His fey charm and classic good looks
on Michael Chabon
[...] the bespectacled transvestitite in Singapore who, when asked to name the best restaurant in a town justly celebrated for its unique combination of Chinese, Indian and Malaysian delicacies, answers, without a moment's hesitation, 'Denny's.' [...]
The critic Edward Said has pointed out the ironies of placing Eastern and Western voices in such rigid opposition, and has unravelled them in such a way as to show that this strategy is a kind of philosophical imperialism -- an imposition of Western images about the East onto the East. America …
Then she said, 'Do young men need sex? ...
'... Come on. What's to hide? I wish I'd known a long time ago that I was going to die. We could've gotten to know each other a lot better. There's so much we don't know' ...
You began to forget the way she looked then, and to see her somehow as youn…
The teenage dread is not so much dramatized (as with Caulfield or Sport) but is, to borrow Jacques Derrida's phrase, sous rature -- as though the very presence of the idea owrks only to emphasize the extent to which it should be absent.
