Multiple day fasts with sunlight and black coffee, 60 hour work weeks, recreational substances, bootcamp workouts, breathwork classes, beach walks with family and dogs, etc. All became experiments to see if I could push the right buttons to become a well balanced individual. 

I consider losing my appetite to evidence positive moral and ethical standards.

The genius would be like—do you know the two

ways to eat a beer glass? Like that was a situation

we were often in. He’d learned it from Jasper Gallon.

Kojeve’s theory of desire, based on Hegel’s lord-bondsman dialectic and a huge influence on the thinking of one Jacques Lacan, was that desire isn’t simply about desiring an object, but rather about desiring to be desired, and desiring the object that desires you, in what could potentially become a house of mirrors of recognition and mis-recognition

“Bless us, o Lord,” went the reverential drawl, “and watch over our riders and our livestock. And Lord, protect the brave men and women serving in our armed forces and our first responders. And Lord, we pray that you will guide our elected officials as they seek to lead this country through difficult times.”

Maybe all I want from a movie—what any of us wants—is not only something to talk about, but something to talk to.

Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness.

Without a premature claim to any kind of sagacity—that is, with all due humility, I begin to understand the epigraph to J. Salter’s final novel.

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.

Falling out of love, with an object as much as with a person, is a rupture between the past and present selves.

Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”

In rendering Natalie Portman's character, and her pleasure, so obviously deformed, the film makes her into a particularly monstrous figurehead for an ever wider cultural impulse to psychologize every aberrance, to assign exacting, demystifying vocabulary to all the ways in which a person can be hurt.

Available responses to constraint (boxes)

1. Reject the structure and rebuild. 

2. Contort the structure, make the hinges creak. 

Either might include building smaller new boxes inside the old box.

Baptize yourself in the promise that every moment might ring with the ecstasy of leftovers fitting just perfectly into a takeout carton.

Perhaps the literary community needs a lot more of the absurd, even in spades, and perhaps especially in relation to economics.

Linguists trace the means by which, they say, Black Pittsburghers use language to position themselves relative to, and against, whiteness. The idea that white speech might be made and maintained in order to create racial difference is unexplored.

We must go beyond the tired narratives of cultural exploitation or commercial gentrification that tend to dominate discourse.

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

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.

I thought it would be a fun exercise, as a means of assessing this activity over these last few months, to assign Pokemon types to each piece we published.