Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."
I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.
When I was young, I was all about personal sovereignty and that junk, because there was no privacy and the available ideologies were collective, both socialism/communism and nationalism.
Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.
Every artist, writers included, have an ethics and an aesthetics, whether they can formulate them or not. I happen to think that it is good to be able to formulate - it is good to know what you are doing and to be able to talk about it.
Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
For a fight to be productive, or at least relevant, writers should fight over different demands they put upon writing (as an individual, private act) and literature (a network of relations in which we are all involved).
I am itching to criticize some well-regarded writers' works, but I am not doing it because I am perfectly aware that my critique could easily be reduced to envy or just plain meanness.
The balls do not make a writer.
To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."
Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you're not, to think of it as sovereign because you're not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
