Wednesday, March 13, 2019

The limits of genius








Living some major chunk of my life in a library, reading books, writing, thinking about books, wallowing in books, I am sometimes forced to come to grips with the fact that, well, there aren't very many good ones. I walk down the aisles of my library, down the shelves crammed with books, and my vast wealth of experience informs me: Lies, posturing, twaddle, derivative, indulgent, studious without courage, timely for some other time, humorless, prevaricating, for money and not that much of it, art without life, marketing, abstruse, workaday, boring, boring, boring, and boring!

And then I say "I can write better books than these!"

But I can't. Which, speaking as a literary genius, just goes to show how hard it is.














No comments:

Post a Comment

If you were wondering, yes, you should comment. Not only does it remind me that I must write in intelligible English because someone is actually reading what I write, but it is also a pleasure for me since I am interested in anything you have to say.

I respond to pretty much every comment. It's like a free personalized blog post!

One last detail: If you are commenting on a post more than two weeks old I have to go in and approve it. It's sort of a spam protection device. Also, rarely, a comment will go to spam on its own. Give either of those a day or two and your comment will show up on the blog.