skopia
Every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible, Malcolm opens, then proves it through a convicted murderer suing the writer who befriended him and delivered him to readers as a sociopath.
Dyer imagines his way into the nights of jazz musicians, Lester Young after the army broke him and Thelonious Monk alone at a piano, inventing scenes to reach what no biography can.
Borges wrote criticism the way he wrote fiction, in short pieces with trapdoors, on subjects from Dante to King Kong. Every writer creates his own precursors, he argues, and literary history rearranges itself.
Taking a picture is a form of acquisition, close to aggression, Sontag argues, and a world drowning in images loses the power to feel them. You will not photograph casually again.
Give a woman five hundred a year and a room with a lock and she will write, Woolf argues, then invents a gifted sister for Shakespeare and follows her to a terrible end.