It is one thing to take inspiration from another's work for one's own creative writing, but it is entirely another to complete a work first conceived and named in another's fiction. What to make of such fictions within fictions?  

In an earlier post I wrote a little about Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

I began this as a reply to Timothy Morton's extremely helpful comment on entropy in letters and words (following Shannon, whom I've used elsewhere in discussing the editing of Shakespeare). In fact all the comments were wonderful, so let me say thanks. Thanks!

Following up on my earlier post on Nantucket, as well as all the discussion here about Ngrams, I want to offer a few spontaneous speculations based on a new paper that's the talk of at least a couple of neighborhoods in the town.

At the end of a work of fiction, the ideal reader knows as much as the author. How could it be otherwise? There is nothing else to know.This means that the end of the work is the end of omniscience.

While Beckett once advised another writer to stop "blazing away at the microcosmic moon," it's sometimes an irresisitible temptation to try to "flush the coverts of the microglot," as J.L. Austin put it (in "A Plea for Excuses"). And why resist it?