Oh dear sweet jesus.

If y'all liked that, go get Culley's book. It's a study in writing technique; the parts where anything is actually happening are quite well done, but then he slips into stuff like this that belongs tatooed in the author's navel.

Re: your post above, making the language do tricks and using it well are two different things. I recommend the Nabokov book on Gogol as a starting place. Also, if I'm not mistaken you would be making better use of the language if you referred to your published canon in the singular.