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Joyce Cary.
This week, we bring you Joyce Cary’s 1954 Art of Fiction interview, Carolyn Gaiser’s short story “Differences,” and David Wagoner’s poem “Photographing Snakes.”
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Joyce Cary, The Art of Fiction No. 7 Issue no. 7 (Fall–Winter 1954–1955)
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul—politics does the same thing for the body. Of course they overlap—this is a very rough description. But the politician is responsible for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of perpetual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuading people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade. And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words, the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him. Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy, these were great spellbinders … Poets have started most of the revolutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.
Differences By Carolyn Gaiser Issue no. 40 (Winter–Spring 1967)
The next morning it was cold in the apartment. She sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in an old plaid bathrobe and warmed her clothes over the electric heater. He was still asleep. Without his glasses, he seemed accessible, someone who could be talked to with understanding, without self-consciousness: his hair curling up into funny ringlets and the lines of his profile imprinting on the air a certain naive justice. A large suitcase lay open on the floor, overflowing with sweaters and socks. She wondered if anyone wore socks in Israel. Probably not.
Photographing Snakes By David Wagoner Issue no. 188 (Spring 2009)
They’ll seem to pose for you, though they’re always posed in their own ulterior ways in a steadily calm abstraction of available light. They belong to what they’re lying on, looking like nothing on earth among other things, and they arrange themselves with what has been rearranged repeatedly by the wind and the time-stopped intervals among seasons …
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