I’ll tell you whether you have talent or not.” And Tom Disch, Thomas Disch, said to me-if anyone could write poetry, Tom wrote it beautifully-Tom said, “Any person who can’t write poetry should take up the accordion.” Then he said, “Write me a poem. “Why don’t you write poetry?” Because I can’t write poetry. Many poets that I’ve known, from Galway Kinnell to, you know, everybody, have assumed that because I write so poetically, with such onomatopoeia and such cadence and such a voice, that I should write poetry. The only poetry I’ve ever written is:Īll you ever see are the pennies people drop. I bought it in 1955 or ’56, when I would have been 20 or so. That the human mind could write this way. They were shuddering with nervousness as dusk approached. But the poor wretch didn’t know, of course.Īnd they all grew anxious lest they should be attacked, now that they were approaching An-his and the southern edge of the Gobi. One night he was gone, but the next morning back again. Once there was almost a fight between two young porters who were inseparable friends. During that one day their faces grew hollow, hateful, really evil. Fear of each passing mound, each curiously shaped rock, and most of all, of course, the sun. Layeville saw that day how a certain specialized sort of fear tore at them constantly. The land was measurable, yes: but it might as well have been boundless, and as far as the spirit could encompass it, it was indeed boundless! No mind, reflected Layeville, could stand it here except those who, like plants and animals cast into the wilderness, had thrust aside all recollections of home, of human faces and habits, and had at last grown totally new senses and new ways, having intuitively likened themselves to their scenery.īut the others felt fear. Sensations were nameless, energy was uprooted. A yellow naked body, grotesque and charred yet possessing, cupped in its hollows, the unspeakable years on intimate terms with the sun and nothing but the sun, giving its shrunken secrecies daily to the sun, smelling of nothing at all except the sun, each stone palpably adoring the sun and indifferent to everything except the sun.ĭesert: a feeling for which no word could exist. The utter desert this was indeed, far more lonely than a sea of pure sand, just as a limitless bog is more lonely than the Pacific. No more hills, no insect, no life at all, not even any colors now, no shapes except the accidental curves of the centuries, no sound, no smell. There was no motion, no gesture except the monotonous trudging, the swaying back and forth on the camels’ backs, the limp and weary swaying of dark arms.Īn empty world. Their eyes peered through toward the east, embers half-dead glowing underneath the aching purple eyelids. They moved like dolls, as if their dark limbs were half unhinged. The porters covered their heads and faces. de la Scaze rode all day beneath curtains, in a kind of impromptu howdah. The men that day became effigies, horrible dolls. Any heat, any cold, any sort of sterile frightfulness seemed possible here. Nature lay there in front of them quite hideous and exposed, all of her pointlessness and boundlessness at last unmistakably obvious. Toward evening the world began to resemble a star spent, lifeless, purposeless. Listen to this, from the section called “Desert”: It’s seven people fleeing a Chinese war lord across the Gobi Desert. it was the 1937 Harper Prize-winning novel, but I’d never heard of it. I say, “I’m going to read, just sit and listen.” You can learn more from the chapter in The Outfit where he goes down south to buy the car. Read the first story, which is called “Anne,” and if it doesn’t break your heart and make you weep, I don’t know what will. If you’ve never read him, get a book called Lost Pages. I wish I could write 1/20th as well as Paul Di Filippo. Mark Twain, Gerald Kersh, Clark Ashton Smith, Joseph Conrad, comic books, Big Little Books, radio drama (especially “The Shadow”) and the best writer in America today, Paul Di Filippo. Name your writing influences: writers, books, teachers. I didn’t become a writer, I was a writer. I didn’t realize that everybody couldn’t write.
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