Status Updates From Somebody with a Little Hamm...

Outside the window, another old lady stood and shouted in at us [in Russian]. “What is she saying?” I asked Mischa. He listened for a moment and then said, “I think she’s asking how we [writers] make our money. She’s asking, do we even work.”

Dickens is excessive by modern standards. But modern standards have become denatured, &Dickens is excessive like Nature; like living things, his creatures must twist &turn, expand out or tunnel in until they have utterly fulfilled what they are. It’s very entertaining, but it’s also faithful to human experience, which indiscriminately mixes trivia with genius, artificiality with raw power, sentimentality &seriousness

I understand this impulse, or at least I think I do—many authors must secretly itch to stop torturing their characters, to spread their arms and give it up, making everything right in the end...

In past books, you felt the characters’ awkward, sometimes belligerent attempts to negotiate between the two poles, and you felt their disappointment when they failed; you also ...

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