Quotes from Jess Row

The gestures and the swagger and the attitude of black men is imitated everywhere in American culture, but people still find black men intolerable.

You think about every piece of idiomatic speech adopted by white men over the past ten or twenty years; virtually all of it comes from hip-hop.

The politics of transgender identity are really complicated. And the debate over how much of gender is biological and how much of it is socially constructed is a very complex debate.

We live in an age that's very suspicious of preachy political rhetoric, which means that there's room for art that approaches these issues from the side - as satire, as parody, or as a kind of outlandish speculative proposition.

In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn't find another use for and couldn't compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you'd see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back.

If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself?

In my study, there are stacks of papers to grade, books I should have read & reviewed months ago, but I have no concentration: the time slips through my fingers like water.

It's possible, when you've been married for twenty-five or thirty years, when your children have grown up and moved away, to keep coming back across the tail ends of conversations you started in a different decade, and to realize that whole areas of existence have lain dormant all that time, like seeds in an envelope. There's nothing unusual about that.

What I was pointing to was that, yeah, blackness is a fiction; whiteness is a fiction. When we live according to these categories, we're living within a fiction. Of course, it's a fiction with very real consequences.

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

But [Ben Marcus] can't resist the urge to re-enact the great prizefights of the past--Kerouac vs. Capote, Barth vs. Gardner--as if what we really need, in 2005, is two white male writers fighting over something that can't be circumscribed, much less owned. Isn't it time we allowed the scorched-earth rhetoric of avant-gardes and ancien régimes to drift, like the tissue-thin sheets of an old aerogramme, into the dustbin of history?

It was one of the great pleasures of the age, to be safe and warm and dry - showered, deodorized, professionally clothed in espadrilles and a linen jacket, latte steaming up the radio display, taking in the world's troubles three minutes at a time. That was luxury.

Worried about getting a life? Forget that. Get a lifestyle .

The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to justify imperialism and slavery. They're categories intended for the enforcement of power. They were never intended to be psychologically satisfying in the way we want them to be.

Does it, does it—I'm flailing here—does it have a name? What you've done? If it had a name, he says, what would that change, exactly? Would it be more acceptable to you? Would it be a thing people do? Would it have a category unto itself?

Were I a black man, it occurs to me, working or not, in this city, I would have a dry-cleaning bill.

There's a feeling among white Americans that there's no such thing as racial harmony, no such thing as a positive, productive relationship with people of color.

As a white teen, I was very drawn to hip-hop culture, almost to the point of disappearing in it - there was a sense of having no sense of authenticity except this one that wasn't mine.

Disguising your own origins is a deeply American impulse, but that doesn't make it any less compromising. The way I live my life is to try to foreground the tensions and paradoxes of being a white person who's interested in racial justice and reconciliation, rather than disguise or obliterate them.

I try to think of the social function of fiction as drawing the individual toward larger social and political questions. But I'm also very comfortable in saying that my novel - any novel - doesn't matter as much as larger questions of how we can see justice done.

I was relatively isolated from people of color. My parents are too old to be Baby Boomers; they had me later in life. So we didn't listen to any black music at all in the house, not even Ben E. King.

I had a lot of expectations placed on me because I was already having some success with my short stories. That was not a good situation to be in. That by itself took a long time to overcome.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

My greatest fear about a world in which racial reassignment surgery becomes common is that it then becomes an expression of all kinds of class privilege. You have a truly dystopian society divided between the people who can afford to be racially altered and perfected and the ones who can't.