“Julienne” at Wigleaf

I have a very short piece up at Wigleaf. There’s also a 2 ½ question interview as a post-reading palate cleanser.

AG: What’s mysterious to you? (I’m thinking of your Kenyon Review essay, “The Great Unknown,” where you muse about how mystery in our daily lives is “in dangerously short supply.”)


RM: The question of why we haven’t been colonized by an advanced alien civilization. (Bear with me here…) Statistical models suggest a high likelihood of intelligent life outside our quaint corner of the cosmos. Why haven’t we been contacted? There’s the eerily possible possibility that our present predicament is a simulation (making our fictions simulations of simulations). My favorite theory, however, is that once civilizations reach a certain threshold of intelligence, they bring about their own destruction. So, in other words, intelligence and self-destruction are inextricably linked. (Kind of grim, huh?)