Song of Lunch

Finished "Song of Lunch", written by Christopher Reid, a poem narrative of a little over sixty narrow pages, about a fifty-year-old man's failed love. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it is a rereadable. However, I am impressed anew over how much readerly impact one can get with an occasional rhyme and curt, crisp lines that are intermittently quasi-clever. It tempts me.

The issue for me is time. I am not going to produce anything that good, and so, is it really worth taking time away from my journals and my reading life? Which would give me more aesthetic pleasure per minute? It is a hard enough struggle for me to sit down and write a halfway decent diary entry.

I don't know. I still feel this temptation ... to be a little more artful, I guess, or to try to. Right now, I am casually fishing for a subject, and if I can settle on one, maybe I will give a morning to it and see what happens, see if it clicks for me, or see if I should just forget about it and get over these pangs of aspiration. Of course, it is not as though we have not been here before. It never clicks. I have no musicality in me, there's no true art in my soul. For me, writing has always been more about therapy than art, but I still get tempted to try to shift that balance, to see if something more has developed in me, to see if miracles can really happen. While I am at it, maybe I can make myself thirty again, and be handsome this time, smarter would be good, taller would be great.

Early Night

Pop claimed the big room early last night, at seven, instead of ten or eleven. A country music awards show was on. I took the opportunity to go to bed early, when I became dreadfully tired, dazed, and sleepy at 9:30. The problem, however, with going to sleep at ten is that I am up by three and am unable to fall back asleep. It was good for the cats. They do not have to starve as much, as I give them continual access to their food. As for myself, I read a bit, had an early breakfast, and finished watching a movie. I went back to bed at about six. I dozed a little, but I still feel wrecked. I am tired, but not enough to really sleep. It's that zombie-zone I always dread: half-living, half-dead, not fully human.

American Psycho

And this will close out our coverage of “American Psycho”. I suspect that I will be leaving the novel behind me for good. It is actually one of the big books in my reading life, but I picked it up in my twenties and it really is a young man’s book, someone who still howls at the moon, feeling hungry and wild and mean, and is red in tooth and claw. That kind of passion is much faded in me now.

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… where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliche, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

-- “American Psycho” by Bret Easton Ellis

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