At the New Yorker, Valeria Luiselli gives us an essay in defense of monuments, libraries, park benches, daughters, Dickinson, and ‘simplicissimusses’:
In that first New York of my early twenties, I decided that I despised writers who admitted to crying over art or beauty or solitude, those who indulged in elevated states of mind. I would renounce those who feigned innocence or slight stupidity in order to create empathy in their readers; I would never fall into the trap of candor. I would read only the bastards (Pound), the crooked (Eliot), the strange (Cravan and Loy)… If my programmatic convictions were not pretentious enough, I decided that this “other” literature would be the backdrop against which I would experience the city.
