Quotes from Laura Mullen

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.

If we take seriously the idea that the stories we want to hear shape the stories we can (and want to, and are allowed to) tell, then the canon emerges as something to examine very carefully.

It is worth asking who decides what's an "obsession" and where it differs from meditation or the kind of deep dwelling on a subject we see in philosophy or the work of Robert Wilson, for instance?

One might say that "Torch Song" is, in part, about the urgency of the effort to pin things down and what wild dart throwing that desire leads to.