Winter or summer, wherever you may be, I hope this finds you well. Upon resuming publication, my thought is to take things slowly, and to add to these pages on an occasional, irregular basis, making each new entry a kind of letter from home, a hodge-podge from this side of the moon, taken from notes and observations made along the way. These “letters,” as I’m calling them, will be collected […]
We have visited briefly with Ross Freeman three times thus far. I skip ahead now to the end of his story, with the complete text of the closing chapter. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the feeling of friendship is strong upon me, and the end of The Smiling Eyes of Children, among other things, seems to express something of the gratitude I feel for the wonderful people I have met […]
A grape on the tongue, and language is born. Or is it dream? Or is it memory? Emergency He was riding his bicycle slowly over the bumpy dirt road that ran between his father’s vineyard and the neighbor’s. It was late summer. The atmosphere was warm and still, and the air was heavy with the scent of ripening fruit. As he wobbled along, he noted with pleasure the tracks […]
All of Herman Melville’s poetry, complete in a beautiful, one thousand-page book — the new Library of America edition, out just days ago, is already in this reader’s hands. This is another of those projects I enjoy so well, like the slow and careful reading aloud of Thoreau’s fourteen-volume journal, which I have currently under way, Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and the complete works of other writers I have […]
How beautiful, and how strange, the sense of continuity, harmony, and balance that keeps a lifetime of writing and reading suspended, as it were, or meaningfully afloat — such is memory — and as I hold my glass up to the light, I am surprised to find it still full. Ross Freeman He went to the window and closed the drapes. His typewriter on the table looked like an […]
If this is a book I’m putting together, it’s already the length of a short novel — this in the space of a little more than five months. As meaningless as things like these are, I find them quite interesting. My first novel, A Listening Thing, was written in ninety days. And if I remember correctly, my second novel, The Smiling Eyes of Children, was written in fifty-four. These are […]
Not until I’d written the last word of what follows, did it occur to me use the title of my unpublished novel. But that letter has been read — by a few, a very few — and will be safely forgotten unless someday someone summons it into the light. Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. The Smiling Eyes of Children Let’s say you’ve come […]
William Michaelian 