“One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decline of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.
“The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”
“When Woody Allen was twenty, comedy writer Danny Simon taught him a few rules about comedy, the most important of which was this: always trust your own judgment, because external opinion is meaningless.”
turned out to BE a play
They defied description.
They had a certain je ne sais quoi.
They came, they saw, they were a little vague on the details. They stayed under the radar, between the lines, open to interpretation. They were the stuff of dreams. They did not leave a message. They resisted categorization, remained difficult to grasp, proved hard to pin down, were reluctant to lend themselves to definition. They did not respond to calls from this reporter. They were Grandfather’s axe, the sum minus the parts, what was there before the Big Bang. In the beginning was the Word, and they were it, or rather its nuance. Hard to peg, tough to nail down, slip’d twixt cup and lip, lost in translation, they were what was there once you were freed from your own projections.
But you knew them when you saw them. They left everything to the imagination. They left no aftertaste. They were, more or less, in a manner of speaking, The Ineffables.
“If someone says, ‘Don’t say that,’ it’s all I want to say. And also, something I learned in therapy… which is darkness can’t exist in the light. And then that made me think of something Mr. Rogers said, which is, ‘If it’s mentionable, it’s manageable.’”
you night owls
all mrs. goblington's
notes UNDERWRITTEN By
I find myself in a House
of many Mansions,
Large Home of a Kind.
Jesus made the Chattering Demons
Leave the Abject Man. In Practice
this does Not Happen All at Once.
They appear before me in
The Communion of Consciousness,.
I welcome their appearance
in Light of Day.
When Life doth Give You Demons,
Sayeth the Lord,
Make Demonade.
But in Dark of Night
They Have me.
[Always we look forward to your notes, and we pray for you often, Mrs. Goblington.]
Comes from the Greek τύπος for the substance left in your hand once you squeeze all the blood from a stone.
A synopsis serves to communicate the heart of a novel in precisely the same way that a resume is useful in seducing a lover.
tell fred we sent you
Tonight you stop by the big old indie bookstore kittycorner from Union Station. It’s just before closing, but you only want to pop upstairs and see if the new Joshua Ferris is in. You’re hardly in the door when the woman comes on the public address system to say the store will close in ten minutes.
It’s as you’re crossing the second floor maze of towering stacks that you notice it. Where the Horror section ends, and Young Adult begins, there’s a ten-inch gap between shelf the units. It shouldn’t strike you as any kind of egress; you’d have to turn sideways and squeeze through. But you can see a sort of nook with shelved books. And thumb-tacked to the end cap of the Horror unit is the mailing face of a postcard with a ballpoint-drawn arrow pointing the way through. Written under this, in thin letters with over-emphatic serifs, is Old Children
You oonch through.
It is a snug little reading room no bigger than a service elevator, walled in solid all sides with books. The only exit is the narrow slot. Surely no fire inspector ever laid eyes on this.
A pair of soft armchairs. An end table between them, with a parchment-shade lamp. Someone’s cup from the coffee shop downstairs
And maybe you’d thought of fire, because out of the corner of your eye you registered to your right the little hearth in the bottom middle of the wall. In it, a silent blaze of paper-birch logs. A fake fire of course — there’s no chimney above the stack — but an awfully good one, the first satisfactory artificial fireplace you’ve laid eyes on, with no gas hiss, and green and purple flames intermittently wagging from the ends of the backwall log. And then you feel its warmth on your face, and smell woodsmoke that brings to mind a great house when you must have been very small, with a servants’ stairway off the kitchen, and streetlamps throughout the gardens, and a great stable with four wings and what you still believe was a dance floor in the middle.
By now you’re taking in the shelf labels, written out n the same hand as the postcard. CLASSICAL WONDER, ANAGOGIC WONDER, MAGICAL REALISM. Well, you recognize the last one.
The ceiling lights flash twice. On the PA system a woman says the store will close in five minutes.
The categories make no obvious sense. Here’s C.S. Lewises stuck next to the Murakamis. An adjoining shelf is taken up by the new Harry Potter premium editions, the ones adults buy to replace the old hardcovers falling apart, or would if it weren’t for the author’s pet hatreds. These overbear a few thin volumes of Harvey by Mary Chase. Above this on the top shelf, faced outward to display its cover, is the latest Phillip Pullman, and next to that A Wind in the Willows, the edition with illustrations by A.E. Shepard. And adjacent, a couple of John Masefields.
The overhead lights flicker again, and go dim. You’ll have only the sconces along the walls to light your way out and down now. And anyway you can’t make out the spines anymore, not in the firelight and the glow from the little lamp.
Steam rises from the coffee cup. And now you notice, in the chair nearer the fire, how sunken the seat cushion is. But not by varied behinds of many hours.
No, you’re looking at a pair of rounded, noticeably crisp depressions in the cushion made by an invisible sitter.
In the mailbox, a big thick envelope containing a Virginia Quarterly Review. We scan the contributors list on the cover, and there’s Koye. Koye Oyedeji was one of the waiters at Bread Loaf, and he was in our workshop. After Bread Loaf later sent out a link to mp3s of the Waiter Readings, we played Koye’s three-minute reading for our teenage nephew as he was in the kitchen making a sandwich. He looked up from his sandwich. “That’s unshakable writing,” he said.
If Koye were here, we would have him sign our copy of VQR, and we would offer him the most troublesome praise one human being can offer another.
“You,” we would say, “should write a novel.”
