The photograph loomed over the toiling shoppers like a totem of
sexualized pathology, a vision of feeling and unfeeling chaffing together. It
was a picture made for people who can't bear to feel and yet still need to
feel. It was a picture by people sophisticated enough to fetishize their
disability publicly. It was a very good advertisement for a product called
Obsession.
"The Dentist"
HB: I was a little anxious about meeting you. I imagined
myself dissolved into the kind of perceptions your characters have of each
other; as when one character says, "she didn't think his languor was drug
induced. It seemed more the product of an unusual distribution of self, as if,
by some crafty manipulation of internal circuitry, he'd concentrated himself in
certain key psychic posts and abandoned the vast regions he didn't want to be
in."
It seems risky to be perceived by you.
MG: Let me tell you most of the time it's not like that.
Every now and then something jumps out at me but usually I have to sit there
for hours, literally hours, and think: what was that like, metaphorically or
literally?