Will any immobilized hero ever find his way through the labyrinth of his mind to his perfect, absolute Zero? His white leviathan?
One does not think so.
Charles Willeford, Writing & Other Blood Sports
I think it can be shown that none of Melville's longer works are wholly or even mainly fictive, except in that broadest sense in which everything formulated into words is a fiction. But it is just this sense that everything formulated into words is a fiction that led Melville, in his later works, to despair of literature's being able to tell a truth. Indeed, I believe that Melville had no great respect for fiction, that he equated it with popular literature and his own literary infancy, and that in the works that most aspire to truth he expresses a range of attitudes toward fiction that go from impatience with its demands to a clear sense that fiction and truth telling are opposed activities.
Nina Baym, "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," PMLA 34 (1979): 909-23
Jack Saunders
Garage Band Books
Box 10501
Panama City, FL 32404
Copyright © 2009 by Jack L. Saunders, Jr.
Civilization is based on literacy.
Reading and writing. Reading and writing
books.
A country that does not read good books has no advantage over
a country
that cannot read. We live in a post-literate, or post-civilized
society, where
people get their information about how the world works
from TV. That is, from
the corporate sponsors of the news and entertainment
programs. Writer is something
you go to Halloween as, or to a writers conference
as a presenter. Are you a
painter, no, I'm a writer.
I meant a housepainter. I meant a technical writer.
Don't
quit your day job. They will lay you off.
Be patient. Rome didn't fall in a
day.
Decadent is related to decay.