Tristram Shandy

"The more you talk, the less you paint," someone said, a Frenchman I'm pretty sure. It's always seemed like good advice for a writer; to write like he or she can't talk about writing at all and instead just has to write.

I'm reading Paul Virilio again. Everybody should read Paul Virilio to be assured culture really is breaking down and that's always been the way it's been, that it's human nature to destroy what we know as meaning and to make another meaning. It's true our meanings are pretty tired now-- Jeff Koons' "Popeye" series comes to mind--tired enough to have been copyrighted long ago, but some of our new literary forms are new enough to be sustaining.

Every morning I read at least two and sometimes four pages from Tristram Shandy to assure myself that real literature is inherently very funny--

Attitudes are nothing, madam--'tis the transition from one attitude to another--like the preparation and resolution of the discord into harmony--which is all in all.

Tolstoy wrote a story that's partly narrated by a talking horse. I haven't read it but I've read about it. If literature has a mission it's to make things much stranger than they are so that the reader can see what would otherwise be obscure or, even more amazing, normal.