All who participate in the cult of biography should be murdered. There is nothing to be learned from a writer’s biography, and that is in spite of whether you believe writing is impersonal, in itself contained, transcendent of time or place, and able to stand alone for the whole of some real or imagined fucking forever, or maybe eternity, if you were inclined, as I am, to know that forever and eternity are not one and the same, forever that freak infinity that stands looming like an avalanche waiting to happen; or, if you believe that any text is a reflection of or a re-presentation of a simple, separate heroic personality–I do not wish to evoke a new cult of personality . . . the labor of subjectivity, Ms. Sontag had once said . . . what is there to learn from the writers biography? There should be as many biographies written about a writer as there are people, no? I do not wish to play the critical ping-pong I have seen played in the Academy these last several decades. I am not going to get into who I am or less so what I am and maybe even avoiding where and when I am who which, this, that, what else or what other is there that will come to be or might not come to be, arriving as we do by accident even when we imagine we have intended to get to where we have gotten.
