The Past Is What Makes Now Like

How We Treat Our Invalids - Our Mad, Our Physically Or Mentally Compromised Family Members - Does Tell You Something About Who We Are Politically, Historically, Culturally.

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.

It Is Easier To Argue That Something Nobody Believes In Actually Exists Than It Is To Argue That Something Everybody Believes In Is Unreal.

A Poet Is Wounded Into Speech, And He Examines These Wounds, Meticulously, To Discover How To Heal Them. The Bad Poet Harangues At The Pain And Yowls At The Weapons That Lacerate Him; The Great Poet Explores The Inflamed Lips Of Ruined Flesh With Ice-caked Fingers, Glittering And Precise; But Ultimately His Poem Is The Echoing, Dual Voice Reporting The Damages.

When What Is Is Congruent To What Is Supposed, The Reaction Is Functional And The Mental Processes Competent. When What Is And What Is Supposed Have Nothing To Do With Each Other, The Choice Of Reactions Is Random. Something Tears.