Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

Cool is spent. Cool is empty. Cool is ex post facto. When advertisers and pundits hoard a word, you know it's time to retire from it. To move on. I want to suggest, therefore, that we begin to avoid cool now. Cool is a trick to get you to buy garments made by sweatshop laborers in Third World countries. Cool is the Triumph of the Will. Cool enables you to step over bodies. Cool enables you to look the other way. Cool makes you functional, eager for routine distraction, passive, doped, stupid.

Maybe when I'm sixty-five I'll talk about my literary life.

The past was so past it hurt.

I believe in the absolute and unlimited liberty of reading. I believe in wandering through the stacks and picking out the first thing that strikes me. I believe in choosing books based on the dust jacket.

I love comic books and always did as a kid.

Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.