I've run dry (well, not really. But I can't possibly publish every last piece of doggerel I have, can I? Certainly not for free, anyway). I am sick of this blog. I have been reduced to going ice-skating in order to amuse myself.

It is downright dispiriting to have to write in the wake of giant predecessors. Borges: "The certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all." If every aspiring writer were told that he must compete directly with the literary personages of the past, we should not have half so many complacent mediocrities clamouring for our attention and approval with trivial topicalities.

Was reading the Strong Opinions of Nabokov at Borders. That was a flagrant paraphrase.

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote it and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando