The characters are products of that world but they are also the justification for its existence (which I recognize is itself a thoroughly religious notion), so the characters and their world have a necessarily symbiotic relationship, which means that in order to get the story to a point of completion the characters must feel completed too. If anything else could be done with them then the story would simply not be over. But of course nothing is final, least of all completion. That’s just a noble(ish) lie we tell ourselves so we know when to turn the printer on…

In Ferguson we see the collapse of the urban economy and the explosion of the defense industry all in a single shot. What we see, in fact, is the buoying of our economy, and the enrichment of the 1%, at the expense of human lives, lives like Michael Brown’s. This is the family portrait of late-stage American capitalism: our weapons, deployed all over the world, have no targets left but ourselves.

From the start, I liked Little John better, a preference which was reinforced years later when Big John said the following of learned women, “She cannot make a bed but she will lecture you on the inner symbolism of Camus while dinner burns”…

A: To a kidney stone of a decade!
B: It doesn’t look like the sky has fallen in!
They clink their glasses.
A: Of course sometimes shit go down when there’s a billion dollars on an elevator.

I recently picked up A Room of One’s Own because I am beginning to write a novel, and I was wondering if my room and income count. Do I have, quite literally, what Woolf thinks it takes to write fiction? It crossed my mind to see if, adjusted for inflation, I make enough money. What would 500 a year in 1928 be in 2014?

The ultimate fate of the wall is not merely to leave remnant spaces, be they lines or open squares. It is, rather, to reinforce, even in its absence, the primacy of inside over outside, of capital over province, of city over town.

A: I will admit I had to be told don’t ever use torture— B: —Well, to torture in the cold light of day… A: —but I didn’t think it was offensive regardless. B:  You didn’t think it was offensive? They have wives. … Continued