Pictures From The Weekend

 CC working, KH's shoulder; weather; waiting for the bus; the plenty of Payless Supermarket

 

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Another What Does An Artist's Character Matter?

 Which is More Important, the Writer or the Writing? (Joe Ponepinto, Beyond Craft) raises this question again. It is becoming so frequent that I am wondering if it is not a sign of the zeitgeist. Unless, another essay presents a better argument, this will be the last. I think Mr. Ponepinto's essay well-written, so go read it if you find yourself confused by his conclusion.

The complexity of the human experience, let alone the writer’s experience, is just too great to reduce down to a lifestyle judgment. As difficult as it may seem, we must do our best to keep the work and the artist separate—for our writing’s sake as well as theirs. The ideas and revelations conveyed in great literature are far more important than the people who wrote them. To devalue them because of who wrote them shortchanges not only the writers, but ourselves as well.

I do not know of a single author whose work I read because of their biography, and vice versa. Not that before the internet we knew much about our the people we read; this is why I wonder if this question really troubles our post-internet generations.

If you find a person abhorrent for (fill-in the blank), then explain how you attained such an exalted spiritual state. Plenty of room below in the comments.

Would you also please explain how you manage to deal with any other human being having such moral squeamishness?

I do not read Norman Mailer because he tried killing his wife, but because I find him boring more often than not.

I read Philip Roth because he was a great writer, and his personal life does not matter to me.

It seems to me that if you read fiction and the author's biography slips in, then either it is not very well written or you are a very poor reader.

Let him who has not sinned, cast the first stone.

sch 11/3

 Ted Gioia's Derek Thompson on the Anti-Social Century feels like it belongs here. At least, it seems to align with my ideas that current thinking is too self-contained.

Derek: I think many writers live with a kind of hypocrisy at the heart of their work. And I would say that my personal hypocrisy is that I’m mostly optimistic about science and technology, but I’m also pessimistic about the social changes that come with science and technology. And so in a weird way, I find myself often writing about how thrilled we should be about all sorts of advances in medical technology and biotech. I’m fascinated, by the way, with just GLP-1s and everything they seem to do. And at the same time, I find myself consistently drawn to the way that modernity changes habits and behaviors in ways I find often quite bad.

I wrote this cover story for The Atlantic on the phenomenon that I called the anti-social century. And the antisocial century emerged really from one key statistic that I found in the American Time Use Survey. One of the things that they ask is, how much time do you spend socializing with other people in face-to-face communication? And the key statistic that I found is that the average amount of face-to-face socializing in this century has declined for all Americans by about 20% and for young Americans by about 40 to 50%. What I’m identifying here is the fact that in the 25 years since Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone there has been an antisocial quarter of a century. It touches the anxiety crisis that we see among young people. I think it changes our politics by alienating us from our neighbors. I think there are so many different tendrils that emerge from the phenomenon of the anti-social century.

People are not dealing with other people. Flaky self-righteousness abounds.

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Rejections - Prison Thanksgiving - Too Cold

 Friday: I got up early and have no idea what I did. CC came over around 11 AM to wait on the arrival of the new computer. I went to group. KH picked me up, and we came to my place. CC was cleaning and cleaning; it was not even like the place was a mess. KH and I talked to Joel C; we may be launching a literary magazine on Substack. CC left around 3; just as the new computer arrived. KH agreed to my eyes are worse than his. The computer is in a corner of the living room. KH left me to piddle the night away. I got an idea about what to do with "

Inkd Publishers rejected “Going For The Kid”:

Thank you for the opportunity to read your submission to the Rebels anthology.

Unfortunately, we have limited space, and we have decided to pass on your story.

We received many great stories, such as yours, with over a hundred submissions for this anthology, but can only accept a small number of those.

--

 Facebook

Submissions

Kickstarter

And one more:

Thank you so much for sending us 'Agnes'. This time, however, we're saying no, but we wish you the best of luck with your piece.

Sincerely,

Editorial staff

The Forge Literary Magazine 

Robert Heinlein - Differing Views

 I do not buy Heinlein as a fascist. A provocateur, yes. 

I read some of him during prison, but my readings go back decades before that. The first novel I read was Stranger in a Strange Land, in my high school senior English. Between then and my mid-thirties I also managed to read The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Friday, Methuselah's Children, and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls. There was also a collection of his Future History stories. 

I did enjoy the later novels - not something I expect to find much support for - there was a playfulness to him. Perhaps sci-fi readers were not ready for literary fun.

There is a discussion in the first video of stories that I have not read. Therefore, not much to comment on there, but to say that the dictatorship Heinlein foresaw was a theocratic one. Decades before Margaret Atwood, by the way.

