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200-page philosophical dialogue that was published in Cannibals and Christians. Looking at reproductions of Picasso���s work for two months at the Museum of Modern Art stimulated that writing. But I wasn���t ready to write about Picasso. I didn���t know enough about him. I really didn���t know his life. He stimulated, sent me on a long, wonderful voyage, and I honored him for it. But I wasn���t ready to write about him. Over those 30 years many good books and bad books were written about him. By now I had developed a sense of the honor and the shoddy in another writer���s style. You get a very good sense of the part of the writing that has integrity and the part that is meretricious. This is true for all writers, even the very best. I���ll show you in Shakespeare a hell of a lot of meretricious writing. Parenthetically, what Shakespeare loved was having wonderful lines of dialogue, back and forth, and wonderful monologues. So he���d bring people together to produce this language. It had nothing to do with reality ��� which may be one of the reasons Tolstoy hated Shakespeare so much. Shakespeare was not interested in reality or morality, as an intimate matter. He was only interested in morality for its relation to language. To come back to what I was saying, you can find the meretricious in a writer no matter how great they are. You can find it in Proust where he is needlessly long at a given moment, until finally his virtues become his vice because he���s so good at it. Certainly, when you are reading an average good writer, what���s fascinating is where they are telling the truth, as you see it, and where they are not, where they are fudging it. If you���ve been a writer all your life you do have quite an authority there. You are not unlike some high ecclesiastic who decides that the evidence here is such that we will or will not call this woman a saint. There are standards, HYLAND 26