I cannot divine how it happens that the man who knows the least is the most argumentative.
Today it is not the classroom nor the classics which are the repositories of models of eloquence, but the ad agencies.
World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth's atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.
Time’ has ceased, 'space' has vanished. We now live in a global village. . . a simultaneous happening
All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.
Wives are good on paper, at least. until they turn into harpies with sharp claws and open check books. Then they're kind of frightening. And they put on all kinds of makeup and parade around the street with their shopping cart yelling "Sale on aisle seven!" at anyone who will listen. Their wooden clog sandals make a helluva racket on linoleum tile. Their plastic jewelry clatters like the bones of little children.
I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
My family believe you should never be flashy about anything. Maybe that handicapped me a little bit, that extreme humility.
Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.