Category Archives: literature
Duty and sacredness and mysterious-God-like-darknesses, factors of writing or reading a damn story
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamador. The Tralfamadorians ask him if he has any questions and Billy says, Why me? The aliens reply by saying, “There is no why.” Which to … Continue reading
Filed under art, books, literature, writing
Without great solitude, no serious work is possible
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a … Continue reading
Filed under art, books, literature, writing
As you read, some memory comes back to you. Now, in your own mind, you are inventing a story.
Now, as you read, some memory has come back to you. Now, in your own mind, you are inventing a story. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described the studium and punctum of a photograph. There are elements of composition and subject … Continue reading
Filed under art, fiction, literature, writing
Publishing in the New Yorker takes care of those blank faces when you say, Yes I’ve published
As Dubus put it in my interview with him, “I think most writers quit between the ages of twenty and thirty for various reasons. They are alone then unless they have exceptional parents; even if they have very loving and … Continue reading
Filed under literature, Uncategorized, writing
The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than … Continue reading
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Giving Ourselves to Something Which May Change Us – John Ashbery
John Ashbery, Winner of the 1976 National Book Award for SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR. For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as “difficult” and “private,” though I never meant for it to be. At least, I wanted its … Continue reading
Filed under art, literature
A Writer’s Palinopsia
When I was five I dressed up as a football player for Halloween. I wore an Oregon State Beaver football jersey and a plastic Seattle Seahawks helmet. I painted black marks under my eyes, wore my baseball cleats, and stuffed … Continue reading
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Gold and Ashes: The Cycle of One Hundred Years of Solitude
In One Hundred Years of Solitude Marquez compresses the Latin American unrest into a Buendia family history. The children of the family all carry the same names of their parents. And they also act in a similar way, thus repeating … Continue reading
Filed under literature, review, writing
Elsewhere, Perhaps by Amoz Oz
Amoz Oz wrote Elsewhere, Perhaps when he was 27. It was his second novel. Set in the fictional town of Metsudat Ram, an Israeli Kibbutz, in a valley near a disputed border. If the desert heat doesn’t threaten their way … Continue reading
Filed under books, fiction, literature, review
