Activity

I was marooned for the first four weeks of term in the morgue shift at Chez Michel. 10:30–17:30 Monday–Thursday. A shift which coincided with an unsurprising number of lectures. Michel had not had the vision to see that a waiter whose appearance called to mind Kafka, Liszt, Rimbaud and Egon Schiele…

A mailbox sprang open. It had 100 messages, only 20 for penis enhancement.

It’s the second week in December. Snow falls each night and is cleared each morning from the streets. The Germans are unashamed of efficiency in the clearance of snow, though the Deutsche Post disowns the Führer and all his works by sending every third letter astray. [...]

He doesn’t understand. He reads Miller, Mailer, Joyce, Bukowski, Fante, Bataille, he reads Celine’s Voyage to the End of the Night, he reads Genet, he reads Burroughs, he reads Krapp’s Last Tape, why can’t he find a publisher who publishes the kind of book he reads? Every single book he reads is a …

Meanwhile he talks. He says: I should stop drinking, it would be good to do it, you know in Russia they think beer is a soft drink, there’s the attitude that if you’re not doing it till you black out it doesn’t really count. He says: I don’t need it, it’s just another way of doing things to excess.…