What was I trying to figure out? Beginnings, I think—what a beginning is, what one must do in order to start.| n+1
I have admired Naipaul as much as I have found him difficult to admire, a murky admixture that I find difficult to explain or clarify, and which I find with no other writer, to anything like the same degree. (Edward Said referred to his “pained admiration,” and dissonant phrases of that kind are scattered through appreciations of his work.) I know, too, that you knew him, which I did not. I don’t know if that makes him more or less difficult to appraise.| n+1
Today, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. But it is still not fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco: an attempt by the Western media as well as the political class to forge reality itself, which failed catastrophically, but not without embedding cruelty and mendacity deep and enduringly in public life. And partly because this disaster was unacknowledged—editors and writers pushing false narratives, and cheerleading large-scale ...| n+1
I was embarrassed. To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere. The blunted, abject language of bereavement, and the responsibility I had, which I had worked for and wanted, to speak clearly about my own sentences.| n+1
Two years spent in an MFA program, in other words, constitute a tiny and often ineffectual part of the American writer’s lifelong engagement with the university. And yet critics continue to bemoan the mechanizing effects of the programs, and to draw links between a writer’s degree-holding status and her degree of aesthetic freedom. Get out of the schools and live!| n+1
Is it wrong to want to write toward what isn’t intended to be read? What I want is a story that’s an object that can turn itself inside out. So perhaps what I’m thinking of as inspiration is something else instead. Not to be writing like Martin but to be not writing like her.| n+1
Speaking as another son of a Tennessee industry lawyer—a country music lawyer; it was TVA power that helped turn Nashville into a radio and recording mecca—I think the prime darkness at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction, always precariously perched over oblivion, began with his father, a fixer behind the laboratory that powered the possibility of human extinction.| n+1
At a time when the United States is backing Israel’s wanton destruction of the besieged Gaza Strip, in what some scholars have called a “textbook case of genocide,” principled dissent is of paramount importance.| n+1