When Pittsburgh refuses to see the world, the city becomes unbearably precious and self-congratulating; and when Pittsburgh refuses to see itself, it takes as truth each insult it has ever received.
Both the impotence of art and the complicity of the world in the face of atrocity have demonstrated that armed, decolonial struggle never lost its urgency or necessity, despite what the triumphalists of the “end of history” would have hoped.
I suspect that everything I do or say after 11 pm is lunatic. Panic about it at 5 am. In real life a police officer shoots a man twenty times in his own backyard. Is there someplace else to stand? No. (Shaved pubes.)
What Bugs performs for us—and, in a different way, for Elmer Fudd, because the internal machination of their awareness is notably different—is Wagner’s opera.
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.”
But they also promise a conditional escape: if you attain the right knowledge and listen to the right people, you might be able to save yourself and those you love.
Surface Studies is about reading and writing, not encyclopedic knowledge, cultural context or the history of literature, awards, sales, or markets.
Chipmunk on the path almost as fast as I can see it. Underneath the crisping reddish edges—all the fear in the world but I didn’t say it like that.
The Downward Spiral, a record explicitly concerned with the decay that issues from indulgence, was recorded in the house that killed the 1960s, in the city that projects image over substance, where glamor circumscribes and hides destitution on a daily basis, in the state that makes consummate the double nature of the frontier as both the height of American exceptionalism and the embodiment of its most brutal expansionist tendencies
But more and more Robinson’s public statements have tended to emphasize a broadminded civic rhetoric and a wishy-washy liberalism that seem a far cry from the radicalism evinced in early works like Mother Country.
I’m at the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles with a friend waiting on a green card. He’s just moved to Ohio. Same as me.