The idea of time is our consolation for losing the moments
we fail to pay attention to. We say: it's got to go some-
where.

Note on street protests (1984). The streets are no longer
where anybody is, only a way to get to somewhere
else. Not even a place, since pedestrians themselves don't
think in terms of walking, but just like carless drivers. Thus
whatever happens in the streets, is nowhere, can be
nothing. The streets are where you ignore whatever
isn't in your immediate path....As a consequence, there is
no public forum for all the public (only, separate groups
arranged by explicit distinctions and for particular times)
and no sense of awareness as the people. Television
usurps these regions with its artificial homogeneity and
compulsive irrelevance and most of all its totally bogus,
arbitrary authority. Besides that, there's subculture organs
of media which define narrow and narrower points of
view, till one can no longer communicate with any other
except through the empty hieroglyphs of mass imagery--
through advertizing slogans--and nothing but the crudest
emotions (adrenaline on, adrenaline off)...for subtlety
you have to use some specialized argot: a hobby, a job, a
cult, or an addiction.
Postscript 2003. One may now ask: is the Internet
a place? Or is it, perhaps, our nostalgia for a common place,
made manifest?

When i busy myself with postproduction (and caring about what
happens to my work) it's like the island castaway taking his
message-bottle between his teeth & wanting to swim it across
the ocean...There can be no one it's aimed for...
Yet it goes.

"Alas, the penis is such a ridiculous petitioner. It is so unreliable,
though everything depends on it--the world is balanced on it like
a ball on a seal's nose. It is so easily teased, insulted, betrayed,
abandoned; yet it must pretend to be invulnerable, a weapon
which confers magical powers..." --William Gass, reviewing Henry
Miller [--substitute: the Single Discrete Auctorial Voice of the
Poet]

Ozick on Helen Keller.