An exclusive interview from The New Yorker
In my view, nothing demands the guarantees of freedom more than how one chooses to express his or her relationship with life. Some choose to express this relationship through song, through the pen, through spirituality, through art. There are so many choice ways to express oneself that no matter how hard oppressive forces try to oppress these expressions of life, and they will try very, very hard, they will always and ultimately fail. Freedom can never be truly or completely oppressed.
, the state of the union is dire. The country is bankrupt and so are its morals and values. It is at war both abroad and at home with itself. Its fall from grace and global dominance is near complete. Its citizens are vacuous, intellectually dead, and have ceded their free will and persona’s to ubiquitous technological devices and the killer apps that power them.
Within the midst of this dystopian future is love-stricken Lenny, a shlumpy, less-than handsome, middle-aged romantic, first generation Russian, lover of his past-its-prime-and-glory city, who still reads those anachronistic, smelly pressed wood pulp things with ink-stained letters called books, attempting to court Eunice, a vibrant, young, superficial first generation Korean beauty who is repulsed by nearly everything about Lenny–he is old, naïve and weak, he has the face of a battleship, and the smell of his dirty old books make her ill–and who consumes her time and mind by shopping and live streaming on her all-consuming apparat.