nathan > Recent Status Updates

Let’s say something obvious. People have the right to make art. People have the right to write books. They also have the right to go to school for those things. (In fact, the state should pay for it!) What people do not have a right to is having their art exhibited in museums or their books published by publishers.

Radical compassion

I agree that violence is a difficult word these days; it means too much and rarely enough.

Charles loves David; David loves Edward; David loves Charles; Charlie loves Edward; Jude loves Willem; Hanya loves Jude. Misery loves company. (On A Little Life)

But even Yanagihara’s novels are not death camps; they are hospice centers. A Little Life, like life itself, goes on and on. Hundreds of pages into the novel, Jude openly wonders why he is still alive, the beloved of a lonely god. For that is the meaning of suffering: to make love possible.

The only measure of judgment is more judgment: that is what it means to try to live together with other human beings. It is to them—to everyone else—that the critic owes her allegiance, not to art or the state or even the abstract totality of society. And sometimes, overseas is precisely where her heart belongs.

I say: Stop reducing ideas to novels!)

Jameson’s famous maxim—“Always historicize!”—remains fine advice for any critic today, albeit with an important addendum.

One does not step outside of history just because one is dreaming up a world; no author has ever managed to solve the irritating problem of their own concrete existence.

My patient copy editors at New York have noticed that I like to speak of literature in the past tense—“Dickens wrote,” instead of the more standard “Dickens writes.” I suspect this is because I am more invested in the material activity of writing than the eternal present of literature.

There is no higher truth of criticism than what W. H. Auden once said of his own book reviews: “I wrote them because I needed the money.”

Hence the paradox of well-regarded critics like James Wood, Zadie Smith, or Adam Kirsch who write with great moral intensity but little moral clarity. We expect the good critic to leave his own values at the door but not his nose for valuing; we then applaud him for how many other values he can root up without eating them.

a more honest claim is that liberalism is an ideology of good temper. We find it only natural today to rate a critic on the basis of her mental attitude—her poise, her catholicity, her scrupulousness—rather than the ideological content of her judgments. This is the corollary to art for art’s sake: criticism for the sake of criticism.

If another says that autofiction dramatizes late-capitalist alienation, he is nothing but Marx in Groucho glasses.

For no critic escapes the pitfalls of moralizing, or restricts herself to the work of art in its purity, or resists the temptation to smuggle in all manner of intellectual contraband; no critic manages to cut out her heart and hide it under the floorboards without leaving a little trail of blood.

So we must disaggregate our legitimate fears over the degeneration of legacy media in the digital age from what may be the oldest idea in the history of criticism: the idea that there are simply too many critics. No other profession has a higher opinion of itself or a lower opinion of its practitioners.

merging of the publishing houses, the evaporation of staff writing positions, the pressure to churn out ad-supported content. And even these are less novel than supposed: Henry James once described the periodicals of his day as a “huge, open mouth which has to be fed.”

that they are demonstrating a “resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions”; that they are getting by on a “sententious, cavalier, dogmatical tone”; and that almost all of them are “amateurs of literature” who are frankly angling to “grow important and formidable at very small expense.”

they are ossifying “the living tissues of literature”; that they are practicing “little more than a branch of homiletics”; that they are trying to “limit the subject-matter at the disposal of the artist”;

today’s critics are succumbing to the “perdition of egotism”; that they are reducing art to a “statement being made in the form of a work of art”

One dearly wishes he remembered the second half of the Walter Benjamin quote: “Communism replies by politicizing art.”

haste and waste is all there is.

“Exisssstence is meaninglessssssss and random. YOLO.”

..humanity shaped itself around the fact that it is possible to have a pure and open heart. And when someone is bold enough to have one of the most pure and open hearts in the world, they are bold enough to give it away to someone who will never love them back. This has been your destiny all along: to love incorrectly.”

The snake continued slithering across my foot, then stopped and opened its little mouth. “No, it’ssssssss not,” said the snake. “You can’t lie to me, I’m a ssssssnake in the dessssssert who can talk.” “Sorry, snake,” I responded. “It’s been kind of a strange journey.

A sky that was hot blue with no clouds. I looked down. A rare periwinkle garden snake wearing sunglasses slithered across my foot. It was the first living thing I had seen in so long. “Hi, snake,” I said to the snake. “My name is Girlfriend.”

It was one, two, three martinis, dry, ice-cold, and so I went to the bathroom and sat in the stall and counted the number of drinks I had consumed that evening. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

We were at one of those dancing clubs where what you do is drink a martini dry, ice-cold glass, and everyone is wearing something black and leathery and the walls are all mirrors and the music is disco balls, high hats, sparkle synthesizer.

Oh! We moved with such elegant velocity. We were like a divine girl centipede, snaking its way through the streets, bombarding the general public with our fit and flare frocks, our skirt suit sets, our dresses of fine materials such as organdy and chiffon. Us girlfriends—in our makeup, with our hair so perfect, with our nails so perfectly manicured—we were a gorgeous sight to behold.

“Reality,” said Ariel. “You’re wasted.” “Actually, I’ve only had, like, six champagne cocktails and some gin, plus some ketamine and anyways, you know that I am an idiosyncratic character who tends to speak her mind! At least I’m not serenely smoking crack cocaine. A cigarette will do!”