Both Flesh and Not: Essays

The best teachers seem to acknowledge the conflict between their vocations, reach some kind of internal compromise, and go on. The rest, according to their capacities, either suppress the resentment or make sure they do the barely acceptable minimum their primary source of income requires. Almost all, though, take the resentment out in large part o

which Borges’s individual personality and circumstances matter only insofar as they lead him to create artworks in which such personal facts are held to be unreal.

puff-words,

anorgasmia,

natty

maelstrom,

Because it’s not as though television and advertising and popular entertainments have ceased to be mostly bad art or cheap art, but just that they’ve imposed themselves on our generation’s psyches for so long and with such power that they have entered into complicated relations with our very ideas of the world and the self. We simply cannot “relate

heath.

A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but—demanding nothing of comparable value in return—perverts the giving, h

eo ipso