 

 Make up your own mind. 

More troublesome is Heinlein's prose. I am not so sure that it will stand today - he retains more of the pulps than does Asimov. See what you think.

sch 11/25 

 sch 12/2

Writing: Story Ideas & Learning From Other Writers

Business, commerce, has not been of interest to writers for a long time, then I ran across the review Fate and fortune in the 21st century (Engelsberg ideas). The review mentions the scarcity of fiction dealing with business. Read the following and decided if Alexander Starritt (who I never heard of before) has found a way of bringing life to an old genre.

Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt, Swift Press, £16.99

In Drayton and Mackenzie, his ambitious third novel, Alexander Starritt has accomplished something few, if any, of his millennial generation have even attempted. He has taken the Bildungsroman, the novel of intellectual formation, the journey from youth to maturity, and given it a new lease of life. He has done so by infusing it with elements of the European and American realist traditions, in which a whole era is held up to the light.

Yet the result is something else entirely: a novel of ideas that tells the story of a firm in gritty detail. What Starritt implies is that the ideas that count now are business ideas. Whatever alchemy may take place in the laboratory of science or humanity, it is only when the power of capital can be harnessed that the mind is able to take wing, to mould the affairs of men and women and lend meaning to their lives.

This focus on the literary potential of commerce was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has become rarer since. It evidently owes much to the author’s unusual career trajectory. Now 40, Starritt began life in the business world, as one of a team behind the policy platform Apolitical. By his early thirties, he was prosperous enough to become a professional writer. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was a latter-day Scoop, mocking the prejudices and pretensions of the tabloid press. Starritt was raised in Scotland but spent much of his youth staying with his German grandparents. This resulted in a second novel, We Germans (2020). This reminiscence of the last days of the Second World War depicted a soldier, based on his grandfather, coming to terms with the grim reality of what he and his comrades had experienced and done. It was a critical success and has been translated into German and other languages.

***

Although James and Roland are by no means physically attracted to each other, their relationship is more like a marriage than a business partnership. At a crucial juncture, when Roland needs to persuade Alan, a canny Scottish engineer, to join their still non-existent enterprise, he finds himself delivering what he realises is a ‘wedding speech’ about his oddbod friend. ‘On his gravestone it would say “He actually did it.” As in, loads of people say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?” But his thing is that he really does it.’

A portrait of the human cost of entrepreneurship – its highs and lows, its triumphs and tragedies — emerges that is convincing enough to make us care about these two privileged and somewhat spoilt man-children. Both are indulged by devoted parents who let their sons live at home indefinitely but can, when required, provide ‘a few hundred thousand’ for a flat. Yet neither is driven by money: Roland is careless about it and James doesn’t know what to do with it.

James in particular is an example of the ‘worldly asceticism’ that Max Weber saw as the characteristic source of the Protestant work ethic. Roland draws inspiration, rather, from what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’, without which the rational calculus of capitalism doesn’t add up. Between them, they possess a complementary combination of brainpower and people skills that can withstand the fluctuations of fashion, fate and fortune. 

***

When I said that this was a novel of ideas, I didn’t mean the occasional glimpses of the author’s political beliefs — which one suspects are pretty much those of the protagonists. This is the world according to the Weekend section of the Financial Times. (Sure enough, Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year — a rare distinction for a work of fiction.) Rather, what gives the novel its intellectual heft is the attempt to delve into what makes a young person acquire ambition. This is not straightforward at all: for the first half of the novel, Roland is constantly looking for an escape from the iron cage in which James has captured him. It is only by following the example of others that we learn to spread our wings. Yet human beings are motivated by the desire for fame far more than fortune. And it is only by the pursuit of ideas, often obscure ones, that the whole rich tapestry of human commerce and endeavour is conjured into existence.

When I think of the business novel, I think of Theodore Dreiser. (Which reminds me, I have his The Bulwark lying around here unread.) Dreiser is not in good repute. (I keep worrying that my prose is as flat as his.) He had his novel of ideas, too. Perhaps this is one reason why novelists turned away from putting the businessman under the literary microscope. Then, too, there is Babbitt, where Sinclair Lewis turns the businessman into an uncool sap. Third, there was ever so much examining American capitalism through a socialist lens; thinking of John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy here. Finally, how many writers know of the business life, especially in these days of the MFA writer?

The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit comes to mind, although I know only of the movie, not the novel. And it has been long decades since I saw last saw the movie. Reading the Wikipedia entry for the novel, the plot brings to mind Lewis more than Dreiser; Dos Passos seems to have the building.

