And yet, even in 1982, when "Late Night with David Letterman" premièred, he presaged something else, an obsession with what was authentic, the kind of preoccupation that would dominate the nineties, inflecting figures like David Foster Wallace and Kurt Cobain, famous men who were desperate for rock-star fame and then flamboyantly and publicly hated the stuff once they got it.
Several books later, he continues to suggest in the central essay of this volume that the interpretation of any body of writing will follow most of these venerable procedures.It was this set of preoccupations that led, all those years ago, to Empson's charge of "neo-Christianity".
Whatever it was that I recognised in her, or she in me, I am sure that it had something to do with her curiosity and fascination around issues of belonging, a preoccupation that was fed by her two years in Japan.
For another, she has for decades scrutinised torture as an instrument of state-sanctioned policy, a preoccupation that grew out of her 1985 monograph The Body in Pain.
That is, it's the very sort of insider preoccupation that the critics of negativity say they want to avoid.
And, of course, this same phenomenon repeats with each new dietary preoccupation that takes hold of us, from organic, to gluten-free, to look out for wheat, to non-GMO, and so on.
It was a sign of his preoccupation that he engaged in no tourism here, and never once stepped from his car to greet ordinary Chinese, a staple of such visits since Richard M. Nixon -- awkward in most crowds -- thrust into Chinese throngs.
Preoccupation that goes beyond curiosity".
Although it lacks the inventiveness of his more radical Modernist contemporaries, his work with its depictions of the preoccupations that led a generation of writers and readers to break away from Victorian social, sexual, and cultural norms provides crucial insight into the social and cultural history of Anglo-American Modernism.
Looking at the rest of the exhibit, which includes sculptures, drawings, videos and artifacts, one sees some of the preoccupations that have marked Ms. Brown's four-decade-long career.
Forty years after the first James Bond film, "Dr. No," was released, the series has outlived many of the preoccupations that fueled it: the cold war, the space race, the sexual revolution and the British Empire.
