If You Can't Annoy Somebody, There Is

Being American Is, I Think, A Very Difficult Thing In Art, Because All The Elements Are European.

When That Ineffable Compound Of Depression, Sadness (these Two Are Not The Same), Anxiety, Self-hatred, Sense Of Failure And Fear For The Future Begins To Steal Over You, Start Telling Yourself That What You Have Is A Hangover. You Are Not Sickening For Anything, You Have Not Suffered A Minor Brain Lesion, You Are Not All That Bad At Your Job, Your Family And Friends Are Not Leagued In A Conspiracy Of Barely Maintained Silence About What A S**t You Are, You Have Not Come At Last To See Life As It Really Is And There Is No Use Crying Over Spilt Milk.

Twentieth Century Music Is Like Paedophilia. No Matter How Persuasively And Persistently Its Champions Urge Their Cause, It Will Never Be Accepted By The Public At Large, Who Will Continue To Regard It With Incomprehension, Outrage And Repugnance.

The World That Seemed So Various And New, Well, It Does Contract. One's Burning Desire To Investigate Human Behavior, And To Make, Or Imply, Statements About It, Does Fall Off. And So One Does Find That Early Works Are Full Of Energy And Also Full Of Vulgarity, Crudity, And Incompetence, And Later Works Are More Carefully Finished, And In That Sense Better Literary Products. But . . . There's Often A Freshness That Is Missing In Later Works--for Every Gain There's A Loss. I Think It Evens Out In That Way.

Only A World Without Love Strikes Me As Instantly And Decisively More Terrible Than One Without Music.