I am still trying to find the way to tell the overarching story for my "The Dead and The Dying" stories. It was a found theme, not an intentional one: the effects of deindustrialization in an Indiana factory town. The industry was initially a local creation held by a family, then they sold out to a New York corporation; the New York corporation shuts the company down eight years after its purchase, sending the town into shock. I did not intend that when I started, but it is pretty much what happened to my hometown of Anderson. General Motors had colonized the city and then abandoned it. The locals are left trying to get by, or trying to be heroes and restore the town to what it was. The heroism doesn't work because capital has deserted them. What may succeed - and I leave success contingent - is a radical creative who never intended to give life to the city's economy, combining with others. It is not the heroic individual capitalist but a group - a democratic movement - has promises life. I am still trying to figure out how to sharpen the stories. Both the collection and a novella consolidating the stories are making the rounds. The novella focuses more on one particular character as a thread through the stories. I keep thinking of revisions to the collection, but not of the novella. Even while writing this, visions pop up in my head.

Working through something else, I ran across a sight I spent time on a few years ago, but have not been visiting of late: The Modern Novel. The proprietor has a page of lists, My Book Lists. I am looking at Neglected Writers and The Great American Novel. I am just saying here may be something to spark you.

10/26 

Continuing the theme of literary fame's slipperiness and promoting writers you might not have heard of:

Myths of Meaning: Kay Cicellis’s The Way To Colonos by Rachel Cusk (Paris Review)

This savage little book is a recasting of three Sophoclean tragedies into the modern era. It unfolds for its reader certain human situations that are familiar enough, with an absence of sentimentality that renders them entirely shocking and strange. Its themes are the pain of youth and the disillusionment that comes with observing the less-than-faithful relationship between authority figures and the truth, but its originality resides in its broaching of the force of tragedy in ordinary human relationships. This is not to say that existence is presented as merely nihilistic or absurd: on the contrary, the characters here are beset by almost ungovernable emotion. What is tragic is the infallibility with which their natural love of justice and truth is taken from the hands of these young protagonists and bruised or broken by the people on whom they rely—rely not just for survival but for the explanation of life and the example of how to live it that their elders are meant to provide.

***

Today’s reader of Kay Cicellis will find in her voice another missing piece of the female literary puzzle, a woman before her time in her scrutiny of intimate relationships and her effortless shrugging off of the conventions that adhere both to the living and to the representation of them. She is a writer who has lacked a category, and it is to be hoped that her writing will now find itself beyond categorization, free to reach readers with an appetite for female artistic authority who wish to see the world through sharp, fresh eyes. 

I can say now that I have read Rachel Cusk; even if not any of her novels.

Also from The Paris Review is The Female Picaresque: Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver by Amanda Fortini taught me that Jack Kerouac had a daughter who wrote two novels, and they are nothing like his. It may also finally brought out what has left a little towards On The Road, that it hid behind lyrical prose the hardscarabble lives of Americans.

And for something completely different: Processing: How Erin Somers Wrote The Ten Year Affair (Counter Craft):

As an author of both stories and novels, how is your approach to those two forms similar and different?

Short story is the one true form, in my opinion. You can get a short story a lot closer to perfect than a novel. A novel is going to be flawed, and even as I know this, it sort of drives me crazy. With short story writing, if things are going well and an idea has legs, I draft a story in four or five extended sittings. Just really focused and fast. I try to draft them as clean as possible as I go. Then I’ll revise and edit over a few weeks. I don’t like to over-revise the short fiction. I try not to kill what is loose about the form, or gestural, with lengthy explanation or backstory.

With novel writing, on the other hand, I revise endlessly. Some sections take me five to eight drafts. Some I never get exactly right. In the drafting phase, I work through a novel in chronological order and write 500 words a day. That’s a number I can hit, and often exceed, even if I have work or life obligations on a certain day.

In both cases, I work best from a place of zero ego and zero hope. I call this state being “lower than a worm.” A feeling that nothing will ever come of what I’m working on is crucial. A feeling of my smallness in relation to the world. I gotta be below the dirt. I am nothing and nobody. That frees me up. Who cares what a worm thinks, you know?

That worm idea works for me. I have no idea what I am doing - editors and friends are too kind to say so, but it's the truth. I do think I am finally getting a grip in the short story - 50 years since I wrote my first one. I not a slow learner - I am a very slow learner. 

Growing up with having no idea how real writers worked and thought, I try to collect sites where writers do talk about their work. Granta Podcasts is such a resource.

Writing Literary Fiction - Renée Watson & Jabari AsimI:

I did not know the writer before the video. She is a delightful conversationalist, and one that is also inspirational. Wannabe or published writers would do well to spend time here.

sch 11/14

I read one of Walter Benjamin's books while in prison, and I understand his importance to Western intellectuals, but I have to admit the writing rules in the following video seem commonplace other than in their expression:

The Slings And Arrows of History

 I had run across the first two items earlier this week. Until today, I did not see the connection with the third entry.

