Sublime

The turn, in art, from the reparative to a demand for repair, treats art less as “a ‘third thing’ between people whose meaning ‘is owned by no one, but which subsists between [artist and spectator]’” and more as something whose meaning and function can be named and adjudicated—something that can, in fact, be moved out of the category of art, and in

Sinfonietta

I still think up short stories from time to time, as though there were money in it. The habit dies hard. There used to be fleeting fame in it, too. Highly literate people once talked enthusiastically to one another about a story by Ray Bradbury or J. D. Salinger or John Cheever or John Collier or John O‘Hara or Shirley Jackson or Flannery O’Connor

The only way he had survived in his marriage, with a wife who not only made about fifteen times his really quite good doctor salary but who, the moment she surpassed him on the earn-o-meter, found herself completely disgusted by his earning ability, was that he made a big show of only barely tolerating the perks of the money. He allowed Rachel to b