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It’s hard to imagine a scene of greater coziness and safety. My house sat in the middle of a field in the middle of the woods in the middle of an almost entirely crime-free island.
didn’t want to compile a catalogue of monsters—after all, wasn’t the history of art simply already that?
liberalism was a failed plan for protecting ourselves from ourselves.
I would love for this book to turn commie
it became clear that it would have absolutely zero effect on Trump’s viability as a candidate.
Id argue it made him more popular
Style looks easy, but is not.
The women met on the streets and looked at one another and shook their heads and walked away wordlessly.
Real obsession has tendons and guts and, and, and consequences. This new usage wants to steal the stakes of real obsession, and apply those stakes to something consumed. As a dedicated obsessive, I resent this!
necessarily well equipped to handle this feeling of being spoken to directly even as the speaker is actually addressing multitudes.
relationships are workers creating money for somebody else.
feel.
No mention of racism in harry potter interesting
She looked like she might smoke the chalk.
I learned a structure for reviewing: What is the film trying to do? Does it succeed? Was it a worthy objective in the first place?
I stated earlier in this book that Annie Hall is the greatest comedy of the twentieth century. I wrote that as a silly kind of joke on the whole idea of critical authority and objectivity. I don’t really believe such things are knowable.
Thank god because i was considering watching it
There’s an essential falseness to Schickel’s perspective, simply because he has not entertained the possibility of his own falseness.
In the tarot, the Magician card is the card signifying the artist.
Two killed themselves—and so did Picasso’s grandson, Pablito—and most of the rest were left with their lives shattered after their time with Picasso.
The sometimes-truth is that we are interested in and, yes, even attracted to bad people.
We want the asshole to cross the line, to break the rules. We reward that rule-breaking, and then we go a step further, and see it as endemic to art-making itself. We reward and reward this bad behavior until it becomes synonymous with greatness.
To pretend that there’s no allure to bad men is to sidestep reality.
Maybe we have created the idea of genius to serve our own attraction to badness.
Fry positions himself as someone free from the blinders of history—he’s unwittingly illustrating the liberal ideal of the ahistorical present.
The use of the word “Jew” as an adjective is generally speaking not a good sign.
non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim.
And moreover I’ve done this: Written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.
But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness.
The thing is, writers don’t really get lonely.
It was years before I realized: Oh. I became a writer so I could be alone all the time. It wasn’t a by-product, it was a motivator.
The kinds of lives that are typically thought of as nice by non-writers, lives that involve things like unending vacations; things like never having to work again—these kinds of lives don’t sound nice to writers. Not really. Writers want be left alone to write, and be waited
More generally he says of writers: “Well, we are ruthless. We’re not nice people. We might be interesting, we might be diverting…but mostly [living with us is] just slog.”
And then he goes on to say of his youngest daughter: “She is so furious, indignant, about all this, in a good way—which is the best state for women to be in. If I were a woman I’d be so furious all the time.”
Is it pathetic that I’m grateful for...
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One day, while out for a walk with a male writer, in the midst of a very serious heartfelt conversation about my memoir, I screwed up my courage and blurted: “I want to write a great book.” Without breaking his stride, he said expressionlessly, “Welcome to the Thunderdome,” and we continued our walk, with me feeling secretly buoyant, as if I’d swallowed a balloon.
Even the idea of trying to be great was thrilling to me.
As a memoir writer, it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly?
Again, this political idea of luck. Who has enough money to live on? Who can afford the time it takes to write?
When I was young, I saw it, or rather felt it, like this: pregnancy was the very definition of the death of options.
In 1965, Joni Mitchell, twenty-one years old and unmarried, fell pregnant.
‘My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician. She kicked the kitchen door off the hinges.’ And I thought maybe I’m the one who got the gene who has to make it happen….
For Mitchell, separating the life from the art was not an aesthetic question, but a point of view necessary to her survival. In other words, she wasn’t confronting the problem as an audience member, but as an artist.
For a struggling female artist (I mean me) trying to make herself into something uncompromising, trying to learn to trust herself, important questions loom: How should I act? How should I behave? How should I be? Maybe if Joni looked at Miles and Pablo, I can look at Joni.
Get rid of money, work, and men, and you’d have a society fit to live in. As the kids would say, where’s the lie?
In any case, Warhol survived, and Solanas was sentenced to three years.
three years for shooting and nearly killing 2 people ?
Plath seems to attract this kind of reproachful critic—self-appointed arbiters who are eager to tell the rest of us how we ought to read.
The violence of male artists is tied to their greatness.
unexpected: by taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism.
You sit in the rooms and listen and you hear terrible, terrible things, but they are also ordinary things.
Because everyone in that room has been through them. Leslie Jamison has written about this gift of the ordinary—your own story is not paramount
the empathy of saying what is worst about me, what is most monstrous, and having it accepted not because I a...
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In other words, we keep looking to consumption as the site of our ethical choices, but the answer doesn’t lie there. Our judgment doesn’t make us better consumers—it actually makes us more trapped in the spectacle; more complicit in what Fisher calls the atmosphere of late capitalism.
An inherently corrupt role—because under capitalism, monstrousness applies to everyone. Am I a monster? I asked. And yes, we all are. Yes, I am.
