“You know basically we just had to tell a story, so we weren’t exactly choreographing, we just put some steps together and made the steps propel the action … I don’t know if that’s choreography – it’s just steps.”
Tag: 2010
John Irving Explains Why His Novels Aren’t About Himself
“I was pretty determinedly not a practitioner of autobiographical fiction. But the longer I get away from something – the political anger, the personal hurt, the psychological obsession – the easier it is to write about. And the more I can afford to be playful or, a better word, manipulative.”
Umberto Eco Considers The Nature Of Lists
The author sees lists as falling into two (very Eco-ist) categories: “those that evidence the ‘poetics of ‘everything included” and those that express the ‘poetics of the ‘etcetera’.” The former covers a finite number of items (as with a phone book) and aims for completeness; the latter (as with a medieval writer’s list of devils) “is limited only by the imagination’s disinclination to invent more.”