Sublime

Basel,

The Uilsa story reveals his strong, almost violent emotional side and his ability to tap the Dionysian spirit; the ethics essay reflects his lifelong interest not in epistemology but in ethics. Already his question is not “What can I know?” but “How should I live?”10

Within a five-block radius of my apartment there are four first-run multiplexes and a dozen thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors, and genres. These are the mom-and-pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of The Honeymoon Killers even if I’m the only one

” Levitt’s deadpan spunkiness emerges throughout the essay. She is a proud reporter, insisting on the exterior, matter-of-fact, impersonal quality of her work, writes Gopnik. But she refused to become a journalist. “A reporter,” according to Levitt, “says what she sees; a photojournalist sees what everyone else is saying.”

Rorty advises, always asks of a text: what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean? I confess that I like these questions, and they are what I think strong reading is all about, because strong reading doesn’t ever ask: Am I getting this poem right? Strong reading knows that what it does to the poem is r

a hamburger the size of a Susan B. Anthony dollar. All day long I installed doorknobs. It was all right.

Updike’s “A&P”

“You suggested the beats, so that’s who I’m reading. I got an anthology at the college bookstore. Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, Ed Dorn… I love him… Lawrence Ferlinghetti…

Banal, in that, despite an uncustomary gentleness of mien, the morphological type was one very much in the public domain; it exemplified what I take to be a specifically American criterion of ‘cuteness’ – which is to say, beauty untranscended by mystery, tragedy or spirituality, beauty golden and well nourished and so vacuously secure in its own na