'The Ecstasy Of Influence'

[fiefoe]

A plagiarism by Jonathan Lethem

• Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
• ... the notes he so carefully added to The Waste Land can be read as a symptom of modernism's contamination anxiety. Taken from this angle, what exactly is postmodernism, except modernism without the anxiety?
• I'm not alone in having been born backward into an incoherent realm of texts, products, and images, the commercial and cultural environment with which we've both supplemented and blotted out our natural world.
• Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall's fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it's not a surprise that some of today's most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange.
• A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.
• ... industries of cultural capital, who profit not from creating but from distributing
• Active reading is an impertinent raid on the literary preserve. Readers are like nomads, poaching their way across fields they do not own.
• Works of art exist simultaneously in two economies, a market economy and a gift economy.... Art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—is received as a gift is received.
• Any text that has infiltrated the common mind to the extent of Gone With the Wind or Lolita or Ulysses inexorably joins the language of culture. A map-turned-to-landscape, it has moved to a place beyond enclosure or control.
  

<<