Category Archives: Read
Quickened by Dickens
I feel like I’m a better person than I was two weeks ago. I’ve finished reading Great Expectations and to my surprise, I really enjoyed it. Understand: I have never had to read Charles Dickens. This unfortunate reality is likely due to skipping two years of high school (long story) and all the reading that […]
What Jack Said
Jack Kerouac once said that things we feel find their own form. In my very early years as a writer-for-hire, I worked with clients and form was decided for me. There was no room for feeling. But writing thirty-second ad copy demanded economy of expression, bang for buck delivered in three different versions designed to […]
Disconnecting Hamlet
Growing as an artist and creative thinker in a highly industrialized city can be a real challenge. Where I live, there is a tendency for art to be packaged; and thinking follows set patterns. So it helps that I work in solitude. My life is an experiment that is slightly Darwin-esque, and I wonder how […]
In the metro, short and quick
There’s a conversation that took place one winter in Rome between the poet Ezra Pound and interviewer Donald Hall. Published in the Summer/Fall 1962 issue of The Paris Review, the interview revealed Pound’s ideas about where literature was headed: And now one has got with the camera an enormous correlation of particulars. That capacity for […]
Permission to Write
My summer reading kicked off with Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. Carrington was a surrealist painter, so her novel is a wonderfully surrealistic narrative. I won’t go into any analysis here, but since finishing the novel, I’ve thought much about this quote from the book: If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for […]
