It's Funny To Be A Critic.

It's Funny To Be A Critic.

There Is A Place In Men's Lives Where Pictures Do In Fact Bleed, Ghosts Gibber And Shriek, Maidens Run Forever Through Mysterious Landscapes From Nameless Foes; That Place Is, Of Course, The World Of Dreams And Of The Repressed Guilts And Fears That Motivate Them [i.e., The Unconscious]. This World The Dogmatic Optimism And Shallow Psychology Of The Age Of Reason Had Denied; And Yet This World It Is The Final, Perhaps The Essential, Purpose Of The Gothic Romance To Assert.

I Used To Be Fond Of Indian Arm Wrestling.

Unless Criticism Refuses To Take Itself Quite So Seriously Or At Least To Permit Its Readers Not To, It Will Inevitably Continue To Reflect The Finicky Canons Of The Genteel Tradition And The Depressing Pieties Of The Culture Religion Of Modernism.

I've Been Writing About James Fenimore Cooper. He Was Not A Writer. Here Was A Man Who Was 30 Years Old And Had Never Put Anything More Than His Signature On Paper.