It Is True That Money Attracts; But

Bohemia And All Its Works Are Vanished Out Of America; Or, More Exactly, Bohemia Has Migrated To The Middle Class, And Is Alive And Well In Condo And Suburb.

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.

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.

Nothing Is So Awesomely Unfamiliar As The Familiar That Discloses Itself At The End Of A Journey. Nothing Shakes The Heart So Much As Meeting-far, Far Away-what You Last Met At Home.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.