Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pu...lp, disgraced by Goebbels and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a sto...ry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban m...asses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but p...ulp is left, become a massive, sick Thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. Here is the real enemy of the people: our own selves dehumanized into "the masses." And where is the David who can slay this giant?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities ar...e the ova of insects in their axils.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another; ...that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out of existence like pulp.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or books... containing lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »