the piles of intellectual slack which truss these schlemiels like babies
[...] Flaubert told Maupassant that 'talent is a slow patience', and that 'there is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought to the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing…
Literature, like art, pushes against time's fancy - makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. A story is told about the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was leading a live drawing class. The students were bored and doing dull work, so Kokoschka whisper…
In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Be…
But just as Ryabovich’s one-minute story is not really worth telling, is not really a story, so the shapeless story that would take all evening is too shapeless, is not enough of a story. Ryabovich, one suspects, needs a Chekhovian eye for detail, the ability to notice well and seriously, the geniu…
