Characters in Tailspin
Jacqueline and Jemima are instructing Zeno, who has returned the purloined GRE documents and is thus restored to dull respectability, in Postmodernism. Postmodernism, they tell him, has turned its back...
View ArticleAbout Writing — Linkdump
Mostly sf writing. Simone de Beauvoir – interview with Madeleine Gobeil Jorge Luis Borges – “The Metaphor” (and the rest of This Craft of Verse) Samuel R Delany – “About 5,750 Words” (and the rest of...
View ArticleNo End To This
I hope the novel proves to be retrievable. I enjoy retrieving mine better than I do writing them. Perhaps you finished it under a strain. Try rearranging it backwards and see what you see. I thought...
View ArticleAll That Has Dark Sounds
Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and...
View ArticleSnipped and Shaped and Built On
The temptation is to give what you overhear great credence, as if people would only say what they really think about you behind your back. But behind your back is also where people are most free to...
View ArticleTiresome Novel Synopsis
The other day I had the experience of talking to a young man of the same age as the girls I find I can’t talk to. He was a little older perhaps, 23, just out of Harvard, and wanting to write. I had...
View ArticleA Radical Openness to Persuasion
Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is a radical openness to persuasion. Even those beliefs he’s surest of, the artist puts under pressure...
View ArticleA Literature of Inimitable Relics
Contrary to history, art describes individuals, desires only the unique. It does not classify, it unclassifies. No matter how much they may engage us, our generalizations may be likened to those...
View ArticleCraft & Mechanics of Prose
As stumbling is the motion of all skating, so skating is the motion of all imagining: picturing requires “a pitch / Beyond our usual hold upon ourselves.” When the sound of sledding or skating is given...
View ArticleCraft & Mechanics of Prose II
Here is one final recitation of the five formal practices. Radiant ignition is the first. Sprays of light can bear their own weight or lift something heavy; they can, like a golden envelope, surround...
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