Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.

Vladimir Nabokov

Creature Fear

Greg rolled up to the front door of baggage claim with a cardboard sign with FARREN STANLEY printed in block letters. Inside the car: a helium balloon in red white and blue that shouted WELCOME HOME!

I am almost finished with The Intuitionist, I cannot stop listening to Bon Iver and the word of the day is Intarsia.

From The Intuitionist

From Theoretical Elevators: Volume Two, by James Fulton:

To believe in silence. As we did when we lived in bubbles. Sentient insofar as we knew it was warm: Silence provided that warmth. The womb. Ants have it easy for speaking in chemicals. Food. Flight. Follow. Nouns and verbs only, and never in concert. There are no mistakes for there is no sentence save the one nature imposes (mortality). You are standing on a train platform. A fear of missing the train, a slavery to time, has provided ten minutes before the train leaves. There is so much you have never said to your companion and so little time to articulate it. The years have accreted around the simple words and there would have been ample time to speak them had not the years intervened and secreted them. The conductor paces up and down the platform and wonder why you do not speak. You are a blight on his platform and timetable. Speak, find the words, the train is warming toward departure. Nothing is allowed to pass between you and your companion. It is late, a seat awaits. That the words are simple and true is only half the battle. The train is leaving. The train is always leaving and you have not found your words. Remember the train, and that thing between you and your words. An elevator is a train. The perfect train terminates at Heaven. The perfect elevator waits while its human freight tries to grab through the muck and find the words. In the black box, this messy business of human communication is reduced to excreted chemicals, understood by the soul’s receptors and translated into true speech.

Colson Whitehead

Sundial shadow of a stallion stretches out long across the lawn.

Heat from Every Corner, Diane Cluck

For breakfast, blinis with cured salmon slivered paper thin with Forest’s sushi knife, creme fraiche and scallions. We discussed the bergamot macaroons we’ll be test-running this evening, for the New Year’s party. Ann is bringing Apples to Apples. I am flying home tomorrow. I want to remember everything, all of this.

Koolhaas

Flume, Bon Iver

If I sit still

Last night Anna and I had a long talk while she knitted a Koolhaas hat for me and the tears ran out the far corners of my eyes and down my cheeks. “I’m so sorry I have been kind of out of it and crappy this past week,” I apologized, near the end.
“Don’t be silly! We wanted you to come here to have the silence and space to do whatever kind of rest or work you needed to do.”
“I know, but I feel like I’ve just been shuffling around and doing your dishes all week.”
“Well, good! No one here likes to do dishes. Seriously, you don’t have to entertain us. You are fine. We’re just happy you’re here.” And the tears started anew.

The things 5 days with a huge bathtub will do for a person’s soul.

Slash and burn.

Fishing with John

is pretty hilarious, I’m not gonna lie.

I bought a crapload of new poetry with Dana yesterday: a collected Wallace Stevens, Bright Existence by Brenda Hillman, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery, The Pajamist by Matthew Zapruder, James Galvin’s Lethal Frequencies and the book for which Jorie Graham won the Pulitzer, Dream of a Unified Field.

Then this morning I ordered a Collected Simone Weil and another collection of Fanny Howe essays. But I’ve just found out about Roberto Bolano’s 2666? And the internets are RAVING about it. So I might have to overcome my sticker shock, spring for a copy and make that 900-page trip.

Happy Holidays, y’all.