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Hefty reminders of corporeal nature. I’m always amazed by how successfully we do in fact banish all that from daily discourse. We all have our little dramas in the bathroom most days. Something’s not quite right. You can see the way a certain bit is going. And we’ve all got our back pains and our knee aches and so on, and yet people can spend the whole day together and it’s never mentioned—everyone’s got their little cargo of health anxieties, their little cargo of entropy.
in response to: " One motive that recurs again and again is the mortality of the body—the rotting, the decaying, the baldness, the toothaches and so on."
[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.
I’m fanatically reluctant to say that fiction ought to do one thing rather than another. I do know what I want from fiction. I want it to exhilarate me, to unbind my eyes, to murder and resurrect me, to harm me in some fruitful way. But that said, yes, the journey into intense feeling and the conquest of unknown emotional territory is something fiction can make possible.
steven millhauser
[...] You have to have that gift every now and again. And when the gift comes, you open yourself to it and the words just flow and you love it and that’s what the whole process is about. It’s really a way of going outside of myself. The sculpting and the chiseling and the work is more of a different discipline altogether. And I get tired of myself. I’m too aware of my limitations there and I’m always working against my limitations. So it’s claustrophobic for a while. And I wonder, is it ever going to get any better, because it’s me talking to me, what do I know? So you need that infusion from somewhere else, whether you call it the muse, or the unconscious, or whatever. It has to swing in, you have to be visited, I think. At least this writer does.