It's the pain, somehow vascular, in the legs, that makes the wine taste so good and soothing, if you've done an honest day's work.  Hoofing it.  A meeting of hands.  What else do we call it.  There's one of those Christian terms, I can't think of it...  Can't sleep, valerian doesn't do it, only listening to music, in my case Irish music, Sinead O'Connor singing with the Chieftains, "The Foggy Dew," or, anything MacGowan.

Writing is a symptom of wakefulness.  Irritated by not being able to sleep, you have some math to sketch out on a blackboard.  You have some growing up to write about.

Philip Roth, also found on the internet, in interview with Tina Brown, has a piece of the puzzle, and perhaps has kept the ticking distance of our lackings toward literature and literary forms.  Unless it's stunning and revelatory, salacious, maybe shameful, but true and recognizable, we don't need the parsimoniousness of the novel.  As Roth says, too many screens, television, movie, internet, and this being one of them.

And yet, and yet--the great directors, Fellini, love to say, 'and yet, and yet'--there is something Shakespearean, that strange poetic 'outing' of what must be said, the capturing of voices that hover in our heads.

To skirt upon an issue, maybe it is literary form, literary form in a sense, which we, or another, or a group, or a larger 'truth seeking nationality' would seek to defend.  And if it is literary form we are talking about, then, maybe, what seem to be greater issues can be more pleasantly discussed.  This is why Mr. Roth thinks that the world, quite clearly, will be happier when no one believes in God.  Literary form is, as always, an important, or perhaps, the most important battle ground there is.

So we see this now, as if by coincidence, in the NPR piece of Antietam, the photography of Alexander Gardner, (setting the issues of what the more thoughtful words of the day would be dedicated to.)  We see it Rushdie's new book about what it is like being a marked man of extremist.  The story of Naguib Mahfouz seems to have been forgotten at the current moment (stabbed in the neck almost fatally by a young Egyptian extremist--who then later having finally read him, humbly asked for apology.)

Shakespearean technique might finally be the point, the inclusion of all the voices, mad, sane,  clownish, regal, male, female, deep, shallow, interested, not, musical, atonal, mystic, secular, cynic, saint, cop, what have you.  Which we get now, readily, fragmented, but blitzed at us, if you will.

And we are the ones with our own gyroscopes, compasses, filters, points of interest, tastes.  Important things.  We have our own voices, and that's why, in our DNA, the writer came into being, a being that is a crystallization of what we are, what we are often enough.

Do we riot?  Is that who we are, or do we write a poem?  Can we write a book fairly honest, or is taste something different?  Or then do we misapprehend other people,  and take them to say as being more than what they really are about, which is, after all, and at the end of all days, a matter of literary form, and all that is accepted within literary (mental) forms.

Mr. Roth, for instance, might write about masturbation.  That might not be particulary to your taste, but the form might be, well, not far off from your own.