Q: When you couldn’t have a career as a novelist you became a novelist by other means.
Or the novel you wrote became something besides a novel, or other than a novel.
Owing to your objective circumstances.
You didn’t do it by design, it happened by accident.
But accidents are like coincidences. They arouse suspicion.
A: For John Keats, negative capability meant a person—especially a poet—could live with an opposition not being resolved.
A conflict unresolved.
The poet didn’t set up and resolve oppositions so much as the oppositions set themselves up and played the poet like a violin.
It takes taut strings to make music.
I hit the brick stone wall of the world’s indifference until it rang out like a bell.
I was belled, like a leper.
The Greek word for ostracize is from potsherd, used in the balloting.
This is what I did with what I had.
Q: Cultural Operator?
A: 40-Year Run.
I vibrated like a tuning fork.
Sympathetically.