Don't Go Chattering To The Stars If

Fiction -- At Least For Me -- Requires Long, Relatively Uninterrupted Time Stretches In Which To Bring It To Fruition. I've Never Been A Two-hour-in-the-morning Writer, Who Could Put In Another Six Hours On Sunday Afternoon. For Me, A Novel Requires Weeks Of Living In A Largely Mental And Wholly Internal Landscape. Everything Else Has To Be Relegated To The Odd Hour Here, The Bit Of Time There. Sadly, However, Uninterrupted Time Blocks Are Not What Life Doles Out Today To Any Of Us With Regularity.

Each Of Us, With Money, Gets Further And Further Away From Those Moments Where The Hand Pulls The Beet Root From The Soil, Shakes The Fish From The Net Into The Basket -- Not To Mention The Way It Separates Us From One Another, So That When Enough Money Comes Between People, They Lie Apart Like Parts Of A Chicken Hacked Up For Stewing.

Historically, I Guess That's How Science Fiction Works: You Start By Using Aliens To Think The Unthinkable — And Then, Eventually, Another Writer, Having Grown A Little More Comfortable With The Earlier Notion, Brings It Into The Human.

A Number Of Things In Dhalgren Are Just Meant To Function As Mysteries. They're Mysteries When The Book Begins, And They're Mysteries When The Book Ends.

I Was A Kid Who Liked Art And Theater And Dance And Music, But If You Lived In Harlem, High Culture Was Somewhere Else, And It Wasn't Black.