Archive for The Writer’s Notebook - page 11

All that allegories intend to say is merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and that we already know. But the problems we struggle with every day are a different matter. On this subject a man was once asked: “Why such stubbornness? If you only followed…

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          I’ve often thought that the best way of life for me would be to have writing materials and a lamp in the innermost room of a spacious locked cellar.   Kafka Letter to Felice Bauer          …

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We are nihilistic thoughts that come into God’s head.   Kafka Letter to Max Brod    

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I’ve spent all afternoon out in the streets, bathing in Jew hatred. Prasivo plemeno—filthy brood—is what I heard them call the Jews. Isn’t it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated? The heroism involved in staying put in spite of…

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        I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.   Franz Kafka Letter to Felice Bauer April 13, 1913  

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During the early and mid-1980’s I was an attorney in private practice. Little by little I gravitated towards criminal law, which seemed to offer more glamorous and action-packed opportunities than the old grind-it-out prospects of business law, divorce or, worse yet, real estate. My clients…

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I’ve been named Chairman of the Wichita, Kansas Big Read.  Here’s a lecture I prepared about Dashiell Hammett and American Crime Fiction.   In 1929 Samuel Dashiell Hammett was thirty-five years old, tubercular to the point that he was often racked by coughing spells brought…

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Jack’s Boy was a difficult book to write and when I was finished with the first draft I could barely stand to revise it.  I only hope that a kid somewhere will read it and realize he or she isn’t alone; or, that a parent might…

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I am pleased and happy that The Moon When Water Freezes is now available to young readers as an e-book.  I think the novel could appeal to readers of all ages, however.  Many of the people and events relate to people and events that I’ve…

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I got the lousy news on NPR that Charles Bowden died in his sleep on August 30, 2014.  I loved his books.  I loved in particular Blue Desert, the first book of his I read.  I liked hearing that he was rambling alone on foot…

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