Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined with the imperative of accomplishing nothing.

Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

Yellow is vagueness and luminousness, both.

We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.

New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?