Writing about the story “Here and There,” Max recounts the character Bruce’s (“a Wallace stand-in”) ambition to be “the first really great poet of technology.”  Max describes “his manifesto for a different sort of writing…”:

“No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, arm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol … No more metaphors.  Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. … I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here.” (Every Love Story is a Ghost Story 62).