A Big Silvery Janitor. Penny, This Can’t

In A Way Fighting Was Just Like Using Magic. You Said The Words, And They Altered The Universe. By Merely Speaking You Could Create Damage And Pain, Cause Tears To Fall, Drive People Away, Make Yourself Feel Better, Make Your Life Worse.

How Often Have I Met And Disliked Writers Whose Books I Love; And Conversely, Hated The Books And Then Wound Up Liking The Writer? Too Often.

In Our World No One Ever Knows What To Do, And Everyone's Just As Clueless And Full Of Crap As Everyone Else, And You Have To Figure It All Out By Yourself. And Even After You've Figured It Out And Done It, You'll Never Know Whether You Were Right Or Wrong. You'll Never Know If You Put The Ring In The Right Volcano, Or If Things Might Have Gone Better If You Hadn't.

The Idea Of Some Kind Of Objectively Constant, Universal Literary Value Is Seductive. It Feels Real. It Feels Like A Stone Cold Fact That In Search Of Lost Time, By Marcel Proust, Is Better Than A Shore Thing, By Snooki. And It May Be; Snooki Definitely Has More One-star Reviews On Amazon. But If Literary Value Is Real, No One Seems To Be Able To Locate It Or Define It Very Well. We're Increasingly Adrift In A Grey Void Of Aesthetic Relativism.

You Don't Want To Move Toward Some Utopian Literary Situation Where Everybody's Free Of All Conventions. That's Ridiculous! Conventions Are What You Need. You Have Nothing To Break Down If You Don't Have Conventions.