Michael Ventura
Michael Ventura’s biweekly column, “Letters at 3AM,” has appeared in The Austin Chronicle since 1993. His most recent book is If I Was a Highway. A native of New York City and a longtime resident of Los Angeles, he has lived since 2004 in Lubbock, Texas — reportedly the second most conservative city in the U.S. When asked, “What are you doing in Lubbock?” Ventura answers, “Whatever I please.”
An Inventory Of Timelessness
What I’m saying is that we in the late twentieth century live not in a city or country, not on a planet, but in a collective dream. Our everyday world is one of dreamlike instantaneous changes, unpredictable metamorphoses, random violence, archetypal sex, and a threatening sense of multiple meaning.
July 1994Standing At The Wall
On its surface death meets life, the past meets the present. What was, doesn’t accuse; what is, doesn’t apologize. But this is the one place in America where they face each other, like it or not, beyond cant, revision, and lies.
March 1994The Talent Of The Room
Writing is something you do alone in a room. Copy that sentence and put it on your wall because there’s no way to exaggerate or overemphasize this fact.
January 1994The Witness Tree: Memoir Of A Ritual
It is a terrible thing when a brave person becomes afraid of you. It wakes you up. You see that, in Hemingway’s great phrase, you have “gone beyond where you can go.” It is unlikely you can save yourself, and unlikely that any one person — lover, therapist, friend — can save you.
February 1992A Dance For Your Life In The Marriage Zone
Marriage is the most dangerous form of love. Count the casualties and you know. It turns many people to stone. We all have seen that. Our society is cracking under the weight of many stone-lives. We all know that. But will we, or will we not, discover all that a man and woman can be? Marriage is not the answer, but it is the most demanding way to live the question.
April 1988
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