Michael On
Michael On
tuesday reptiles afternoon
Novelist time is reptile time; novelists tend to be ruminant and brooding, nursers of ancient grievances, second-guessers, Tuesday afternoon quarterbacks, retrospectators, endlessly, like slumping hitters, studying the film of their old whiffs.
passion alcohol way
The rest of Sitka's homicides are so-called crimes of passion, which is a shorthand way of expressing the mathematical product of alcohol and firearms.
editors phones houdini
To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing," he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal . "You weren't the same person when you came out as when you went in.
pain party wrath
Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. If a writer doesn't give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves, if he doesn't court disapproval, reproach and general wrath, whether of friends, family or party apparatchiks... the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.
steps culture devolution
The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward
revolutionary novel
I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It's a devastating novel.
reviews deep-breath breaths
Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.
couple boys men
[I]n 1938, Superman appeared. He had been mailed to the offices of National Periodical Publications from Cleveland, by a couple of Jewish boys who had imbued him with the powers of a hundred men, of a distant world, and of the full measure of their bespectacled adolescent hopefulness and desperation.
invisible untouchables felt
Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.
paper salvation said
See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.
summer baseball games
The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
imagination imagine i-can
I can imagine anything except having no imagination.
mistake great-love terrible
... But he believed that every great love was in some measure a terrible mistake.
trying hats world
...Landsman doesn't buy that. Bina never stopped wanting to redeem the world. She just let the world she was trying to redeem get smaller and smaller until at one point, it could be bounded in the hat of a hopeless policeman.