Semicolons: A Love Story

[alice wellintown]

what is the advice about writing or anything else that one should take
mindlessly? if the aIdvice is so mindlessly made an absolute it may be
that the person giving it is a priest or a crank and should therefore
be treated with caution, the advice taken with a grain of salt, or the
person devoted to the crank or priest so naive or so star struck, and
therefore not capable of taking advice at anything other than face
value. writing can be taught. like riding a bike it improves with
experience on lotz of different streets, trails, un-mapped and
un-mappable paths less or never travelled. like an instrument we are
taught or teach ourselves, the pen is played in countless styles.
some, as the faulkner article notes, play the pen in exactly the
manner a good teacher would find foolish for most students. kurt v.
was no faulkner, no pynchon, no joyce. he could spin a clever yarn.
but he was not what nabokov called a spinner of planets. nabokov gives
his share of cranky absolute advice. why not? we will never run out of
grans of salt to take.