Drug-eating is now drug consumption. Where "eating" implies a loamy process of co-constitution, "consumption" is a rote expression of your identity.
His resistance to canned models exposes the fragility of the sclerotic aesthetic order that reigned in his time.
The thing about surveillance, there's a lot of boredom in it. This was part of the attraction, I think, to becoming detectives.
The dragon named communism, the final boss of history.
It is an anti-elitist, capaciously democratic argument against the disfiguring mystifications that turn labor into commodities and art into the purchase of a privileged few.
Everyone keeps telling me
my mother looked so pretty
in her casket. They try to assure me
the mortician did a good job.
My mother looked better
alive.
The other girls were staring at him rapt as he explained the camp schedule. We had never seen a man like him before. Different from any high school boys we had ever known, football players, brothers, or fathers. I myself didn’t have a father. Just a mother who liked “anything that chugged or neighed.”
If Kairos has an arc, it’s toward her will to act, to feel something other than the guilt and pressure Hans exerts, to question his version of events, to regard his violent control not as inevitable but as a force she can resist.
We were getting along even better than average, actually. I suspected I might be a better person for a while.
Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.
As a reader, it’s flattering to be let in: to understand that the writer is playing with expectations, starving you a bit of plot, feeding you a ton of side dishes instead of a meat and potatoes dinner.