Collected Novellas: Collected Early Fiction 1949-1964, Vol. 1 Book

1.) Romans à clef ? : He shook a negating muzzle : "Don't count as a reference as such; but the persons-in-question have usually been nailed down umpteen times elsewhere."
2.) [how brightly beams the morning star] ? (as is well known, the first letters of each of the 7 verses spell out a name). : "Counts as a reference !" he confirmed.
3.) Plagiarize ?. : "You can do it as often as you like. : On the contrary ! We take that to be a good sign that someone's beginning to be forgotten, becoming a rarity - and it's heartily welcomed !"
4.) Punishments ?. : "That happens relatively seldom. Thrashings are, of course, the order of the day - and usually quite justified : new arrivals, unsuspecting=proud editors of anthologies, often get frightfully lambasted; or biographers by their poets. The heaviest punishment of all, and one very seldom meted out - roughly comparable to your death sentence up top - is for sending [inspirations] up to the earth's surface. That's when some scribbler grubbing in a library (or even dreaming) suddenly has an [inspiration] : Someone or other would really be a very interesting person to do an evening radio program about." (At first I smiled right along with him; but suddenly ceased, and recalled).
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. / And then there's this cold consideration - and let that be the end of it ! - take one of those ever so clever wolfhounds : is he really any unhappier than in the days of his humanity ? There are personalities, leather-stockinged all-round, who voluntarily isolate themselves even as humans : restlessly roam the forests, by wind and storm; go wild like wolves, and devour; their bed old leaves, pallid in beauty, their lamp the moon, if they're wearing a hat, their roof is thatched. Now and then, into the bushes with something red-leathered Indian : might it not also be perfectly possible for a type like that voluntarily - indeed blissfully ! - to greet his external transformation into one helluva wolfhound ? That way he could effortlessly scour, instead of 60, 200 kilometers a day ! And a chic she-wolf, silver-gray, each hair black-tipped, would surely be preferable, in wolf circles, to the lady from Milo. / (some very witty wrinkles to it : the way said Tyras must have growled a laugh as he lifted the secret documents off Inglefield. Or the one yesterday, who immediately passed along to Uspenskii the phrase about [swapping] ! -Nope; most people - at least given the current state of intelligence - could probably care less whether they ran around as a wolf, or a human being capable of speech.) / ..... /
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"Writers ? Oh go on !" - so we were agreed on that as well : "Barefaced cowards, that's what they are !" (they can stick their dotdotdots up their dotdotdots ! He nodded and asked about the deleted words, and got the details with no hesitation : when we geniuses are by ourselves, I'm candid, as is only proper.)
~~~

Post-Finneganean, Post-Wakean, Post-Freudian, Post-Punctuationean, Post-Formasfunctionalean, Post-Functionalformean, this "solipsistic" Hamburger who is a most "unmodern modern" does veryvery well one of the things the imagination alone can do- peel away time and space and on the page imprint that inner infinite, the wiry clockwork of working cognition and language-cascade representing the vivid, imprecise language of the conscious-unconscious- it is in the very style (and what is not hogwash but structure and style ?) it is in the very narrative(s)- it is in this very act of translation (John E. Woods, medium-as-messenger, a round of applause from the audience, s'il vous plaît; or better 'bitte schön'); it is of course in the very etyms of these Träume that creak and bow and scrape and sing in the moonlight and along the black desolate plains of future-past devastation, of pervasive authoritarianism, of violence, of Rabelaisiean laughter at the former/latter, of mathematics, of people doing bad things to people and the blissful retreat into the intellect, of the mystifying vastness of space-time, of the mystifying limits of material reality, of the reach beyond and between the latter/former, of orthography, numerology, geometry, morphemic-obsessive typesetting, word-and-worldsmithery... (...This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, methinks...)