“It seems to me that the writers we love most are those who manage to capture something we ourselves have thought and rejected, for being forbidden, dangerous, elusive, something that if we made room for it would undo something else we want to keep, so we force it away—literature as a catalogue of rejected thoughts. For the way they can hold onto what the rest of us would put away as dangerous, they become heroes, the ones who emerge with the one thing we hoped to keep secret, but know we need. When I say to you James Salter is one of my heroes, that is what I mean.”

— “Sex and Salter,” by Alexander Chee. Click on the piece, be prepared for some grade-A writing about sex, and writing about writing about sex.

I interviewed photographer Gregory Crewdson for The Paris Review Daily, where we talked about the movies (Lynch, Hitchcock, Malick), the pursuit of things that are perfect, digital versus film, and Mad Men, of course. In the “good news” category: Wes Anderson is finally working at a quicker pace. Hooray!

Fun fact, I don’t know if this remains in the final piece: Mr. Crewdson watches Mad Men on his iPad, because it reminds him of looking through the ground glass on his 8 by 10 camera, which makes a lot of sense.