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The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates.
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It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.
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This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
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What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?
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The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.
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This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.
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My chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it.
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Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies, upped the stakes.
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Severity is in the eye of the sufferer, it says. Pain is pain.
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The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, 'then' what do we do?
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This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn't engage anybody.
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It can become an exercise in trying to get the reader to like and admire you instead of an exercise in creative art.
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I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
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Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.