So much of philosophy is fiction. The William H Gass Reader (2019) William H. Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction, nine books of essays, and a book of conversations. Gass was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. For most of his life he lived…
Tag: fiction
On light & liquid sentences
(TIDYING BY READING, PART 3) Years ago, I bought a copy of Gerald Murnane’s book The Plains (1982), a novel summarised in following words by the publisher: The Plains is a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps…
2017 in books –
personal favourites: Ali Smith: Autumn Ali Smith: Winter Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing Angela Palm: Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere But Here Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: The Fact of a Body Deborah Levy: Hot Milk Nina Riggs: The Bright Hour: A Memoir of Living and Dying According to Goodreads I read 76 books in 2017, it sounds a lot, but…
Ocean-chart
He had brought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand. … A perfect and absolute blank! Lewis Carroll The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
worth trying?
To my surprise I have found my own writing to be a kind of hybrid genre, placed somewhere in between poetry and the essayistic. I love using hard-facts, you know: the quantifiable ones …, and am daily playing around with facts about the world that I find in encyclopedias and on pages like this &…
… a leap from red to blue
After having spent several bewildering & enchanting days in company of Carson’s Autobiography of Red, I’m moving on to blue, or more precisely Bluets. Bluets, by Maggie Nelson is (if I am to be honest), in its own ways, just as amazing as Carson’s Red. This is how the publisher presents Bluets: A lyrical, philosophical, and often…
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
Remember the Faulkner saying I quoted some days ago: “In writing, you must kill all your darlings”… Here is an interesting continuation: From his 1957 book After Lorca onward, the American poet Jack Spicer (1925-65) wrote what he described as “dictated” poetry. For Spicer, the poet acts as a receptive host for language, rather than as an agent of…
Meandering Narratives
I call his books novels, partly, I think, because I want to claim him for fiction, and partly because that seems the most inclusive term for their mélange of fictionalized memoir, travel journals, inventories of natural and man-made curiosities, impressionistic musings on painting, entomology, architecture, military fortifications, riffs on the lives of Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova,…
A world of relative inaccessibility
I’m spending days in Spain doing a bit of reading on Woolf, but also gradually focusing on my own writing. And this time I mean fiction & poetry, not the kind of pre-given jobs & assignments I usually do. For some time now I have been working on a hybrid-text, mixing scientific observations and natural…
The Time Is Now!
Have you ever visited Poets & Writers? The most important and underrated factor in a writer’s success is discipline. Its really very simple: If you want to be a writer … focus on the writing! However, finding the time and inspiration to write is not always easy. That’s where creative writing prompts and exercises can help. The Time Is Now…
sub rosa 