Man Makes Plans . . . And

I Don't Have A Problem With Many Uses Of The Word Genre, Just Certain Ones. I Have The Most Trouble When These Labels Are Used To Prevent Discussion, To Prevent A Work From Being Taken Seriously As Literature. When We Say "genre," We Generally Mean "something Crappy," Something That Would Be Sold In An Airport.

We Are Accustomed To Repeating The Cliché, And To Believing, That 'our Most Precious Resource Is Our Children.' But We Have Plenty Of Children To Go Around, God Knows, And As With Doritos, We Can Always Make More. The True Scarcity We Face Is Practicing Adults, Of People Who Know How Marginal, How Fragile, How Finite Their Lives And Their Stories And Their Ambitions Really Are But Who Find Value In This Knowledge, Even A Sense Of Strange Comfort, Because They Know Their Condition Is Universal, Is Shared.

I Took Comfort, As A Kid, In Knowing That Things Had Always Been As Awful And As Wonderful As They Were Now, That The World Was Always On The Edge Of Total Destruction.

The Things I Keep Going Back To, Rereading, Maybe They Say More About Me As A Reader Than About The Books. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Every Time Another Review Comes Out I Let Out A Deep Breath.