From The Inside. I Regard Him As Something Of A National Treasure.

Anything In History Or Nature That Can Be Described As Changing Steadily Can Be Seen As Heading Toward Catastrophe.

The Photographer Both Loots And Preserves, Denounces And Consecrates.

When Something Is Just Bad, It's Often Because It Is Too Mediocre In Its Ambition. The Artist Hasn't Attempted To Do Anything Really Outlandish.

America Was Founded On A Genocide, On The Unquestioned Assumption Of The Right Of White Europeans To Exterminate A Resident, Technologically Backward, Colored Population In Order To Take Over The Continent.

Existence Is No More Than The Precarious Attainment Of Relevance In An Intensely Mobile Flux Of Past, Present, And Future.

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.

A Photograph Comes Into Being, As It Is Seen, All At Once.

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.

The Traditional Metaphor For A Spiritual Investigation Is That Of The Voyage Or The Journey. From This Image I Must Dissociate Myself. I Do Not Consider Myself A Voyager, I Have Preferred To Stand Still.

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.

The Destiny Of Photography Has Taken It Far Beyond The Role To Which It Was Originally Thought To Be Limited: To Give More Accurate Reports On Reality (including Works Of Art). Photography Is The Reality; The Real Object Is Often Experienced As A Letdown.

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.

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.

A Writer, I Think, Is Someone Who Pays Attention To The World.

Photography Is An Elegiac Art, A Twilight Art. Most Subjects Photographed Are, Just By Virtue Of Being Photographed, Touched With Pathos.

Just As A Camera Is A Sublimation Of The Gun, To Photograph Someone Is A Subliminal Murder - A Soft Murder, Appropriate To A Sad, Frightened Time.

Writing Is Finally A Series Of Permissions You Give Yourself To Be Expressive In Certain Ways. To Leap. To Fly. To Fail.

Cinema Is A Kind Of Pan-art. It Can Use, Incorporate, Engulf Virtually Any Other Art: The Novel, Poetry, Theater, Painting, Sculpture, Dance, Music, Architecture. Unlike Opera, Which Is A (virtually) Frozen Art Form, The Cinema Is And Has Been A Fruitfully Conservative Medium Of Ideas And Styles Of Emotions.

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 Want To Live As Long As Possible, Just To See How Stupid It Gets.

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.

In Contrast To The Written Account-which, Depending On Its Complexity Of Thought, Reference, And Vocabulary, Is Pitched At A Larger Or Smaller Readership-a Photograph Has Only One Language And Is Destined Potentially For All.

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

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

If An Irreducible Distinction Between Theatre And Cinema Does Exist, It May Be This: Theatre Is Confined To A Logical Or Continuous Use Of Space. Cinemahas Access To An Alogical Or Discontinuous Use Of Space.

That Sort Of Reception - Where Everything Is Assimilated To The World Of Celebrity - Makes Me Dream Of Becoming A More Recalcitrant, Harder To Assimilate Writer.

What Is The Most Beautiful In Virile Men Is Something Feminine; What Is Most Beautiful In Feminine Women Is Something Masculine.

Photographs Alter And Enlarge Our Notions Of What Is Worth Looking At And What We Have A Right To Observe. They Are A Grammar And, Even More Importantly, An Ethics Of Seeing.

My Idea Of A Writer: Someone Interested In Everything.

Writing Is A Mysterious Activity.

My Own View Is That One Cannot Be Religious In General Any More Than One Can Speak Language In General; At Any Given Moment One Speaks French Or English Or Swahili Or Japanese, But Not 'language.

The Young-old Polarization And The Male-female Polarization Are Perhaps The Two Leading Stereotypes That Imprison People.

And What Do I Mean By The Word 'perfection'? That I Shall Not Try To Explain But Only Say, 'perfection Makes Me Laugh.' Not Cynically, I Hasten To Add, 'with Joy.

Photographers Are Always Imposing

The Quality Of American Life Is An Insult To The Possibilities Of Human Growth... The Pollution Of American Space, With Gadgetry And Cars And Tv And Box Architecture, Brutalizes The Senses, Making Gray Neurotics Of Most Of Us, And Perverse Spiritual Athletes And Strident Self-transcenders Of The Best Of Us.

Is It The Obligation Of Great Art To Be Continually Interesting? I Think Not.

There Is An Understandable Vindictiveness In People Who Come From Communist Countries. They Want To Keep Telling Us That We Were Fools To Think That We Could Make Radical Changes In Our Society. Though I Understand Their Dismay, Respect Their Suffering And Don't Understand The Gullibility Of Some People Who Don't Take In How Repressive These Societies Are, I Still Think It's Important To Keep People Of All Kinds As Active In Civic Matters As Possible.

Persons Who Merely Have-a-life Customarily Move In A Dense Fluid. That's How They're Able To Conduct Their Lives At All. Their Living Depends On Not Seeing.

False Values Begin With The Worship Of Things.

I Belong Rather To A More Classical Tradition Of Social Analysis.

The Life Of The Creative Man Is Lead, Directed And Controlled By Boredom. Avoiding Boredom Is One Of Our Most Important Purposes.

I Feel That I've Had Enough Theoretical Speculation To Last Me A Lifetime.

Art Is A Form Of Consciousness.

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.

Any Important Disease Whose Causality Is Murky, And For Which Treatment Is Ineffectual, Tends To Be Awash In Significance.

