More on the Q&A

What I remember: The conundrum of the bumblebee. Cueing fetishes, talismanic pages. Not knowing how to solve the problem of the project until you're inside it. Ideas agglomerate. Roth: job is to make a book smarter than its author. Maugham, Mann: Waiting to write the bildungsroman. "I'm a great believer in bohemian life." The value of the intimate and useless. Trillin on Babel via Wachtel: The human fact within the vale of circumstance. I heard the lyric as "monster eyes." I was so happy the kangaroo was named Shelf.