Novelistic ambitions are hardly novel. Nor am I particularly well-suited for writing one. They require stories with people, and stories never interested me like ideas, and people? Well, people…people who need people…are the luckiest people in the world. That’s what I knew of people.

I liked the joy of words and the joy of ideas but not esoteric ideas. I knew nothing of philosophy so I couldn’t be an Iris Murdoch who was able to make books of only words and ideas but lacking flesh & blood.

The idea of writing a dime novel seemed beneath me, though if you can’t write the alternative how can the former be beneath you?

“I see dead people” goes the line from the Sixth Sense. Well, I like dead people. They are winsomely quiet, make no demands and there is no way for me to muck up my relationship with them. They are in a place where any negative thoughts I might harbor against them are forgiven instantly. There is such a sense of relaxation in a relationship frozen in time with only the ambering nostalgia making things appear better and better in retrospect. And I’m not nearly as bad as the character in TC Boyle’s “World’s End” who peppers his sandwiches with ancestral dirt.

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