This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
In the sea of words, the in print is foam, surf bubbles riding the top. And it's a dark sea, and deep, where divers need lights on their helmets and would perish at the lower depths.
I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
I never take any notes or draw charts or make elaborate diagrams, but I hold an image of the shape of a book in my head and work from that mental hologram.
The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.
The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.
Discomfort is very much part of my master plan.
I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture.
In my third novel there is an actual black hole that swallows everything you love.
