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I'm always overawed by Oxford, W. knows that. Overawed, and therefore more contemptuous. I hate it, W. says, because I love it. It disappoints me, W. says, because I have disappointed it: didn't I apply here to study as a student? Didn't I visit the city as an interviewee?

W.'s dad, who was very wise, banned him from applying altogether. – You don't belong there!', he told him, and he was right. W. has always been free of any Oxford influence, he says. He's free of the attraction to Oxford, but also the repulsion from Oxford: he doesn't hate it as I do.

W. likes being with me in Oxford, he says. It seems to drive me to extremes of hatred and venom. I become Cynic-like, W. says. I all but assault passersby. Parrhesia, that's what I call it. Drunken abuse, that's what he'd call it, W. says. Shouldn't I just set up my tub in the middle of the traffic?

W. loves nothing better than taking the path through Christchurch meadows, following the Cherwell to the Isis (that's what they call the Thames here, he says, pretentious fuckers). He loves watching the froth form on my lips as we turn back to look at the spires of Oxford in the distance. Is it a sign of prophetic frenzy or rabies?

He wants to go back to his room for a nap, W. says. This is always his intention. An afternoon nap! A power-nap, as he calls it. He learned about it from a learned lecture at the university. Sleep for 20 minutes, and you fool the mind into thinking you've been asleep for much longer. 20 minutes! That's all he needs to regain his composure, W. says.

But I never let him nap, W. says. In fact I scorn his desire to nap and even the very notion of a nap. I keep him up all night with my inanities, W. says, and then I keep him awake all day with more inanities.

Of course, he's being unfair, W. agrees, as he is the night-owl in our friendship: he is the one who insists on staying up later than anyone, of following the night through all the way until dawn. How many nights have ended for us just as dawn was brightening the sky, and the first birds were starting to sing? How many nights with Satantango on the TV and The Star of Redemption open on the desk?

W. is a man who wants to see the night through he admits. But the afternoon … that's my time, W. concedes. That's when I come into my own. When everyone around me's tired and can put up no defence. When everyone's too tired to make me shut up, that's Lars-time, W. says. The afternoon: it's when I'm at my weakest and he's at his strongest, W. says. That's when I can really get going. It's when I wear everyone out.

I've always feared the afternoon, of course, that's what I've told him, W. says. He's always been struck by that: for him, the afternoon is a time of repose, of the gathering of strength, but for me, it's a time to fear.

It must be my years of unemployment, W. says. Didn't I say my afternoon sagged like a drooping washing-line? Didn't I complain of the eternullity of the afternoon, of its infinite wearing away? It was post-Neighbours time, the afternoon, that's what I told him. Post This Morning, post Vanessa Feltz, and deep into the time of Amercan cop-show repeats.

Colombo-time, W. says, I could never bear that, could I? Instead I go out for walk, that's what I told him. Instead, it was time for a cycle. Anything to be active! Anyting to have something to do! I'd head up to Tescos for a £1 box of sushi, wasn't that it? I'd head into the library for another video, all the time full of fear, all the time fearing – what? How did I put it?

It's no wonder I'm no night-owl, W. says. No wonder that I'm always worn out by dinnertime. Don't I have to revive myself, whenever I visit, with a fourpack of Stella and some pork scratchings? Isn't that always my pre-dinner snack?

W., meanwhile, would have been refreshed from his nap, if I'd allowed him to sleep. He would have come downstairs, a man refreshed, reborn, having had a power-nap, he says. But instead, I always insist on conversation, W. says. I always insist on wearing him out, he lying on the sofa, I sitting up at the table. I always insist we make some plan or another, W. says.

It's always planning-time, world-conquest-time, W. calls it. I have to pretend to some kind of hold on the future, W. has noticed. It's like a climber throwing up a grappling hook, or Spiderman swinging by his squirted webs. I'm never happy in the moment, W. says. I'm never happy in the belly of the afternoon.

Now and again, W. says, he goes to the tulip garden at Mount Edgcumbe to read Kafka. Off he sets in the morning, with his Kafka and a notebook in his man bag, heading up to the Naval Docklands, and then catching the ferry across the Tamar – a friendly river, says W., he always thinks of it as that.

On the other side, it is only a short walk to the tulip gardens, which he approaches through the orangery, he says, and then the English garden and the French garden. But it is the tulip garden which is his destination, W. says, whether it's spring or summer, or for that matter, autumn or winter; whether or not there is anything in flower.

The tulip garden: W. gets out his Kafka, whatever it is he is reading, and then his notebook and sets to it. 

But what would I understand of any this?, W. wonders. What conception could I have of the ceremony of reading, of the rituals that must surround it?

He knows how I read, of course, W. says. There are books piled all over my office. Books leaning against other books. But it means nothing! You can have all the books in the world, but if you know nothing about reading, then …, W. says.

He's seen me at it, my reading, W. says. I open one page – another – and then what? I make a beginning, I open a book, and not always at the start, and what happens? I invariably open another, W. says. Another and then another.

