I Don't Think I've Left

Something Changed. Somewhere Along The Line You Stopped Accelerating.

Reading A Novel Is Just A Much More Involving And Intimate Experience Than The Act Of Watching A Film. I Mean, You Literally Get Inside Of A Novelist's Head, And You Invest Many Hours To Do So.

I Was Fortunate To Get A Lot Of Mileage Out Of My Vices . . . The Point Is Not To Be Debilitated By Your Pleasures. Maybe I Have Lucky Genes Or Something But I've Never Been Truly Addicted To Anything, Except Pleasure In General.

What I'm Nostalgic For Is The Idea Of An Edge In New York. There Used To Be These Fringes Of The City Where Civilization Sort Of Ended, And Therefore Young People Could Live Cheaply, Or Open Nightclubs Or Art Galleries, Or Even Squat. That Fringe Moved Out To New Jersey And Brooklyn. The Whole Idea Of The Metropolis Is The Centralization Of Like-minded Souls, And When The Central Real Estate Becomes Too Expensive, The Dreamers, The Young Poets, And The Artists Will Go Elsewhere.

The 20th Century Saw Far Greater Catastrophes Than September 11th, As Bad As It Was, And They Didn't Render Literature Or Art Or Music Irrelevant. In Fact, I Think That Literature And Art Help Us To Understand - Sometimes They Provide Narratives And Metaphors For Understanding History, For Understanding Recent Catastrophes.