[...] A friend of mine, my cousin, stopped drinking alcohol, but he didn’t tell me that. We went out to a bar in Soho and he ordered a bottle of vodka. I didn’t know he was in AA at that time. He made me drink a bottle of vodka in front of him so that he could get a kind of thrill from it.

[...] I asked him why he was doing it and he said, I want to tell my sponsor at AA that I watched my cousin drink a bottle of vodka and I didn’t do it. I said, So what do you do now that you don’t drink or smoke? How do you get your kicks? To which he replied, I have my white noise. For three hours before I go to bed, I watch the most violent pornography I can find. I don’t masturbate. I don’t even feel anything. I just watch it, and I don’t think about anything. Hearing that, I thought: My God, man. Have a vodka. Which is all to say, there’s something numbing about it. It numbs relations. That’s what got me about those young women or old women that I slept with in America. I know I sound ridiculous when I say this, but I’ll say it anyway: I felt like I was not a person – I was a function. They weren’t relating to me as a person. They had their set of tricks that they want performed and then that’s it, and it just felt totally anonymous. I’ve never seen non-anonymous pornography. That’s my basic objection. Maybe there is some amazing feminist pornography somewhere.

The issue has to be: what lies beyond the current relationship our society has with it, and how does one get there? Can pornography be singular – can it escape cliché and script? One of the terrible things about pornography is that it’s so anonymous. It’s my cousin watching three hours of white noise – as he calls it – of people being tortured. What is that? But take it seriously, he literally doesn’t remember shit: pornography becomes not so much an experience of life as an a-experience, a chasm, a place in which life stops happening… I’m used to telling stories and they’re about human beings who have experiences, and they change, and the same is true of you and what you write. Yet so much of porn for me feels like it’s about – it’s not necessarily what it needs to focus on – nullity and boredom and forgetfulness and tiredness. How do you tell a story about that? How does one get at that? It’s not even the worst part of human beings. It is evil, but it’s not the evil of death or murder or something Dostoyevsky would write about. It’s the forgetfulness of someone who can’t even get a hard-on masturbating. How do you write about their boredom looking at the scene they used to masturbate to three weeks ago, their compulsive desire for new content, and their nagging realization that they have to go to the office tomorrow? That’s a strange scene to write.