The instant people specialize, its in their interest to dehumanize the people their specialized function operates upon.

I decided that there is really some sort of entity that I call Imperial, and I decided to extend it all the way along the California-Mexico border and into Tijuana and then to the Pacific because it all has a similar feeling.

I feel like I'm almost ready to write fiction about the border. But even after 10 years of writing nonfiction about it, I don't think I know quite enough to do it right.

There are parts of L.A. that feel very, very Mexican, and there are weird little enclaves of Northside in Mexico - Cancún for instance. So what is a border?

At least I hope - that the fiction I've written so far has flaws but has mostly been successful.

You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters.

Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?