William H Gass on Bright Lights, Big City. A fairly disengorging critique of the writer, for sure. I happen to love it. This essay on the present tense is no ars poetica. It’s simply a verbal assault, like boyars matched over a steep cliff. It conjures my undergraduate stomach butterflies to read, and it causes me in an almost literal sense to long for, you know, those days when I felt capable of setting the world on fire through sheer force of will and wetness of pen. Now. No one even uses pens unless they’re at the doctor’s office or signing a receipt.