Category Archives: Literary Heroes
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 […]
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 […]
