isnât over.
Certainly not a queer bar last night: my quick survey of the patrons yielded not so much as a maybe-if-he-had-a-few-more-drinks-heâd-let-me-suck-him-and-not-punch-me-after. But the beer was cold and the air conditioning worked. Didnât altogether succeed in making the room bearable but worked hard.
They had a baseball game on. I hate baseball--not anything about the game itself, but all those boyhood summers when my brother, Bernie, had the game on the radio, the awful incessant droning when I was trying to read. Last night, though, last night there was something comforting,companionable about sitting with a bunch of gray, tipsy strangers, watching the perennial rhythmic monotony. (And still the droning, on TV where we can see everything for ourselves, they still have to tell us what weâre looking at.)
So I was feeling pretty good this morning, ready to return to my ⦠lifeâs work, I was about to write, which is not just pretentious but also scary, as if I were chiseling my own tombstone. Anyway, I didnât get very far, and instead I find myself writing this. Because otherwise the page that glared up at me from the platen for three hours would still be blank. Now instead I have two whole pages and could easily fill dozens more. No wonder people keep journals! Itâs so effortless, you just put down what happened and youâve done something that almost looks like writing.
This is a vice. At least, when I sit in front of the typewriter for hours with my fingers poised over the keys, awaiting dictation from my comatose muse, I know exactly what Iâm not doing. Now that my fingers are flying I know what Iâm doing, Iâm masturbating. And, just as when I was a kid and told myself so many times, Iâm going to stop, I must stop: I know Iâm not going to stop for a while.
This would have been, I guess, the summer before he started JD . Almost ten years since his last novel, Straphangers . Nearly that long since heâd signed the contract for Untitled Novel . The first time he got an advance that might have bought, say, an Oldsmobile. So for a while Jonathan could still believe he was on an upward trajectory. Through the rest of the Eisenhower years, he was working frenziedly on THE BIG ONE. During the Kennedy years, he was working sporadically on something a little less ambitious.
Then he was just ⦠in his office. With the door closed, so I never knew if he was reading magazines or doing crosswords or just waiting for inspiration. At the time I thought Jonathan was pathetic, but maybe there was a sad heroism about it. He was like one of those Japanese soldiers you used to read about, found on some forgotten atoll decades after World War II ended, still faithfully guarding their outpostâwith no idea that the war had been lost.
June 3O, 1964
Last night my disciples and I were supposed to go on to Gertrude Stein, but I could see how it would be, how theyâd stare at her somber uncompromising wordplay and just titter. As if she were trying to put something over on them--her book like one of those action paintings that turns out to have been done by a chimp or a pig. I think we will never get to Gertrude Stein. And why should we, who reads Gertrude Stein anymore? Dead--how long? Not twenty years, but dead utterly. The writerâs nightmare.
So instead I decided to stick with Kafka. I handed out his little meditation on Abraham and Isaac. Just three pages, thank God, because Rosalie is off and I had to go type up the master myself and run it through the cantankerous ditto machine.
Taking no chances, I read it aloud while they followed along. How Abraham couldnât believe he was the one God called upon. How he wanted to perform the sacrifice correctly but just couldnât believe he was the man God meant for the job, or that God could be satisfied with the slaughter of a grimy, scrawny kid like Isaac. I read that part again, because it is
Certainly not a queer bar last night: my quick survey of the patrons yielded not so much as a maybe-if-he-had-a-few-more-drinks-heâd-let-me-suck-him-and-not-punch-me-after. But the beer was cold and the air conditioning worked. Didnât altogether succeed in making the room bearable but worked hard.
They had a baseball game on. I hate baseball--not anything about the game itself, but all those boyhood summers when my brother, Bernie, had the game on the radio, the awful incessant droning when I was trying to read. Last night, though, last night there was something comforting,companionable about sitting with a bunch of gray, tipsy strangers, watching the perennial rhythmic monotony. (And still the droning, on TV where we can see everything for ourselves, they still have to tell us what weâre looking at.)
So I was feeling pretty good this morning, ready to return to my ⦠lifeâs work, I was about to write, which is not just pretentious but also scary, as if I were chiseling my own tombstone. Anyway, I didnât get very far, and instead I find myself writing this. Because otherwise the page that glared up at me from the platen for three hours would still be blank. Now instead I have two whole pages and could easily fill dozens more. No wonder people keep journals! Itâs so effortless, you just put down what happened and youâve done something that almost looks like writing.
This is a vice. At least, when I sit in front of the typewriter for hours with my fingers poised over the keys, awaiting dictation from my comatose muse, I know exactly what Iâm not doing. Now that my fingers are flying I know what Iâm doing, Iâm masturbating. And, just as when I was a kid and told myself so many times, Iâm going to stop, I must stop: I know Iâm not going to stop for a while.
This would have been, I guess, the summer before he started JD . Almost ten years since his last novel, Straphangers . Nearly that long since heâd signed the contract for Untitled Novel . The first time he got an advance that might have bought, say, an Oldsmobile. So for a while Jonathan could still believe he was on an upward trajectory. Through the rest of the Eisenhower years, he was working frenziedly on THE BIG ONE. During the Kennedy years, he was working sporadically on something a little less ambitious.
Then he was just ⦠in his office. With the door closed, so I never knew if he was reading magazines or doing crosswords or just waiting for inspiration. At the time I thought Jonathan was pathetic, but maybe there was a sad heroism about it. He was like one of those Japanese soldiers you used to read about, found on some forgotten atoll decades after World War II ended, still faithfully guarding their outpostâwith no idea that the war had been lost.
June 3O, 1964
Last night my disciples and I were supposed to go on to Gertrude Stein, but I could see how it would be, how theyâd stare at her somber uncompromising wordplay and just titter. As if she were trying to put something over on them--her book like one of those action paintings that turns out to have been done by a chimp or a pig. I think we will never get to Gertrude Stein. And why should we, who reads Gertrude Stein anymore? Dead--how long? Not twenty years, but dead utterly. The writerâs nightmare.
So instead I decided to stick with Kafka. I handed out his little meditation on Abraham and Isaac. Just three pages, thank God, because Rosalie is off and I had to go type up the master myself and run it through the cantankerous ditto machine.
Taking no chances, I read it aloud while they followed along. How Abraham couldnât believe he was the one God called upon. How he wanted to perform the sacrifice correctly but just couldnât believe he was the man God meant for the job, or that God could be satisfied with the slaughter of a grimy, scrawny kid like Isaac. I read that part again, because it is
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