#joseph mcelroy

PLUS, ZIZZ!, GENJI and the Bomb: The Monthly Gravette #20

(he by the way loathes dotted ellipses in fiction)

As when (as Shakespeare could have said) throwing the gist of life’s book up against an adhesive partition you can’t throw it all up at once so it arrives in its own time but then is known to have got there also all at once, its speed everywhere the same, and to describe a curve. So life describes itself, in which event it must take full responsibility.

She was one of the few women he had known who when they knew something did not ask him to guess what it was.

I can’t know everything.

I mean, I read a novel a year, maybe every two years, standing up in a line at an airport check-in counter or waiting for the shuttle (then fall asleep when I get into my plane seat) and I recall a chapter at random and then throw the book away or leave it in the seat for a stewardess, it was a pretty good book—