“Literature’s standard is not journalistic. Triple-sourced verification of one’s assertions is not an imprimatur of the kind of truth that literature is after, which is fundamentally metaphorical.”
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On Pittsburgh, United Flight 93, and our century of war.
“What this taught me, as I fully embraced the subjective, generative, creative act of thinking about national myth, was how America has never been a fact, but an idea.”
“Cool, and its attendant category of hip, are difficult to theorize, because their slipperiness and ambiguity are part of what’s intrinsic to them.”
“For what is sweet to one is bitter to another, where some thrill at the light others desire darkness. It’s a perspective that tells us everything about the critic and nothing about the text.”
“As a signifier for the Anthropocene, for all of our guile, hubris, and stupidity, as well as for whatever follows our epoch, Chernobyl remains unsurpassed. Because everybody knows what ‘Chernobyl’ means, even if we forget.”
“Those who adhere to this faith in the Singularity maintain that we are approaching an eschaton that will see the expansion of consciousness, the resurrection of the dead, and the triumph of the living spirit over dead matter (or at least the triumph of our minds as software).”
“Searching for a term to describe the current predicament, we can draw from the gravitas of grand rhetoric or the high-brow obscurations of academic jargon, but maybe it is far better to pick a term universally understood, and that is to say that we’re collectively, irredeemably, and totally fucked.”
“There is unfortunately scant consideration of the occult methods of reading, at least in a literary critical sense. My claim is only partially as a joke.”
“A best of list isn’t empirical, it’s a game, and it’s meant to be playful. To be audacious, to be galling, to be annoying, but most of all to be interesting.”
