I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.

I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

In art and life we're always reading bodies and behaviors (and skies and skylines or whatever), constructing brief and shifting coherences, and I guess I want to capture that process of characterization and re-characterization instead of offering up a few stable, easily-summarized individuals.

I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.