I Can't Claim To Be

Wars, Invented And Organized By The Highest Available Consciousnesses (do The Worms Go To War? Do The Fish? Do The Paramecia?), Are The Planet's Chief Source And Cause Of Torment.

Every Writer Aspires To Recognition , And It Comes Entirely Privately, Without Public Fanfare, Each Time A Piece Of Work Is Judged Worthy Of Publication.

What's Impossible Not To Notice, Though - It's All Around Us - Is The Diminution Of American Prose: How Pedestrian It Has Become. Pick Up Any Short Story And Listen To Its Voice, The Tedious Easy Vernacular That Mistakes Transcription For Realism. This Would Display An Understandable Pragmatism If It Were A Pandering To Common-denominator Readers; But It Is, In Fact, A Kind Of Hifalultin Literary Ideology, The Less-is-more Hemingway Legacy Put Through An Up-to-the-minute Industrial Blender.

The Engineering Is Secondary To The Vision.

One Must Avoid Ambition In Order To Write. Otherwise Something Else Is The Goal: Some Kind Of Power Beyond The Power Of Language. And The Power Of Language, It Seems To Me, Is The Only Kind Of Power A Writer Is Entitled To.