“...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar.”

“With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.”

“As a newcomer I felt that this was indeed a blessed place, capable of unabashedly advertising its flaws, fearing no ridicule and no criticism. That, in essence, is the opposite of provincialism. The great cities of the world are not provincial: They invite complexity, not propaganda.”

“The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.”

“The peasants of all lands recognize power and they salute it, whether it's good or evil.”

“Poetry is again hip in America as people are beginning to refuse to die of boredom and to choke in the fog of their funny money.”

“The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.”