A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers’ food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slo

Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.

An art film’s point is usually more intellectual or aesthetic, and you usually have to do some interpretive work to get it, so that when you pay to see an art film you’re actually paying to do work (whereas the only work you have to do w/r/t most commercial films is whatever work you did to afford the price of the ticket).

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.

U.S. pop culture is just like U.S. serious culture in that its central tension has always set the nobility of individualism against the warmth of communal belonging.

As essayist Lewis Hyde points out, self-mocking irony is always “Sincerity, with a motive.”

Organized shuffleboard has always filled me with dread. Everything about it suggests infirm senescence and death: it’s like it’s a game played on the skin of a void and the rasp of the sliding puck is the sound of that skin getting abraded away bit by bit. I also have a morbid but wholly justified fear of darts, stemming from a childhood trauma too

But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes.