...this could have been my moment to start a salon. I could have bought that bread and said to people, "Have you read the new Roth?" as they were taking off their coats. And they'd have gone, like, "What the fuck?" if they were my friends, or "Yes, isn't it marvelous?," if they were people I didn't know.
I'm sure that's an error in my thinking, and that my unwillingness to engage with sensitive first novels about coming out on a sheep farm in North Dakota in the 1950s—I made this book up, by the way, and if you wrote it, I mean no offense—proves that the terrorists have won...
Sometimes it feels as though we are being asked to imagine cultural judgments as a whole bunch of concentric circles. On the outside, we have the wrong ones, made by the people who read The DaVinci Code and listen to Celine Dion; right at the center we have the correct ones, made by the snootier critics, very often people who have vowed never to laugh again until Aristophanes produces a follow-up to The Frogs.
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