Monsters

To say someone else is consuming improperly implies that there’s a proper way to consume. And that’s not necessarily true.

Critical thought must bow its knee to love of the work—if something moves us, whoever we are, we must give that something at least some small degree of fealty.

The genius is a proposition. He’s a fantasy that we have collectively. The genius isn’t so much a kind of person as a status of person: a person who can do whatever he wants.

A screen is what created the idea that we really know these people.

The woman’s emotion: resentment against injustice, an impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The lucky ones like me—fight it.

Harry Potter fan-ship twined with the growth of the Tumblr platform, which in turn twined with the growth of a new kind of LGBTQ+ movement…kids

The writer alone, in a space with a door that closes against the world: that’s the very picture of happiness. Some imaginary ideal mother-writer might not mind a knock at the door, but most of us don’t have beautiful natures and we really mind being interrupted. Doris Lessing wrote in her memoir Under My Skin: “Very few people—perhaps one in fifty?

What follows logically from there is the idea that the artist ought to be free in all his doings.

I was a person who’d watched a lot of movies, sure. I had taken a couple of film theory classes in college because it seemed like something you should do if you wore as much black as I did.