​No doubt everyone who reads and everyone who writes has a construction or phrase that is anathema. For me it is “could be seen.” Every time I run across it I find myself kicked out of the reading process into my editorial mode to think of ways to correct or improve. Too often its use strikes me as authorial laziness.
 
I have just finished rereading “A Boy’s Own Story” by Edmund White. For me this is one of the most beautifully composed works of imaginative fiction ever. One might say, and one does, that it is one of the most overly beautifully composed works ever, to the degree that one wonders if the extravagant beauty of the net diminishes even further the small fish caught therein.

Photograph by William Christenberry

Preface: Various readers who have encountered Sawyerville on this website have expressed interest in knowing more about the community.  The following piece is cribbed from information found in my two memoirs (which see under "Jonathan's Books"),  which has been edited together and expanded for an unpublished autobiography.

Recently I watched Peter Weir’s 1993 movie “Fearless” again. I’ve always liked it hugely. I think now I like it more than ever.

For me it is thematically and stylistically closer to his earlier movies “Picnic at Hanging Rock” (1975) and “The Last Wave” (1977).

In the earlier movie, a group of teachers and young girls from a finishing school picnic at Hanging Rock on Valentine’s Day in 1900, and a young teacher and some the girls go missing. They are never found, and the movie becomes a meditation on unsolved mystery and its effects.

In 2003 British science fiction author Stephen Baxter published his long (592 pages) novel “Evolution.” It is named for its central character. In addition to the Prologue and Epilogue it consists of 19 novella-length chapters in three sections: Ancestors, Humans, and Descendants. The novel covers a period of some 165 million years. Each chapter deals with a different time period, the first one in the farthest reaches of the past, the last in the far distant future.
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At the centerpoint of the novel, a few years from now, Life As We Know It is at its peak. Civilization is brought down by a perfect storm of pestilence and terrorism. Those few who survive retreat into the forest.

Until that point, the novel had celebrated the increasing complexity of the mind, the growth of intelligence, the creation of civilization. A success story.