Luc Sante (born 25 May 1954, Verviers, Belgium) is a writer and critic. Sante has written a number of books and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds.
I thought of New York as a free city, like one of those prewar nests of intrigue and licentiousness where exiles and lamsters and refugees found shelter in a tangle of improbable juxtapositions. I had never gotten around to changing my nationality from the one assigned me at birth, but I would have declared myself a citizen of New York City had such a stateless state existed, its flag a solid black.
Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Books collected on every surface; I believe that somehow they managed to breed
Paris had more sex than most church-laden places, and more church than most sex-laden places. Parisians crowed about Travail-Famille-Patrie while frequenting brothels. They enjoyed visiting drag shows while clamping down on homosexuality. They celebrated romance while treating women like dirt. Many of these contradictions existed elsewhere, but I do think Paris ruled the hypocrisy championships.
Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.
Self-reinvention is an essential trope of the American project, closely linked to another such trope: going on the lam. Both are regularly featured in movies and novels and suchlike. Criminals and persons loitering with and without intent hold a crucial place in the culture. For obvious reasons, the culture cannot endorse this behavior, even as it is in thrall to it.
The con is a kind of jiu-jitsu that turns the sucker's own greed into its principal weapon. The greedier you are the more likely you are to be conned, and for the greater a sum. Since people regularly dispose of their intelligence in their rush to be swindled, and then turn right around and do it again, humans must want to be duped. Institutionalized wishful thinking - the stock market, religion, advertising - is after all a cornerstone of our system.
New York, which is founded on forward motion and thus loath to acknowledge its dead, merely causes them to walk, endlessly unsatisfied and unburied, to invade the precincts of supposed progress, to lay chill hands on the heedless present, which does not know how to identify the forces that tug at its rationality.
I confess I prefer to engage with pictures which I've chosen myself out of the welter of unidentified pictures, without the intrusion of too much personal context - Ilike to be a detective, and dislike being an impresario.
I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.
I realised that although I was fascinated with America, its history and culture, I was not interested in becoming American.
I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.
My method is the magpie's: I look for shiny things. That is, I look for concrete material details of daily life, and I look for vigorous prose, which is the only kind I can read for very long. That effectively bars a great deal of scholarly work, but I didn't feel its loss.
My ideal city is more like the city (New York and Paris come to mind, but it sort of applies to all) that existed up to and including the 1930s, when different classes lived all together in the same neighborhoods, and most businesses of any sort were mom-and-pop, and people and things had a local identity.
I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem to contain it. But I need the stupid things.
The US remains an object of fascination for me, and the subject of much study, but while many of my friends etc. are American and I have no plans at present to move elsewhere, I consider myself a permanent outsider.
When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.
New York has no truck with the past. It expels its dead.