(from an email to John Altman, 2006)

Music and language probably evolved together. I think they’re inexorably linked. To use language without music seems a shame. Not words so much, but structures. I think to really write well you have to think beyond straight narrative and use, abuse, and play with the very structure of language. Certainly abandon all restrictive grammars. Although you have to know grammar (else you wind up like that bass clarinetist who could play free but didn’t know “Giant Steps” and was excoriated on stage by Roland Kirk.) What Bird did with harmony is possible in prose.

But fuck it’s hard.

Brick