Diary

I’m watching Toshiro Mifune dancing around in sequined thigh-high cowboy boots, and some other chintzy Americana garment; I’d forgotten Mifune was known for his camp aesthetic and satirical gestures.

I must be a ‘classicist,’ because I don’t agree with people who say 21st century novels are better than 20th century ones, or that the golden age of the novel, or criticism, or anything, is taking place now, or anywhere except the deep past. I also believe in a reverent attitude toward the “true style” of the past masters, as something to take inspiration from and try to make something under current (bad) conditions; otherwise in your untutored iconoclasm you just reinvent the wheel. Forget being a dwarf on the shoulder of a giant, you’re such a tiny parasite that you don’t even recognize the world.

Entry on Miquel de Palol (article in progress): I think I cracked it: There’s physics, geometry, and metaphysics: this author brings the metaphysics back into geometry: will elaborate later.

The same dream for three nights: I’m angry, on the verge of tears, yelling at people who just laugh and laugh, even though they’re the ones in their undies.

For an April fool, my glasses went missing: the sort of thing that makes one doubt one’s reality. My spare set is an older prescription; I fear a week of being out of it, at least a week.

News: More atrocities unearthed at the Al Shifa hospital; Israel attacks Iran embassy annex in Damascus.

An owl lands on the balcony. I want to open the sliding glass door but I’m afraid of scaring it away. Its yellow eyes glint in the dark. It hops down from the banister and comes up to the glass, and I see it’s not an owl but a cat, with a black head and an orange body. It hisses and spits and slaps at the door.

I’m in a weird spot this evening in the city, looking for a place to dispose of the used condom wadded up in my fist—between the seats in this movie theater, or a trash can on the street?—I don’t want to be noticed.

What if literary beauty is the opposite of how it works in the other ‘fine arts,’ and to succeed it must be functional, effectless; it’s too easy to make things pretty; Nabokov spoke of mechanical patter…

The edge of a cloud is always mist, whether the wispy cirrus or those voluptuous nimbus thunderheads you see in Mongolia or the tropics; the latter have more defined edges from the higher cubic water density, apparently.

Yoshihiro Nishimura, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, James Benning.

That’s the fly in the radio telescope.