Deep Assignments Run Through All Our Lives;

All Over The World Major Museums Have Bowed To The Influence Of Disney And Become Theme Parks In Their Own Right. The Past, Whether Renaissance Italy Or Ancient Egypt, Is Re-assimilated And Homogenized Into Its Most Digestible Form. Desperate For The New, But Disappointed With Anything But The Familiar, We Recolonize Past And Future. The Same Trend Can Be Seen In Personal Relationships, In The Way People Are Expected To Package Themselves, Their Emotions And Sexuality, In Attractive And Instantly Appealing Forms.

They Thrived On The Rapid Turnover Of Acquaintances, The Lack Of Involvement With Others, And The Total Self-sufficiency Of Lives Which, Needing Nothing, Were Never Dissapointed.

Writing A Novel Is One Of Those Modern Rites Of Passage, I Think, That Lead Us From An Innocent World Of Contentment, Drunkenness, And Good Humor, To A State Of Chronic Edginess And The Perpetual Scanning Of Bank Statements.

When The Modern Movement Began, Starting Perhaps With The Paintings Of Manet And The Poetry Of Baudelaire And Rimbaud, What Distinguished The Modern Movement Was The Enormous Honesty That Writers, Painters And Playwrights Displayed About Themselves. The Bourgeois Novel Flinches From Such Notions.

I Don't Think It's Possible To Touch People's Imagination Today By Aesthetic Means.