If you closely observe your reading mind, you’ll find that as you encounter an excess in a story (some non-normative aspect), you enter into a transactional relationship with the writer. When Kafka writes, “Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams . . . ​ changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” you don’t say, “No, he didn’t, Fra

After a while my ear begins to hold the tunes in my head long enough to unpick them. The official conversations are loudest – roll calls for choir and orkestra rehearsals, poliss warnings, the announcement of a funeral mass. Below those are striding public conversations – calls for new prentisses, invites to buy food or beer. Then threading through

A bass note sounds. It is a deep, vibrating chord that hints that the brass section may break in at any moment with a fanfare for the cosmos, because the scene is the blackness of deep space with a few stars glittering like the dandruff on the shoulders of God.