Last time I expressed my dissatisfaction with the attempts Julia Galef made to understand the “other” in our lives, in this case Richard Feynman’s artist friend, who felt that scientific descriptions of things, to put words in the artist’s mouth, ruin them. What Richard reported his friend actually said, speaking about the beauty of a flower, is that “you, as a scientist, you take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” Richard at […]
I finished my first Nabokov yesterday. Lolita. I thought it was shockingly good—delicate, grimy and translucent all at once—though I’m acutely aware I will need to read it another time or two if I wish to speak intelligently about it. As I sit here and wonder how to take the seething swarm inside of me and capture it somehow on the page, I’m realizing it’s an interesting opportunity to continue the vein I began in […]
Writing fiction well is intractably difficult. You begin with maybe one or two bricks at the ready, stand facing an unruly forest that is neither for nor against you, but possesses all the density and might of any previously uncontested wilderness, and you are armed only with the vague feeling that a Taj Mahal-like structure of beauty and possibility is alive inside you. There really is no way to know where to place the first […]
I could suggest I’m grappling with writing—with the idea of writing, perhaps, and how the idea crumbles when I sit down to write; how I pan in the dust for gold and will myself to proceed though a dense and peculiar metal, of itself, is meaningless; how I come up dry and uncertain, but then find a sparkle or two in the half-light just as I turn away, and suddenly am renewed—but the real grappling is […]
The instruction to just be myself resulted in a pretty meandering to-and-fro up-over-and-down there and back again maybe, but maybe not, should I educate myself better or get a few more life skills first type of thing until one day when I was brushing my teeth I came to a scrunchy halt, arm cocked like a frozen piston, and I looked into the silvered plate hung on the wall, the one framed by garishly bright […]
Embracing Forever 