Activity

The fashionable words for this state, in the late twentieth century, are alienation and anomie

The familiar dialectic repeats itself: dreams of love and glory, followed by fits of self-hatred, shame, and spite

when life has the temerity to imitate literature

These "notes" are a performance, part tirade, part memor, by a nameless personage who claims to be writing for himself alone but who consistently manipulates the reader--of whom he is morbidly aware--to the point where there seems to be no judgment the reader can make which the writer has not alrea…