Sublime

A notion abounds that difficult writing—archaic, convoluted, or chock-full of esoteric words—is somehow elevated, more intelligent than plainspoken language. If you can’t understand it, it must be really superior. Vonnegut based more than one novel on the absurdity of such premises.

Story talent is primary, literary talent secondary but essential.

I have not, because there is not a word for the latter (since all human stories have suffered the same confusion). But the Elves are there (in my tales) to demonstrate the difference. Their ‘magic’ is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations: more effortless, more quick, more complete (product, and vision in unflawed correspondence). And i

Fetishism of famous writers, he suggested, occurs because “it’s such heavy-lifting to actually read books.”

The argument for runes as an elite privilege received a decisive blow in the mid-twentieth century with discoveries in the Norwegian harbour towns of Bergen and Trondheim. Hundreds of small wooden slips, inscribed with runes, were found preserved intact in the medieval waterlogged deposits of the dockside streets. They had served a fascinating vari

fact-bound writer can’t go: worlds of imagination, rumination and fantasy. In return we enter into a more forgiving contract with him, allowing him to come at his subject slowly, discursively, obliquely, elliptically or just plain densely if that’s his vision. Density, in fact, is one of the qualities that William Faulkner’s fans most like about