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Compromise

The old Survival Trap, a first husband, a paradox

The Reader Behind The Writer

A great masterpiece might sit there beside some obscure and shoddy effort. Schools and universities told you what books were great and worthy and famous; a library sat there mutely and let you decide.

Literal-Mindedness And Its Cure

For about fifteen minutes every day I worry about AIDS or herpes or Pentagon cost overruns. It’s not that they have any great effect on me, it’s just that I am a broad-based, categorical worrier.

A Letter To Our Readers

Why I Like Dead People

I like dead bodies: at no other time am I so aware of my own animation. This isn’t because I am lucky and this poor fool is not, but because here before me is the mute, incontrovertible evidence. Some force drives these shells, and it drives me still. I am a witness, an attestant, to a foresworn truth.

Wake Forest Nursing Home: Interview Cloyd, Born 1893

Emergency

It is, in a phrase aptly supplied by a nurse, like five hundred hells. Apparently the whole town has converged upon the hospital, all migrating to the Emergency Rooms.

Meeting The Muse

“You got what a muse is confused with a variety of legends and a lot of your own imagination. A muse is a function, a force, not defined as to physical form. You’re too confident in your own self, where you should give more weight to the forces that feed you.”

A Different World

The Sexual Politics of Ursula Le Guin

There is much to admire in these novels beyond the brilliance of their central conceptions. Their style is vivid but simple, utterly unpretentious, with the kind of transparency that reveals ideas in all their clarity. I can’t remember when I have done reading that is so satisfactory on an emotional level — telling a story I want to hear — and also on an intellectual level, provoking hours of thought beyond what the books even dealt with.

The Magic And The Power

An Interview With Odetta

I’m shy about writing, about exposing myself, but songs have come through me. Once, I was in Israel and had a hard night — an argument that was so unimportant I don’t even remember what it was about — and I decided I’d go to sleep. In those days that was the way I handled my problems. There’s a Chinese proverb that says if you have a big problem, and you need to solve it, go to sleep. The problem won’t disappear, but you’ll wake up in another position. (Chuckles.) Well, I got back to the hotel, and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I took pencil and paper in hand and out came a song. The kind of writing I admire involves yourself right out there, like Joni Mitchell. Her songs are about what she did or didn’t do or what she’s feeling. It’s almost like an exorcism. But I haven’t gotten there yet.