I Didn't Think Of Myself As Importing, I Thought It Was More Interesting To Write About Things People Didn't Know About Than What They Did. When I Became Aware That I Was In Fact "importing", I Stopped Doing It.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

When You See Your 40-page Essay Turned Into A "hot Tip" In One Paragraph In Newsweek, You Get Anxious About The Way Your Writing Has Been Used.

I Must Remain Always, Both In Principle + Actively, Interested In Everything. Taking All Of Knowledge As My Province.

Fear Of Sexuality Is The New, Disease-sponsored Register Of The Universe Of Fear In Which Everyone Now Lives. Cancerphobia Taught Us The Fear Of A Polluting Environment; Now We Have The Fear Of Polluting People That Aids Anxiety Inevitably Communicates. Fear Of The Communion Cup, Fear Of Surgery: Fear Of Contaminated Blood, Whether Christ's Blood Or Your Neighbor's.

Time May Enhance What Seems Simply Dogged Or Lacking In Fantasy Now Because We Are Too Close To It, Because It Resembles Too Closely Our Own Everyday Fantasies, The Fantastic Nature Of Which We Don't Perceive. We Are Better Able To Enjoy A Fantasy As A Fantasy When It Is Not Our Own.

Everything Has Changed And Nothing Is Changed.

Things Have Changed

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

We Live In A Culture In Which Intelligence Is Denied Relevance Altogether, In A Search For Radical Innocence, Or Is Defended As An Instrument Of Authority And Repression. In My View, The Only Intelligence Worth Defending Is Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying.

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

Where Once It Was The Physician Who Waged Bellum Contra Morbum, The War Against Disease, Now It's The Whole Society.

To Collect Photographs Is To Collect The World.

Making Social Comment Is An Artificial Place For An Artist To Start From. If An Artist Is Touched By Some Social Condition, What The Artist Creates Will Reflect That, But You Can't Force It.

The Past Itself, As Historical Change Continues To Accelerate, Has Become The Most Surreal Of Subjects - Making It Possible... To See A New Beauty In What Is Vanishing.

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

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.

Societies Need To Have One Illness Which Becomes Identified With Evil, And Attaches Blame To Its Victims.

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

Dissimulation, Secretiveness, Appear A Necessity To The Melancholic. He Has Complex, Often Veiled Relations With Others. These Feelings Of Superiority, Of Inadequacy, Of Baffled Feeling, Of Not Being Able To Get What One Wants, Or Even Name It Properly (or Consistently) To Oneself — These Can Be, It Is Felt They Ought To Be, Masked By Friendliness, Or The Most Scrupulous Manipulation.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Transparence Is The Highest, Most Liberating Value In Art - And In Criticism - Today. Transparence Means Experiencing The Luminousness Of The Thing In Itself, Of Things Being What They Are.

If Within The Last Century Art Conceived As An Autonomous Activity Has Come To Be Invested With An Unprecedented Stature - The Nearest Thing To A Sacramental Human Activity Acknowledged By Secular Society - It Is Because One Of The Tasks Art Has Assumed Is Making Forays Into And Taking Up Positions On The Frontiers Of Consciousness (often Very Dangerous To The Artist As A Person) And Reporting Back What's There.

Secular Society

Ours Is An Age Which Consciously Pursues Health, And Yet Only Believes In The Reality Of Sickness.

Now The New Things Happening In France Don't Interest Me.

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.

Passion Paralyzes Good Taste.

Photographs Are A Way Of Imprisoning Reality, Understood As Recalcitrant, Inaccessible; Of Making It Stand Still. Or They Enlarge A Reality That Is Felt To Be Shrunk, Hollowed Out, Perishable, Remote. One Can't Possess Reality, One Can Possess (and Be Possessed By) Images.

As Industrialization Provided Social Uses For The Operations Of The Photographer, So The Reaction Against These Uses Reinforced The Self-consciousness Of Photography-as-art.

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

The Problems Of This World Are Only Truly Solved In Two Ways: By Extinction Or Duplication.

Books Are Funny Little Portable Pieces Of Thought.

Sanity Is A Cozy Lie.

I Envy Paranoids; They Actually Feel People Are Paying Attention To Them.

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

I'm Not Sure At All That Literature Should Be Studied On The University Level. ... Why Should People Study Books? Isn't It Rather Silly To Study Pride And Prejudice. Either You Get It Or You Don't.

Fatal Illness Has Always Been Viewed As A Test Of Moral Character, But In The Nineteenth Century There Is A Great Reluctance To Let Anybody Flunk The Test.

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.

Tragedy Is A Vision Of Nihilism, A Heroic Or Ennobling Vision Of Nihilism.

Using A Camera Appeases The Anxiety Which The Work-driven Feel About Not Working When They Are On Vacation And Supposed To Be Having Fun. They Have Something To Do That Is Like A Friendly Imitation Of Work: They Can Take Pictures.

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.

Instead Of Just Recording Reality, Photographs Have Become The Norm For The Way Things Appear To Us, Thereby Changing The Very Idea Of Reality And Of Realism.

Wherever People Feel Safe — They Will Be Indifferent.

A Good Listener: A Physical Presence That Is Warm, Alert, Intelligent - More Important Than Any Words.

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

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.

In Every Society, The Definitions Of Sanity And Madness Are Arbitrary - Are, In The Largest Sense, Political.

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.

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