Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

There are certainly times in history where power associates itself closely with fields that we would call the humanities, like rulers surrounding themselves with philosophers and poets, or playwrights. We do not live in that moment, and the best way to gauge the proximity of an academic field to power is by salary.

Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

Take Ezra Pound's translations of poetry from Chinese. He doesn't really know Chinese, and the very strange results that he comes up with aren't all successful, but as a whole it's incredibly successful, moving us away from familiar forms and indicating other forms we might think in or express in.

The corruption in Iraq has nothing to do with ideas - it has to do with the regime and institutional structures and power.

Academic writing you have to get right. Fiction you have to get plausible. And there's a world of difference.

There was this very deliberate move to just overlay an American reality in Iraq. I've never actually seen the map, but apparently Americans thought the names of places were just too complicated so they got decent maps of Baghdad and just renamed everything with familiar names. This neighborhood would be Hollywood, that neighborhood would be Manhattan, and that one's Madison, you're going to drive down Oak and take a left on Main Street.