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Grendel’s Laundry List, Short Form: Reading for Thursday
“It is not simple, not a matter for amateurs, making sentences sexual; it is not easy to structure the consciousness of the reader with the real thing, to use one wonder to speak of another, until in the place of the voyeur who reads we have fashioned the reader who sings… the secret lies in seeing sentences as containers of consciousness. Fiction becomes visual by becoming verbal. The camera understands its enemy, and shuts its eye.
There’s one body only whose request for your caresses is not vulgar, is not unchaste, untoward, or impolite: The body of your work itself; for you must remember that your intentions will not merely celebrate a beauty but create one; that yours is a love that brings its own birth with it, just as Plato has declared, and that you should therefore give up the blue things of this world in favor of the words which say them.”
William Gass, On Being Blue
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