There Is A Deep Sadness To American

You Know That Sickening Feeling Of Inadequacy And Over-exposure You Feel When You Look Upon Your Own Empurpled Prose? Relax Into The Awareness That This Ghastly Sensation Will Never, Ever Leave You, No Matter How Successful And Publicly Lauded You Become. It Is Intrinsic To The Real Business Of Writing And Should Be Cherished.

Life, It Is True, Can Be Grasped In All Its Confused Futility Merely By Opening One's Eyes And Sitting Passively, A Spectator On The Stands Of History - But To Understand The Social Processes And Conflicts, The Interplay Between Individual And Group, Even The Physicality Of Human Experience, We Have Need Of Small-scale Models.

One Of The Most Heartening Phenomena In Today's Britain Is The Great Diversity Of The Modern Nerd - The Nerd Is Out And Proud, And While She May Love 'buffy The Vampire Slayer' Merchandise More Than Is Strictly Warranted, She Is In Every Way To Be Cherished As An Exemplar Of Cosmopolitanism And Tolerance.

Like All Right-listening Folk, I Am An Implacable Enemy Of All Muzak.

What Fiction Offers Us Is An Intimacy Shorn Of The Messy Contingencies Of Human Existence - Gender, Race, Class Or Age. Those Moments Of Transcendence When We Exclaim "you Know Exactly What I Mean!" Depend For Much Of Their Force On The Anonymous Character Of The Intimacy Between Writer And Reader.