I Believe In Broken, Fractured, Complicated Narratives,

What We Know Is That Shakespeare Wrote Perhaps The Most Remarkable Body Of Passionate Love Poetry In The English Language To A Young Man.

My Father Who In This Case Was An Obsessive Life-long Storyteller, And By A Very Peculiar Trick Of My Father's. My Father Would Tell A Very, Very Long Story, And The Punch Line Would Be In Yiddish.

I Believe In Broken, Fractured, Complicated Narratives, But I Believe In Narratives As A Vehicle For Truth, Not Simply As A Form Of Entertainment, Though I Love Entertainment, But Also A Way Of Conveying What Needs To Be Conveyed About The Works That I Care About.

In High School I Read [lev] Tolstoy's "anna Karenina" And Loved It. Then I Read [friedrich] Nietzsche's "on The Genealogy Of Morals" And That Hit Me Hard. I Don't Know Where I Got It. My Parents Warned Me Not To Mention Either Of Those Books When I Went For My College Interviews So I Wouldn't Seem Like An Egghead. They Told Me To Talk About Sports.

A Comparably Capacious Embrace Of Beauty And Pleasure - An Embrace That Somehow Extends To Death As Well As Life, To Dissolution As Well As Creation - Characterizes Montaigne's Restless Reflections On Matter In Motion, Cervantes's Chronicle Of His Mad Knight, Michelangelo's Depiction Of Flayed Skin, Leonardo's Sketches Of Whirlpools, Caravaggio's Loving Attention To The Dirty Soles Of Christ's Feet.