Pavlo’s Reviews > Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays > Status Update

“Surrealism’s great gift to sensibility was to make melancholy cheerful.”

One use of literary respectability in our time— […] —is to make acceptable an outrageous, essentially forbidding author, who becomes a classic on the basis of the many interesting things to be said about the work that scarcely convey (perhaps even conceal) the real nature of the work itself, which may be, among other things, extremely boring or morally monstrous or terribly painful to read.

“All ventures inspired by the ideal of a total art form—whether in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, or literature—manage in one way to another to theatricalize.”