Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder’s Reviews > The Famous Magician > Status Update

If I can give you some friendly advice: forget the whole thing, or use it as a plot for a novel. It’s like what happened to Pessoa with Aleister Crowley. Or it’s just a shell game, where people try to guess which shell or cup the marble is hidden under—they never win, as I’m sure you know, because the illusionist places the marble after his victim has made a choice.

Readers seek out fellow readers as much as they seek out books, though fellow readers are, alas, more difficult to find. So we hold onto them for life.

what I had always disliked about my work as a storyteller was the dull, gray time that had to be spent laboriously writing it all out, scene after scene, paragraph after paragraph, sweating away like Sisyphus to fill up the hundred or so pages required to make a book.

Giving up Literature was a terrible wrench; moments before, it had seemed unthinkable, and I still couldn’t really envisage it. And yet what was Literature, what had it been for me if not the protean power of transformation, which I now had the means to transpose to the plane of reality? From that point of view, I wouldn’t be abandoning Literature so much as transcending it.

I have never been able to understand how there can be bad writers. All the elements required for writing well are right there in Literature, served up on a silver platter. I can’t see the flaw in this reasoning, however I look at it, and yet overwhelming empirical evidence contradicts it.