A Series of Accidents

Philip Glass: In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with... You have to have a place to make the choices from.  If you don't have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don't have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.

The difficulty we have is...you get to a certain point and...spend the rest of your life changing gears in the same way... The real issue is not how do you find your voice, but how do you get rid of it. Getting the voice isn't hard, it's getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you have the voice, you're stuck with it. 

Ira Glass: Do you ever try to compose so it doesn't sound like Philip Glass?

Philip Glass: I do it all the time. And I fail all the time.

Philip Glass, interviewed by Ira Glass on Fresh Air

The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of the books we haven't read, stretch out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading

An autobiography in criticism

"To write down one's impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year would be virtually to record one's own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know."

-Virginia Woolf, "Charlotte Brontë"

Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer

I am very excited to announce that my novel, Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer, will be published this November by Civil Coping Mechanisms. 

[The picture above is me, entering Stockton Tunnel at the bottom of Burritt Alley in San Francisco, where Miles Archer's body is discovered in The Maltese Falcon. More to come.]

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

It is true that you can't get from form to content, but it is also true that without form, content cannot emerge. When it comes to formulating a proposition, form comes first; forms are generative not of specific meanings, but of the very possibility of meaning. Despite the familiar proverb, it's not the thought that counts. Form, form, form, and only form is the road to what classical theorists called "invention," the art of coming up with something to say.

-Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence