I Have A Good Memory

What's Going To Be Hard For Me Is To Try To Divorce Myself As Much As Possible From What I Wrote. I'll Have To Approach It Simply As Raw Material And Try To Craft A Film Script Out Of It.

They Lay There For A Few Seconds, In The Dark, In The Future, Listening To The Fabulous Clockwork Of Their Hearts And Lungs, And Loving Each Other

There Were So Many Pittsburgh Poets In My Hallway That If, At That Instant, A Meteorite Had Come Smashing Through My Roof, There Would Never Have Been Another Stanza Written About Rusting Fathers And Impotent Steelworkers And The Bessemer Convertor Of Love.

All Literature, Highbrow Or Low, From The Aeneid Onward, Is Fan Fiction....through Parody And Pastiche, Allusion And Homage, Retelling And Reimagining The Stories That Were Told Before Us And That We Have Come Of Age Loving--amateurs--we Proceed, Seeking Out The Blank Places In The Map That Our Favorite Writers, In Their Greatness And Negligence, Have Left For Us, Hoping To Pass On To Our Own Readers--should We Be Lucky Enough To Find Any--some Of The Pleasure That We Ourselves Have Taken In The Stuff That We Love: To Get In On The Game. All Novels Are Sequels; Influence Is Bliss.

Novelist Time Is Reptile Time; Novelists Tend To Be Ruminant And Brooding, Nursers Of Ancient Grievances, Second-guessers, Tuesday Afternoon Quarterbacks, Retrospectators, Endlessly, Like Slumping Hitters, Studying The Film Of Their Old Whiffs.