Black Friday

A writer, Annie Choi, wrote a hilarious piece called, “Dear Architects, I Am Sick of Your Shit,” in which she calls out some of the more annoying attributes of architects, i.e., how they always talk about how little sleep they’ve gotten, in furious service of their projects.

Writers, too, of course, have their annoying attributes, primary of which is complaining about how little writing is getting done due to procrastination, lack of fortitude, inspiration, and so forth. The amount of energy spent complaining about how no writing is getting written could fill volumes of dreck that no one could possibly want to read.

Kafka to Max Brod:

“Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life? By this I don’t mean, of course, that my life is better when I don’t write. Rather, it is much worse then and wholly unbearable and has to end in madness. But that, granted, only follows from the postulate that I am a writer, which actually is true, even when I am not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness. But what about being a writer itself? Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child’s lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil.”

A temporary worker at a Wal-Mart in Long Island was trampled to death around 5 a.m. this morning when the doors opened and two thousand shoppers stormed in.

Had lunch with S. in the Upper West Side. We talk about my newish cat. I tease her about the fact that she has “Cats for Dummies: The Purr-Fect Campanion for Cat Lovers” on her bookshelf. She says she is afraid if she got a cat, she would forget about finding a boyfriend.

On the way home, I stop by the outdoor holiday market at Union Square to replace the scarf I got for my ma last Christmas because she had lost it recently and requested a replacement. When I called her earlier that day, she had just discovered a new TV set in her bedroom, a gift from my sister and brother-in-law.

Then I walk across the street to the Strand to look at books. There is a display of David Markson books, which I have off and on thought about getting because I am interested in all writing that is essentially composed of singular lines, strung together and packaged as “novels.” That kind of shit gives me hope. But after reading about a two dozen lines, I feel that I get what he is doing and don’t need to buy it, at least not for $13.

Then I go upstairs and spend a lot of time looking a photography book called “The Places We Live” by Jonas Bendiksen, a Magnum photographer who documented the households of several families who live in slums in Mumbai, Caracas, Nairobi, and Jakarta. I maintain my belief that photojournalism is the sexiest job on the planet, not the least of which because it doesn’t require words.

I have always been uncommonly voyeuristic about people’s domestic spaces. I remember once in junior high, when I had even less social skills than I do now, I mortified a friend when I went to her house for the first time and began opening her kitchen cabinets out of curiosity. Christ, what a savage I was.

One of the interesting things about the households Bendiksen visits is the presence of television sets even in the most rudimentary conditions – presumably even in places where electricity is off the grid.

I didn’t buy that book but I did buy for $5 a book I have never seen of Nabokov’s called “Strong Opinions,” (McGraw-Hill, 1973) a collection of some of his interviews and critical writings.

In the foreword, Nabokov writes: “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.”

This is by way of explaining why he only conducts interviews through writing, never verbally.

The book opens with an interview he does at the St. Regis Hotel in New York with four journalists upon the premiere of the film Lolita.

The first question he is asked is:

Interviewers do not find you a particularly stimulating person. Why is that so?

Later that evening, procrastinating some more, I caught this story on cnn.com:

Deputies: Woman, 84, Covered Self With 50 Cats To Keep Warm

"About 50 cats, 20 ducks and 15 turkeys were taken from a New Smyrna Beach home, and a woman was arrested after her 84-year-old mother told authorities that she kept warm by covering herself with the animals, according to Volusia County sheriff's deputies.

"Mary Bosket, 54, was arrested on a charge of neglect to the elderly after her mother was found on Thanksgiving Day at the Glencoe Road home, which was in deplorable conditions and did not have a working heater, deputies said."

The news: atrocities through peepholes.

There was also a story, dateline Nairobi, reporting that three British guards were pulled out of the ocean after failing to prevent the latest in a string of Somali pirate attacks, this one involving a chemical tanker.

According to CNN, pirates have attacked almost 100 vessels off the coast of Somalia coast this year:

“A pirate leader claimed attacks on shipping would continue as long as life in Somalia remained desperate.

"’The pirates are living between life and death," said the pirate leader, identified by only one name, Boyah. "Who can stop them? Americans and British all put together cannot do anything.’"

I try hypnosis to get some writing done. A monkey leads me by the hand into a subterranean restaurant past the fish tanks and says, All the ideas are here.

I look around and see everything is written on strips of pink butcher paper in Chinese, which I can’t read.