Paul Boccaccio

In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other edge is the other delight: more, more, still more! one more word, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of […]

The poet, however, uses these two crude, primitive, archaic forms of thought [simile and metaphor] in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show you a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind. So he produces what Baudelaire called a ‘suggestive magic including at the same […]

Based on the recommendation of Neil Gaiman, via his blog, I read The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, a collection of criticism and other essays by Samuel R. Delany on sf and the craft and mechanics of writing. It boggled me. His fresh, lighting thought, his ability to strike to the heart of whatever he was reading or […]