November 9-13
November 9.
They were demotic in soul if not prose.
November 10.
Skin the texture of grapefruit rind.
November 11.
Documentary on origami. We are all the results of folds, the man says.
November 12.
First line of story: “Like my calf implant?”
November 13.
King Rat starves to death.
November 2 - 6
November 2.
Broken porticoes in the city.
November 3.
A moveable Dark Age.
November 4.
Men who drive Escalades and wear silk socks and spend a million a year on their girlfriends.
November 5.
Myth of the Cave as psychological thriller.
November 6.
Irgendwann soll ich ein Testament schreiben.
October 26 - 30
October 26.
By their natures, some practices will never become traditions.
October 27.
No single line of verse is poetic.
October 28.
‘Thought control’ is intended for the thinking classes.
October 29.
What am I supposed to do about nothing.
October 30.
Seen with Roman eyes.
October 19 - 23
October 19.
Optimism of the commuter years - pigeons hopping around the benches at Back Bay Station.
October 20.
Normie, lives in his parents’ house, his parents are dead.
October 21.
No ‘world,’ only smaller, sometimes infinitesimal worlds that bump into each other in their orbits.
October 22.
Without thought or breath or twitch - aching molars - dry tongue - steady hands - weak eyes - ways to become normal - work and only work.
October 23.
Lord Shang: The motives of the people are base.
October 12 - 16
October 12.
He feels different from the members of ancient cultures.
October 13.
Roll the mangonel
Archers hold
Cavalry halt
Let the the infantry
Take this hit
October 14.
Facing down the barrel of age.
October 15.
Preoccupied with culture, but her values were not the values of the next generation.
October 16.
Two doors down Portuguese party - wine, tents, music - ‘So you think you’re Catholic . . .’
October 5 - 9
October 5.
Dope fiend: “Come on, Lady Red, give me some head.”
Every man needs a rigid objective.
So long as he is biodegradable, he will have his gods.
October 6.
Panic in the warm house.
October 7.
She sold her blood.
“I can’t work at Target,”
she says, and her lips
break the skin
of a day-old coffee.
October 8.
Useless but not worthless.
October 9.
Remember: getting a haircut on a hill in Drogheda.
September 28 - October 2
September 28.
In this journal I address no one, least of all myself.
September 29.
Modern to mistake the historical for the absolute, perennial the absolute for the historical.
September 30.
Mamet: The confidence man gives confidence to the mark.
October 1.
The Devil’s face changes every day.
October 2.
Athens and Jerusalem are most famous for their executions.
September 21 - 25
September 21.
‘The feeling without the boredom of its conveyance’—or its consequence.
September 22.
Modern geology: the world began when we were born
September 23.
Karen national found in Khao Loh Forest with twenty-one smoked pieces of bearcat and twenty-four pieces of macaque.
September 24.
Alain Prost: When I look fast, I am slow.
September 25.
Cioran: ‘Nothing monumental has ever emerged from dialogue, nothing explosive, nothing “great.”’
September 14-18
September 14.
Every now and then a dose of Old Rus and the imperial.
To every Ivan his Oprichnina.
September 15.
From bad conscience of established order to good conscience of established disorder.
September 16.
Plague either kills or purifies (Artaud)—scenes from a plague town.
September 17.
Godzilla v. traditional social teaching.
September 18.
Von Trier: A film must be a stone in the shoe.
September 7 - September 11
September 7.
What the body could tolerate a hundred years ago.
September 8.
The leaseholders of my subconscious, and the permanent residents.
September 9.
Not even a tendency of one but a non-tendency.
September 10.
Characters: always a third beside them.
Thoughts of living inland: even Tennessee is too far.
September 11.
Time goes slowly in work; in work there is enough time.
August 31 - September 4
August 31.
An academy dominated by Homais and Mrs. Jellyby.
September 1.
A century-long slouch.
Tacitus: Evil men will always miss Nero.
September 2.
