Missing Epigrams
This week’s feature about the malevolent history of the building that Club Z is in originally had two epigrams at the top. They were edited out of the final version.* They are great quotes, and both were echoing in the distance as the piece was coming together. They are:
“…last night while [he] was sitting on my face, I began to think how futile life is, no matter what you do—it all ends in Death, we are given such a short time…ā€¯
—Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance
“…promiscuity might be about an ambivalent need for love, or the desire, the stray hope, for something other than nothing.ā€¯
—Charles D’Ambrosio
[*There was some debate in The Stranger’s offices over whether epigrams are “pretentious.” My opinion is that epigrams are wonderful, that they give you a sense of what the writer has been reading and thinking about, that they draw you in and, when you’re done with an article, suggest something else you could go read—like Dancer from the Dance (a great novel) or D’Ambrosio’s (unfuckingbelievably great) essays—but my editor, not a huge fan of things “literary” or “twee,” wanted the epigrams to go, and another staffer, let’s say his name is Eli, agreed, writing in an e-mail: “I think an epigram can be off-putting. It can feel too self-justifying or too self-important, even if that’s not at all how it’s intended… It feels like a stalling tactic or a blast of trumpets, either way I don’t like it.” So they were killed.]
But those quotations have achieved the opposite: they have convinced me, perhaps unreasonably, to never ever crack a book by either one of those guys.