This is a no-win situation for the artist and the critic. For the former, each hour is a renewed struggle on worn leather wings to communicate his moment of pain to a dumb, usually hopelessly confounded audience that can neither understand nor respond, but which greedily gobbles up the his ashen fruit at $15 a volume. The artist, usually reluctantly, accepts the $15 to buy ramen noodles and charcoal pencils. He trudges home and takes a cold shower and a shot of whiskey and, sweating, climbs back into his chair to wait. His muse inserts her sharp steel apparatus into his spine and twists hard to the right, splitting his cocyx and stinging his soul. He screams. Through the grit of his broken, bleeding teeth, he begs his God to explain his pain to him. The critic is not better off. He greatly fears the spirit of fiction. It haunts him as he creeps reluctantly out of bed in the morning to participate in a world lighted only by the elusive genius of the creative artist--a genius, he is ever saddened to discover, that eludes him entirely. He damns the muse that will not deign to visit him with her flippant and erratic favors. Confounded by the intensity of the higher powers of creative art, each night he snakes back to his critic's hell, dank and crooked and mute, where envy fats herself on his aching entrails and he, starved and helpless, ponders the horrid straits of his blank existence. Cold stygian winds sweep through his cavernous mind like fires of frost as he knaws the dry, bare endings of his own bones and cries to God to explain his pain to him. -- Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu