extinguished
by uzwi
Some loved writers you detach yourself from, perhaps quite gently, but determinedly too, because they’re like parents or teachers you want to outgrow. Some you drift away from then bump into them with a shock of recognition forty years later, buy all their books again & discover that in the interim a hefty but laughable scholarship has grown up around them. Others, it’s a grudge match & even after forty years you wouldn’t piss on them if you found them on fire in Waterstone’s Piccadilly–but then you do & burst into tears for no reason you can understand. The tears aren’t quite enough to put them out.
–reblogged from April 28, 2007
the m john harrison blog 
Been reading you for several decades now without the need to piss on your fire.
Please burn away–we enjoy the bonfire
Thanx, Mia, I’ll go & find the matches.
At first i misread the post and imagined the authors themselves on fire in the bookstore, which i found hilarious ( approaching employees to point out that, um, there is an author on fire in the fiction. “Perhaps he is angry about something?” ) but considerably less painterly than your books being perpetually on fire in some corner of Waterstone’s Picadilly, like Tarkovsky’s shack or some kind of burning bush.
That should of course be “…on fire in the fiction section.”