October 1979
Reasons, someone wrote, are whores. I believe that. The rational mind bends and scrapes like a sycophantic servant caught napping. I’m not against reason. I just don’t trust it if I’m out of the room.
Sunbeams
Sometimes it seems to me that in this absurdly random life there is some inherent justice in the outcome of personal relationships. In the long run, we get no more than we have been willing to risk giving.
An Interview With Steve Rizzuto
I’m basically interested in how people move and walk around. Movement is an integral activity in the life of every cell and, therefore, in every more complex system. So, motion rather than tightness in the body is what I’m interested in promoting.
Why The News Spreads Fear Rather Than Light
If there is no way to separate story and story teller, there is no way to avoid facing the fact that the press never simply covers news. It defines and authenticates certain ways of seeing. It does this by the way it focuses, the way it names, by its choice of authenticating authorities and of story parameters.
And Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, Wherever You Are
Book Review
The Ghost Writer ends in a punchline, so it must have been a comedy. . . . Yet it was the reader’s impression through most of the novel that he was deeply absorbed in serious problems of art, and character, and relationships among people. Philip Roth’s writing at its best is characterized by just this deft touch, a blend of high seriousness with sometimes light, sometimes broad comedy.
Tales From Inside
Down here was only blankness — as if someone had taken the eyes and turned them around, so only the whites were showing, and that whiteness was what reflected down here to the mind’s screen.