Influence of patrons on critics and critics on patrons—influence of money launderers and intelligence agencies—terminal style.
September 3.
Imperator style v. plain style v. disintegrating peasant style.
September 4.
Morality as a matter of scale.
August 24-28
August 24.
Who founded the sentence cult?
August 25.
In a past life I ate little but plain boiled mutton.
Gums pulling up stakes.
August 26.
Noir is the world of the Aventine.
No limit to the pagan pantheon.
August 27.
Repin was Greenberg’s great villain, and of course Repin has aged exceptionally well,
August 28.
Lonely man in a coffee-stained cardigan, clutching his rhetoric book, insisting it will soon be his time.
A single spirit and a new golden age.
August 17-21
August 17.
We watch the driver’s hands on the turns and chicanes rather than on the straights.
August 18.
Machiavel struggles in primitive societies—he is not just duplicitous but legalistic—uses the system for his own ends.
August 19.
My kind of writing: terse, bleak, Tacitean.
August 20.
How much of my worldview was shaped by Gen X public schoolboys.
August 21.
Your privilege as a novelist (even as a hardboilist)—to narrate. Focus on transition from narration to scene and scene to narration.
August 11-15
August 11.
A long journey to Tsargrad—on foot, on horseback, on a bier.
August 12.
It is silence—not sound—that terrifies them.
August 13.
Beckett’s Molloy: “What business has innocence here?”
Of what cannot be said, one must write.
August 14.
Personal Judas.
Even Prometheus was not an inventor but a thief.
August 15.
We are defined by our failures as well as our successes.
August 3-8
August 3.
Seneca: “This is an adultery against the state, to have sex under trophies of Miltiades.”
In each story, a world ends. The writer who can answer “why” understands the book.
August 4.
The future is always grotesque, because the future is the triumph of life in one form or another.
August 5.
Roving closer to the source—Potosi minerals—thousands lost down the mine shaft—heaving a rusty cutlass, just east of El Dorado.
August 6.
Certain types of music are dead because the types of emotions underpinning them are dead.
August 7.
The next act must be creative—the next act must be an act.
July 27-31
27 July.
Soft living breeds new and extravagant desires.
Life can only be lived as life. The will lives in the present, not the nostalgic past or utopian future.
28 July.
Last two nights watching racing—F1 show, Senna doc—elements of Prost style: strategy, preparation, concentration.
29 July. Burned hand reaching into oven. Skin peeled off, shape of a mouth.
30. Roman pietas, Ghibelline chivalry— “The eternal inside us is what is important.”
31. Beckett and Pinter would’ve rather been cricketers than writers.
Archetype: frail thoughtful one and his gallon jar of resentment.
July 20-24
20 July.
Spiritual dimension of Helenio Herrera and Mourinho.
Blown into the void—into the dark Canadian lake.
21 July.
Cycle of poems: Songs of the Winged Hussar.
Marksmanship contest. First prize is duty-free wine from Hungary.
22 July.
Joint attention: point to the truth and the reader will see it.
23 July.
Nietzsche on Sallust: “My sense of style, of the epigram as a style, was awakened almost instantly when I came into contact with Sallust. Compact, severe, with as much substance as possible, a cold sarcasm toward ‘beneficial words’ and ‘beautiful sentiments’—here I have found myself.”
24 July.
Russian tourist smuggled drugged orangutan from Bali—fed it allergy pills mixed with milk—a new low.
Jim Thompson was the father I loved and Pinter the father I hated.
July 13-17
13 July.
At the end of literacy, anything is possible.
How would I write living in Romania—mode, style, lexicon.
14 July.
Men hollowed out by pleasure.
What lies at the end of pleasure—sleep, on the roadside, in a sheep’s rotten maw.
15 July.
Twitter: disembodied head of Prince Saurau.
16 July.
Never untie when you can cut.
17 July.
Balzac: the Father died at the behest of lawyers.
I know the gods of the age.
A basket for my head? Ask Danton where they rolled his.