A blank prosaic wall of sound. In J.M. Coetzee’s Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, the fictionalized account of Coetzee’s time as a university student in Cape Town and subsequent move to London in the ’60s, the aspiring poet begins to falter in his artistic hopes and gloomily feels the creep of prose writing as an alternative avenue for those hopes and aspirations. It is not a coincidence that this creep, mirroring as it does the creep of the workaday life as a programmer at IBM, leads to, by this point in the memoir, the baldest description of the protagonist’s dejection. … Continue reading Fear Not This Brief Eternity: Mizmor’s Prosaic