When I was a kid and we played baseball we used to use that "eye black" stuff sometimes - that kind of grease you put under your eyes to reduce glare or something. We only used it, of course, to look cool; it's not like we were any better prepubescent athletes for reducing glare.

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

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.

I came to realize that far more important to me than any plot or conventional sense was the sheer directionality I felt while reading prose, the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine.

I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever.

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.