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Reflections On Re-Reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot

Book Review

Reading The Idiot again after five years I am struck by what does not fit into the usual critical categories, a certain kind of truth in the writing, the erratic unnameable of vision. I begin to see there is no proper category for the vivid, an impulse to reveal, an edging toward light.

This Message Was Brought To You By . . .

I make most of my money from advertising. I know, I know. A lower form of enterprise is hard for many to imagine. Especially for a writer. Well, I’ll tell you this: for a writer unencumbered by ideological purity, it can be a damn fine business.

The Medium Is The Mind

“Communication” is a big deal. It is one of the main buzzwords of our time, and has been ever since our intellectuals stumbled over such compelling cultural data as the number of years a child spends in front of a television and the billions of trees that yearly become pages of one sort or another.

The Feminization Of Politics?

Maybe this is one way women can help our present troubled society when they are given opportunities like I’ve had: trust their human responses and instincts and go through the invisible walls that cause us all so much suffering.

Tabula Rasa

Writer’s craft, education, politics

Channel One

Power is neither good nor bad. Power is focused ego producing or preventing change. We are children of America: power is our creed.

One American Writer: Journeyman Into Silence

Certainly it’s difficult to survive as a writer in America, but it may be more difficult to sustain oneself once having been published than it was in one’s first, frustrated, unpublished silence.

The Deposed King

I live now like a deposed king, which is to say, with a slight air of once-proud nobility I cling to as I cling to the rags and tatters of my existence because it’s all I’ve got left.

Poetry: From The Factory

Poetry, like all the arts, has taken a turn toward the diffuse since World War 2. By diffuse, I mean the opposite of the exactness that went into the work of the masters, the pointedness of a strong sensibility.

She Would Have Been A Taxi Dancer, But He Couldn’t Hail A Cab

Book Review

Manning demonstrates a rather considerable talent for manipulating vocabulary and for wringing every ounce of nuance possible from a word or phrase.