Truth is only stranger than good fiction.
Dec 012023
Seeming
Religion, art, taste, and other delusions.
Nov 032023
High art exists, but high-status art is what is generally meant.
Oct 272023
Every art depends on the great lie of discontinuity: that there are moments, beginnings, ends.
Oct 192023
Pretension is a debt, a loan taken against future learning. Sometimes the debtor pays it off; more often he becomes a bankrupt.
Oct 112023
The Four Plots
Dragged back in
Stranger in town
Road trip
I want what he’s having
Oct 092023
We say life imitates art because art is how we see life.
Aug 182023
The sole sacred duty of the critic is not to praise where praise is not due.
Jul 262023
In sane times prizes are useless. They become useful in mad times, as negative indicators.
Jul 202023
Every policy I support seems to threaten democracy itself.
Jul 192023
Islam is monotheist: Allah is always and everywhere the same. Christianity is polytheist: there are German, English, Latin, African, and American Christian gods, along with extinct historical versions, all incompatible and eternally at odds