ON A WORD I'D SOMEHOW NEVER HEARD BEFORE READING IT HERE:
"Can something still be a uchronia if I lived through it personally?
...
"There are many reasons that I actively work against my own tendency toward nostalgia, the tendency that makes me at times daydream of the early 1990s as a sort of queer political uchronia instead of the actual, messy, fucked up political time-space that it was. One of them is the simple fact that nostalgia in this way prevents us from seeing the past for what it was, or as accurately for what it was as is possible with the divide of time. That has always been clear enough to me. But the other reason, which took me considerably longer to understand, is that nostalgia for the past further prevents us from developing the literary/political/survival tools that are necessary for the present."
ON BAE1992 GUEST EDITOR SUSAN SONTAG:
"She was queer and thought about art and she loved essays, and she had a lot of politics with which I agree, and she also fucked up all the time and said things I find problematic, just as I also am queer (or whatever) and think about art and love essays and fuck up all the time and say things that I later find problematic."
ON PRIMARY VS. SECONDARY SOURCES:
"There’s an essay on pornography and the concept of liberty that managed to bore me out of it and into just streaming pornography instead..."
ON THE VOLUME ITSELF:
"The easier thing would be to discount some of the anthology and celebrate the parts of it that I want to celebrate, but this is a disservice, like when we call something a hybrid rather than letting all of its components exist as a contradictory whole.
...
"If the essay is so invested in the world and in history, as so many writers in this collection claim, then there’s really no excuse for the most boring of these essays, talking endlessly about Hamlet, essays where boring doesn’t just mean boring but instead limited, instead conservative, instead stifling, instead damaging."