Low Life preface xi

“There and about town, once useful objects are presented as decorative artifacts, bereft of purpose except to evoke vague images of an era about which little need be known other than that it was a “simpler time”.
The common word for this kind of distortion is “nostalgia.” This word can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community–qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one’s birth.”