Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are

Travelers Are Fantasists, Conjurers, Seers - And What They Finally Discover Is That Every Round Object Everywhere Is A Crystal Ball: Stone, Teapot, The Marvelous Globe Of The Human Eye.

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.

A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

To Listen Acutely Is To Be Powerless, Even If You Sit On A Throne.

Invention Despoils Observations, Insinuation Invalidates Memory. A Stewpot Of Bad Habits, All Of It - So That Imaginative Writers Wind Up, By And Large, A Shifty Crew, Sunk In Distortion, Misrepresentation, Illusion, Imposture, Fakery.