David Given Schwarm

Today we are going to Disneyland for Kates birthday – we will be meeting some of her friends and having lunch at Ariels Grotto, which has been renamed the princess kitchen or something. Kate is so excited – she has learned to sing the happy birthday song (with the cha-cha-cha ending). Jack is also really…

I had come to New York at the start of the e1960’s, eager to put to work the writer I had, since adolescence, pledged myself to become. My idea of a writer” Someone interested in “everything.” I had always had interests of many kinds, so it was natural for me to conceive of the vocation…

America is a land of masking jokers.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied: first, because the possibilities of photography are infinite; and, second, because the project is finally self-devouring. The attempts by photographers to bolster up a depleted sense of reality contribute to the depletions. Our…

The policy of equivocating about the nature of their disease with cancer patients reflects the conviction that dying people are best spared the news that they are dying, and that the good death is the sudden one, best of all if it happens while we’re unconscious or asleep. Yet the modern denial of death does…

I am strongly drawn to camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it’ he can only, whatever his intention exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw it contours…

Having one’s sensorium challenged or stretched hurts. The new serious music hurts one’s ears, the new painting does not graciously reward one’s sight, the new films and the few interesting new prose works do not go down easily the commonest complaint about the films of Antonioni or the narratives of Beckett or Burroughs is the…

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life – its material plentitude, – conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it s in the light of the condition of our senses, or capacities (rather than those…

Fundamental research is hit or miss. You have no idea what could happen or when. The only guarantee is that if you invest in it and prioritize resources will enough, eventually it will change everything.

The Problems are solvable.