“What the poem says, it does.” (Alain Badiou)
“I alone create a product that society does not want.” (Mallarmé)
” ‘Poets, Mallarmé wrote, must take back what is ours. They must sing of heroes with no name — the Figure that is None (la Figure que Nul n’est).’ This declaration is close to the ground zero of modernist abstraction.” (Alex Ross, New Yorker).
“One cannot avoid the days / Parading by in all their carnage.” (John Weiners)
“There is exactly not enough money in the world.” (Michael Klein)
“I am brought to remember Orpheus, who did not sing ABOUT hell; he was IN hell, and sang there, leading the way out.” (Denise Levertov)
“When you’ve seen them all you’ve seen One.” (Ferlinghetti)
Tom’s Garage, JMN, 2011. Photo. Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
EthicalDative 
“What Philip Roth Didn’t Know…”
Dara Horn states that Roth’s caricature of women reveals a lack of empathy, and deems it a literary failure, made more egregious by a lack of curiosity. (“What Philip Roth Didn’t Know About Women Could Fill a Book,” NYTimes)
Definitions of “empathy” mention the words “understand” and “share.”
Is it possible for an author not to understand and share women’s feelings, but still be curious about them?
Does an author write much about anything he or she isn’t curious about?
Can empathy be gender-selective? (That men “get” other men better than they get women is the sitcom pablum of decades. But it doesn’t feel right.)
David Foster Wallace said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” Maybe his F-word was casual, or maybe he meant to flag coitus and violence as what we’re essentially about.
Does true-seeming imagining of other-sexed people demand some sort of gender dysphoria in the novelist, vicarious or not?
I hazard that the answers could be “Maybe,” “Probably not,” “I doubt it,” and “Possibly.”
(Copyright 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.)
HJN Female Nude