I am waiting impatiently for the day when beleaguered, like-minded academics can order James Wolcott's collected essays for their classes.

Teaching is a performance art.

Human life began in flight and fear. Religion rose from rituals of propitiation, spells to lull the punishing elements.

Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.

Gay men may seek sex without emotion; lesbians often end up in emotion without sex.

In the west, Apollo and Dionysus strive for victory. Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.