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I can’t think of a better description for the quality that is everywhere in Fisher than “impersonal care.” He talks about his own problems, his own life, in a distanced, Ballardian way, and he avoids the risk of sentimentality perhaps too carefully. But he cares. He cares about books, he cares abou…

The post of his quoted earlier, about maintaining fidelity to the post-punk event, illustrates why you have to have some patience with Fisher, and also why you’ll be glad you did. First, there’s the lucid analysis: “Punk and post-punk, however, were profoundly suspicious of the Dionysian triumvirat…

The fact that I eventually left my denomination also illustrates that religious people experience coming to our beliefs no differently than other people do. Some religions teach that we learn to share their tenets through divine action, but I’m talking about how it feels getting there. You arrived …

The best thing we can do for Homer, for opera, for the French New Wave, for the Four Classical Novels, for Jay-Z and The Simpsons and Star Wars is to take the promises held out to the culture by the older sort of educational middlebrow, look carefully at them, and keep them. We would keep them by g…

[...] pop culture teaches best when it isn’t so conscious of its teacherly role, when it doesn’t underline every point five or six times. (It has this in common with, well, any sort of culture.) The low-budget shock filmmaker George Romero taught the audiences of his own period far more powerfully,…