No safe landing
1 week ago
“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things
3 comments:
Great interview, I like Alec's deviation from the ordinary line of questioning, it can be quite unnerving but you fielded well. I enjoyed your theories on the continuation of modernism.
Thanks, Mark. For my part, I really enjoyed Alec's questions--I'm much happier to talk about ideas or other book than I am to discuss my own work; really, there's nothing more boring than discussing your own book--if I wanted to say something, I would've put it in the book already!
Good interview, with many things about literary fiction nicely said.
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