Steve Almond

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

The body releases its electricity, merges with another, and together there is something like God in this pleasure. But afterward, in the quiet redolent air, there must also be offerings of truth. And so the mystery of love deepens.

There is no sin in the realm of taste.

Music has become more pervasive and portable than ever. But it feels less previous in the bargain. I don't want to confuse artistic and commercial value, but it's just a fact that some kid who rips an album for free isn't going to give it the same attention he would if it cost him ten bucks. At what point does convenience become spiritual indolence? I realize this makes me sound like an old fart, but sometimes I get nostalgic for the days when the universe of recorded sound wasn't at our fingertips, when we had to hunt and wait and - horror of horrors - do without, when our longing for a particular record or song made it feel sacred.

The connection being that in my head all language began in song and that the best stories inevitably reutrn to song, to a state of rapture. For years, I had assumed that throwing beautiful words at the page would make my prose feel true. But I had the process exactly backward. It was truth that lifted the language into beauty and toward song. It was a matter of doing what Joe Henry did, of pursuing characters into moments of emotional truth and slowing down. The result was a compression of sensual and psychological detail that released the rhythm and melody in language itself, what Longfellow called "the happy accidents of language.

It's like this when you fall hard for a musician. It's a crush with religious overtones. You listen to the songs and you memorize the words and the notes and this is a form of prayer. You attend the shows and this is the liturgy. You're interested in relics -- guitar picks, set lists, the sweaty napkin applied to His brow. You set up shrines in your room. It's not just about the music. It's about who you are when you listen to the music and who you wish to be and the way a particular song can bridge that gap, can make you feel the abrupt thrill of absolute faith.

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

Every now and then, I'll run into someone who claims not to like chocolate, and while we live in a country where everyone has the right to eat what they want, I want to say for the record that I don't trust these people, that I think something is wrong with them, and that they're probably - and this must be said - total duds in bed.

To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

But the real life of a writer resides in showing up at the keyboard every day, with the necessary patience and mercy, and making the best decisions you can on behalf of your people. It__ a slow process. It often feels hopeless, more like an affliction than an art form.Most of us will have to find our readers one by one, in other words, and against considerable resistance. If anything qualifies us as heroic, it__ that private perpetual struggle.Put down the magazine, soldier. Forget about the other guy. Remember who you are.

Misery loves another idiot with a jukebox where his soul should be.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next . . .

The Internet is what you make of it, obviously . . . But the Internet has also been a great aggregator of anxiety and an enabler of our worst tendencies. It has allowed us to trumpet our own opinions, to win attention by broadcasting our laziest and cruelest judgments, to grind axes in public. It has made us feel, in some perverse sense, that we are entitled to do so.

This was one of those mid-thirties moments when you take a look at the stale, half-chewed bagel your life has become and kiss jealousy on its smokey mouth.

If You Can Stand It, Play the Long Game . . .What I mean here is that you have to remain committed to the ultimate goal, which isn__ to win the immediate approval of the online world, or dazzle a workshop, but to improve your storytelling day by day.Finding the right balance of feedback__ncouragement versus vigorous criticism__ill help immeasurably.But your own commitment has to be to the process of improvement, not to the anticipated reward.If it__ any consolation, I__ still working on this final lesson.

Narration, after all, isn__ just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

Eventually, I headed to the bathroom, and I mention this only because I saw in that bathroom the most quintessentially American artifact I have ever encountered: a bright blue rubber mat resting in the bottom of the urinal emblazoned with the following legend:EpplyWorld's Cleanest AirportOmaha, NEGod bless our relentless idiotic optimism.

There is a point you reach, I mean, when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.