Many posts will be found here about Thomas Mann and also about his novel The Magic Mountain. What I have never written before is that before Mann, all I knew of German novelists were the works of Hermann Hesse and Günter Grass' The Tin Drum. The former were pretty much demolished by an essay of Kurt Vonnegut. Having read Mann, Hesse seems small, even humorless (whatever humor there is in German.) 

Today, Grass's novel feels more in line with Hesse than I thought when reading The Magic Mountain. Reading Thomas Mann’s Pessimistic Humanism (The Nation) there is, again, the effect history had on Mann. But that history liberates Mann, and he expands on it. My memories of Hesse (who I did go back to read decades after Vonnegut knocked him down for me) is that history shrank Hesse. Is The Tin Drum a sequel to Mann's novel, showing what happened when the history that liberated Mann is distorted and censored? Or is it about history's resentments needing to have their day, their say, and the price paid for allowing resentments to breed and grow?

Yes, I am talkative today, when I should be taking of other business. And I am not done yet.

History has not been all that kind to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, according to The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term (The Nation). The criticisms contained in that essay are pertinent for a realist novel, or a work of prophesy. Sinclair Lewis has fallen in my estimate, as he has generally. Yet there is a strange alchemy in his writing, if one goes far enough with him, it becomes difficult to leave. There is something stranger in this novel: it is quite unlike anything he ever wrote (not in style, but of substance); it is stranger than anything written by his contemporaries. I share with the Nation essay one serious criticism - that FDR would lose in 1936 and just disappear. That may be because Lewis was a Republican. A corresponding fault in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America has FDR returning as the country's savior. I am more sympathetic to Roth's overestimation of FDR, but wonder if there would not be others who could have taken his place. 

Speaking of The Plot Against America, this seems to be the literary heir to It Can't Happen Here. Roth's novel was marketed as an alternate history. I would have Lewis' novel likewise categorized. I know I exclude much of more traditional alternate history novels such as The Plot Against America and some works of Robert Heinlen. Thinking of it as alternate history is why I found many of the criticisms in The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term irrelevant. What is relevant in the essay, what is relevant in the novel, is this:

Lewis’s predictions may not have come to pass in the decade after the book’s publication. But the myopic complacency summed up in its title continues to eat away at the country’s political culture more than 80 years later. All that remains to be seen is whether the pusillanimous Democratic leadership caste will come to heed Jessup’s grim warning that Windrip’s rise was the fault “of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

Sinclair Lewis identified the flaws in our politics, and Philip Roth reminded us of those flaws. Roth is correct, in my opinion, that FDR had the skills and the ideals to keep American fascism at bay. Lewis points to the flaws in our character taking control in the absence of a leader dedicated to democracy.

I did not intend to be so grim this Saturday morning. The sun is shining for the first time in days. So Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? (Aeon Essays) seems to be a fortuitous find in more than one way. It leaves a more amusing exit than considering American political and cultural failings.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.

And it is history - the invasions physical and intellectual - that makes English so strange.

That English is not a gendered language struck me in high school when I was taking French and German. Nowadays, it makes me wonder about our disputes over non-binary gender identification. Other languages do recognize a third gender. Do those who wish to pursue this identification in official documents want to change the language? Do those opposing them not see a gaping hole in English?

History has left us with two English genders, and time may change this.

What Americans must reckon with is their aversion to history - ours, the world's; of actions and of ideas.

And there I will end this post as conceived at its start.

sch 11/22

Writers: Advice; Thomas Mann & Colm Tóibín; Charles Portis; Chester Himes +

 Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.

My Favorite Book About Writing is Not a Book About Writing 

Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting, talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.

The series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from dozens of cultures.

***

Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2

***

1 Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia, Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.

 While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.

There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:

 Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:

 The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.

 Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.

 The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him. 

Lost Literature: On “Picket Line,” Elmore Leonard’s Remarkable, Long-Unpublished Novella (Crime Reads) - anybody who has not read Leonard should; I see him as one of those guys who straddle the genre/literary line. He writes great dialog.

sch 10/21 

 Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.

Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage by Xiaolu Guo (Words Without Borders)

I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.

Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.

Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.

Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.

sch 10/23 

Something more practical, Free Talk: How Write a Satisfying Final Act for Your Novel (With Ley Taylor Johnson) from Authors Publish.

This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.

David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.

Writers on Writing (60 Minutes)

Well, this post is more than long enough. I hope these were of help and/or inspiration for you.

sch 10/25