Terry Eagleton

“I have to write. In fact, you know, it sometimes doesn’t matter what I write. I feel supremely confident and in control when I am writing, as I don’t in ordinary life.”

-- Terry Eagleton

William Styron

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INTERVIEWER

What value has the creative writing course for young writers?

STYRON

It gives them a start, I suppose. But it can be an awful waste of time. Look at those people who go back year after year to summer writers’ conferences, you get so you can pick them out a mile away. A writing course can only give you a start, and help a little. It can’t teach writing. The professor should weed out the good from the bad, cull them like a farmer, and not encourage the ones who haven’t got something. At one school I know in New York, which has a lot of writing courses, there are a couple of teachers who moon in the most disgusting way over the poorest, most talentless writers, giving false hope where there shouldn’t be any hope at all. Regularly they put out dreary little anthologies, the quality of which would chill your blood. It’s a ruinous business, a waste of paper and time, and such teachers should be abolished.

-- William Styron at The Paris Review

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Debbie

Wow, as if these days of multiple-hour wank sessions over Internet porn were not enough, I now have to dig through my closet to fish out my old videotape of "Debbie Does Dallas". What a pity I could not have a loving girlfriend in which to better spend all these discharges of my passion and lust. It would be like a happy honeymoon, lovers drunk and dazed in carnal concupiscence, as happy and complete as people can be. Instead, it is just me going through all these rolls of toilet paper, and so alone, so damn lonely, a veritable leper in the lust-happy lands of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sugar

I said that I was seriously cutting down on my stalking rounds to Sugar's twitter. I did not say anything about her newspaper column. I got a nice excerpt from this week's column that reflects back on her punk-girl phase, those Queen Sugar days, the girl that fired up my imagination and helped to feed my hopes anew and give my life a second-wind, even if it could not change my course from this dead-end road to nowhere. She is writing about how she lived then in what they call the Village, and how she is now moving back to what is apparently a more gentrified Village.

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I don't know. I don't know what I think. When I moved to the Village, it felt as if most people in it looked like me. Twentysomething, punked up, drunked up, howling midnight glories behind the Osborne Village Inn. The neighbourhood seemed a stopover to so many of us then, a Toronto with training wheels. In the Village you could dress up, mess up and still manage to scrounge up your $450 rent.

Then the rents went up. Apartments became condos. Houses became empty lots, and then empty lots also became condos.

Now, on this day that I make my way back to my most beloved Village, it feels again that so many of the people there look a lot like me: thirtysomething mortgagees. We sip wine at Cornerstone. We do yoga classes. We only dimly remember holding our six-inch platform heels and walking home, barefoot, from an all-night rager.

-- Melissa Martin at The Winnipeg Free Press

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It is interesting to see that she seems to be turning her column into a sort of personal blogging space. She even names Greg in full in it discussing her relationship. I suppose she writes well enough that the paper is willing to give her some room. I imagine it must be the best of all possible worlds for her, that she can now publish in a major newspaper what she would otherwise be limited to posting in an obscure blog - the pinnacle of success. The punk-rock girl has come a long way from the days when she would create blogs and I would be her only reader and fan.

Chores

I finally got around to shaving off that wild forest off my face that was posing as a beard and mustache. I let it go for a long time. It was also time to change the bag on the vacuum cleaner. I got around to these chores thanks to Pop going away for another weekend at Kay's. I do not know why I continue to be so shy about taking care of such things while Pop is here. It is as though I am as embarrassed about handling such chores as I am about masturbation, like it is shameful to clean my toilet, so that it all must be done in private, with only the pets as potential witnesses, and I sorely dread being caught red-handed, and red-faced. I need to get over this timidity, because this kind of privacy is a rare luxury and cannot be counted upon.