Month: March 2014

Jorge Luis Borges on fantasy writing

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Interviewer: There is an element of fantasy in your work, then–which leads me to ask you about the fantastic. You use the word a great deal in your writing, and I remember that you call Green Mansions, for example, a fantastic novel.

Borges: Well, it is.

Interviewer: How would you define fantastic, then?

Borges: I wonder if you can define it. I think it’s rather an intention in a writer. I remember a very deep remark of Joseph Conrad–he is one of my favorite authors–I think it is in the foreword to something like The Dark Line, but it’s not that. . .

Interviewer: The Shadow Line?

Borges: The Shadow Line. In that foreword he said that some people have thought that the story was a fantastic story because of the captain’s ghost stopping the ship. He wrote–and that struck me because I write fantastic stories myself–that to deliberately write a fantastic story was not to feel that the whole universe is fantastic and mysterious; nor that it meant a lack of sensibility for a person to sit down and write something deliberately fantastic. Conrad thought that when one wrote, even in a realistic way, about the world, one was writing a fantastic story because the world itself is fantastic and unfathomable and mysterious.

Interviewer: You share that belief?

Borges: Yes. I found that he was right. I talked to Bioy Casares, who also writes fantastic stories–very, very fine stories–and he said, I think Conrad is right; really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.

looking at pictures

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you’re there
in front of me
one dimensional, of course
but I remember more dimensions
the sound of your laugh
a kid’s laugh, really
but can we be held
accountable
for what we inherit
that smile
that always just happened
without planning
or thinking
a natural reaction
to life
around you
and your eyes
open, clear
looking at the world
from a distance
and yet full of mischief
whenever you laughed
the tilt of your head
the length of your neck
the way your left shoulder
dips to the side
there’s a sea behind you
on a coast
a faraway coast
a lifetime ago
your lifetime
and mine
in a world long gone
that I won’t be returning to
any time soon

Richard Price on writing

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The books that made me want to be a writer were books like Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, where I recognized people who were somewhat meaner and more desperate than the people I grew up with, but who were much closer to my experience than anything I’d ever read before. I mean, I didn’t have a red pony. I didn’t grow up in nineteenth-century London. With Last Exit to Brooklyn, I realized that my own life and world were valid grounds for literature, and that if I wrote about the things that I knew it was honorable–that old corny thing: I searched the world over for treasures, not realizing there were diamonds in my own backyard.