Wallace Shawn talked to Mark Strand

STRAND 

Well, when I read poetry I can’t imagine that what’s in the reader’s head is ever what was in the poet’s head, because there’s usually very little in the poet’s head. 

SHAWN 

You mean . . . 

STRAND 

 I mean, I think the reality of the poem is a very ghostly one. It doesn’t try for the kind of concreteness that fiction tries for. It doesn’t ask you to imagine a place in detail; it suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

from McGuane's The Rescue

He is a big dramatic-looking man, and he was dressed for a wonderful idea he had had the previous evening

Today's Epitaph

Today, in sun, I must look a hard sixty, not my usual forty-three.
Allan Gurganus

Perfect sentiment

Who would you want to write your life story? My wife, Rebecca Wilson, because she loves the ongoing comedy and understood my mum and dad. - Geoff Dyer

Couldn't I just tell you

I was walking the other day, actually it was yesterday, no pardon me it was a few minutes ago and I had a deluge of ideas for this story that begins the day after the narrator puts his dog to sleep and these ideas encompass the entire story including how the dog died actually poisoned by his neighbor George, a struggling writer out of bitterness because the narrator had thought George was terrible and should be doing other things with his life and I thought this is so great, but of course I had forgotten not just my papers, but my pocket journal as well and then by the time i got home I thought the whole thing was crap anyways for all the same reasons that Saunder's outlines here:

"And yes – I always say I try not to write with a definite intention, and that is true. But lately it’s occurred to me that one of the reasons I’m so emphatic about that is to counterbalance my very natural tendency to write with a definite (dogmatic) intention, i.e., to know too well where I’m going. It’s sort of an autocorrect I’m doing on myself to counteract what I know is a lazy or preachy tendency, that doomed a lot of my apprentice stories to lying flat on the page."

 

http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-george-saunders/

by the way the fact that the neighbor is named george is just a coincidence.

McGuane on Brautigan

"Like some widely gifted Rotarian who wants you to come to his town, he seems assured and sincere."

The soil spoke, at that thing in the wood's bidding

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·      to thrive on an ambience that can't be beat!

·      to feel good!

·      to travel vicariously myself

·      to think living at a hotel is great!

Flaming American at BMA

"His model for Flaming American was a swimmer from Yale whom Hartley met
when staying with the young man's aunt and uncle during the summer of 1939."

6th of July Dunkfest, Baltimore

sponsored by Love and the Eye by the (inestimably) classy Laura Newbern

Lightning storm from my window

The White Alb

Manzarek ate a hardboiled egg. - Joan Didion