What I'm Reading

I'm not reading anything that I like. I find it best to avoid reading anything good at all. I like technical manuals and bad novels, really bad, because I can see the elements of a story at work without being blinded by emotion.

I also like spiritual books on the lives of saints, or books about shamans or healers. Not because they help me write better, but because they help me to sleep. They are simultaneously uplifting and tedious, the perfect combination to send me toddling off into the land of Nod.

I find that if I am reading anything to which I respond emotionally -- that is, anything that is well-crafted enough to induce suspension of disbelief -- I immediately lose the necessary detachment from my own writing. The last novel I read was Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" and although it was suitably turgid and overdone, the first half of the middle book (it's a trilogy) was an absolute masterpiece. Complete change in style, perspective, and subject matter. Like listening to a rotten album and then suddenly a perfect song comes on and you're riveted.

Broch couldn't sustain the brilliance of that middle section through the rest of the book, but there was a scene (the novel was set in Germany, natch) when a psychotic clerk takes a stern hausfrau on a trip to look at the Lorelei which was so unbelievably brilliant that I found myself laughing out loud and closing the book every few seconds to savor the performance. It was a horrible, droll, pathetic, and completely human scene. When a skilled writer is really hitting on all cylinders like that, there's nothing more compelling.

Of course Broch couldn't sustain that brilliance; nobody could! But I'm telling you; word-for-word, for purely brilliant writing, I'm not sure that anyone can touch Broch in the first 100 pages of that middle book.

Houston IT Drone

There were good waves in Saint Augustine last week. I was looking at them on the internet from my hotel room in Houston. Yuck, Houston sucks. Actually, it's not that bad if you like restaurants, skyscrapers, and big highways. I took a walk one night just to get myself moving around. The cars were blasting past. It was just me and the Mexicans on the sidewalks. I stopped into a grocery store to get some stuff I like to eat and then I was really a legitimate member of the lower class, carrying my plastic grocery bags down the sidewalk, taking a rest on a bus stop bench. All I needed to complete my initiation was a package of off-brand cigarettes in the pocket of my shirt.

It was actually restful, in a strange way, to be disconnected from the transportation grid and on my own. There was a skyscraper with a fountain in front of it, and I realized that I could cut across the lawn and sit next to the fountain if I wanted. I didn't though, because it was too damned hot. The heat drove me back into my hotel room where the television was waiting. Most everything on television makes me sick, but I'm usually too weak to resist. To make the experience more tolerable, I like to flip through the channels that are not on the menu. You can find strange things there sometimes, such as snowy porn on channel 65. This is doubly valuable. One, because snowy black-and-white images make me nostalgic for my pre-cable childhood, and two, because the porn is bad and the people not at all attractive. Without the low-fi reception, it would be unwatchable. The experience is not arousing in the least, but I feel reassured by the sight of these people's blurry, abstract pursuit of sexual pleasure. At least someone, somewhere, is having a good time.

St. Francis of Assisi

St. Francis was a young nobleman's son who found his release from earthly cares when he began ministering to the lepers in a colony near his house.

The girl I met at the Starbucks, Laruen Williams, has since communicated to me via email that she graduated Cooley Law in 2001 and that she already has a poor young boyfriend and a rich Indian doctor boyfriend, both.

I've got to go to Houston in a few minutes and train my replacements on how to do my job. All day yesterday I was paralyzed by fear and regret. What was I thinking, taking a new job? There's no way I can do it. Why didn't I stay where I had it good?

St. Francis was a young nobleman's son who found his release from earthly cares when he began ministering to the lepers in a colony near his house.

The drummer from Def Leppard's only got one arm.