ㅤ Kindland

“This is what I think of America -- nothing. This is what I think of American Jews -- nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism -- nothing. Your chances for survival -- none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you're over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won't give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife--who's tearing her program up into little white paper pills she'd like to swallow like Percodan--isn't merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it's more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn't just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it's more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that's been thrust at her--from what college to choose to what career to have--is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example--whom she's been condemned to babysit--will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history. Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit, petty and forgettable, with your frigidaires and color TVs, in front of which you can munch your instant supper, laugh at a joke, and choke, realizing that you have traded your birthright away for a bowl of plastic lentils...”
― Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus

“In those days there was Power everywhere. You did not have to be wise to find it. Power lived in pretty feathers; Power was in stars and owls beaks; Power was in the patterns that the women painted on everyone's shirts so that they could find the animals they hunted and kill them; they could bring back meat to eat and clothe everyone in their skins and they could all dream of the Star People who dwelled on the black roof above the trees and sparkled at their images in brooks and lakes; they dreamed also of the Plant People who came on green legs bringing corn-gifts and tobacco-gifts; and all the gifts had Power; but the most Powerful color was red, and the women made paint from red earth and bird's eggs and painted special things on everyone's shirts, so the red cloth of the Jenuaq was highly prized.”
― William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt

“Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings.' It is to turn the world into this world. ('This world'! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have. ”
― Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.”
― J.G. Ballard, Crash