Anything so as not to be alone with a book, W. says. Alone and undistracted, he says. Alone with a span of time opening ahead of me. Haven't I always feared empty time, W. muses, the time in which something might happen? And don't I, for that reason, fear – really fear – what might happen to me when I read?

W. thinks my working class credentials are far better than his. When he thinks of me leaving school and working in the warehouse, he is invariably moved and feels the great urge to protect and encourage me. How long were you there?, he asks me, and when I tell him, he gasps. That long! And what did you do there?, he asks, and when I tell him he's amazed.

Best of all, he says, are my accounts of reading in the warehouse: of the flight of stairs that led up to the roof and no one ever used, and where I went as I began to read my way through the library, W. says. What was the book I started with?, he asks. Oh yes: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, he could never forget that. I began with The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, W. says, and read my way up to Kafka: how was that possible?

W. began with Kafka, of course, he says. He remembers it very clearly, his first encounter with the Schocken editions of Kafka in his school library ('we had a school library', he says, 'unlike you'). They had yellow dustcovers, W. says. Why was he attracted by that colour, he'll never know. But there it was: The Castle. The gates of literature opened to enclose him.

The Castle, W. says. He didn't have to mouth those letters to himself to understand them, W. says. He could actually read, unlike me. He didn't have to wrinkle his brow and mouth the letters out loud.

Ah, his intellectual awakening! Sometimes, W. thinks The Castle took him on an entirely wrong turn. The fatal lure of literature: wasn't that where it began to go wrong?

Of course, he immediately wanted to become a writer, which was a disaster. But then he could form letters, W. says, unlike me. He could actually write a coherent sentence, a task of which I am still incapable, W. says. It was worse, much worse in my case, W. says. It led to all my hopes and dreams, and the perpetual dashing of my hopes and dreams.

But still, says W., he remains infinitely moved by the mental image of my sitting on the stairs that led up to the roof, The Mammoth Book of Fantasy already long behind me. He remains immeasurably moved by the image of the ape-child who sat on the stairs, mouthing the letters T-H-E C-A-S-T-L-E to himself.

'You're never happier than when you make plans', says W. 'Why is that?' I like to throw plans out ahead of me, W. notes. I always have. It must be the illusion of control, a game of fort-da like that of Freud's grandchild. But then, too, there's something wild about my plans, something hopelessly unrealistic, W. says, which entail the very opposite of control.

There are never well thought-out tactics, never a careful strategy; I plan like a fugitive, like a maniac on the loose, or a prisoner who's been locked up for 20 years. What can I know of what I am planning for? Won't the future, and the terrible conditions of the future, destroy any plan I could possibly have?

But there is a charm to my planning, despite everything, W. says. There's a charm to the special joy I take in making plans, as if each plan is a kind of kite, that's how W. pictures it, trailing far, far into the future. As if each were dancing in a remote but lovely sky. 

My plan to learn music theory, for example. To read Sanskrit. To master the fundamentals of economics. How fanciful! How impossible, each one of them, as they danced on the end of the string! Better still, my plans for the pair of us, for W. and I. For great collaborative projects. For whole books and series of books written together! For flurries of articles!

What faith I show! In him! In us! In the many things we can supposedly accomplish together! Of course, it's all for nothing, W. says. He knows it and I should know it. Indeed, I do know it. Only something in me knows otherwise. Something that remains in me of an unthwarted faith, and this is the key to my charm.

Of course, you can't be ambitious once you know you've failed, says W. And if there's one thing we know, it's that we've failed. W. realised long ago that he wasn't a genius, he says. – 'Do you think you're a genius?', W. asks me. And then, 'I think you still have nostalgia for the time when you thought you might be a genius'.

Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking, I read out loud from my book. – 'Most thought provoking is that you think you're thinking', says W. 'Because you do, don't you?'

It's all gone wrong!, I tell W. It's falling apart! W. feels he has to pull me back from the brink. It's not that bad, he says. I tell him we should stab ourselves in the throat – now, immediately! I over-react to everything, says W. It's my dramatic nature. I'm an hysteric.

W., by contrast, takes the long view. He's more grandly apocalyptic than I am. 'You have to see it all in terms of the apocalypse', he says. I do have my apocalyptic moments, W. concedes, but I do not have the sobriety and broadness of view required by apocalypticism. 'You see it's not just you or I', he says, it's everyone'. I'm calmed by his words. The disaster is everywhere.

The mystery is why I want to parade my buffoonery rather than apologising for it. Or rather, why, in the guise of such apologies and self-castigation, there is simply a desire to parade my buffoonery, to perform it, to insist upon, and to thrust it into everyone's face.

I would have been happiest in the period of show trials and autoconfessions, W. says. I would have liked nothing better than to have confessed for imaginary crimes, the greater, the better, signing every confession the police brought to me and admitting my role in the greatest of conspiracies. And I would have liked my entire oeuvre to be swallowed up by the great confessional autocritique that would sprawl from volume to volume.

I did it, I would say. I was the worst of all. It was me, it was all my fault: what have I ever wanted to say but that?

W., by contrast, dreams of a mystical kind of buffoonery that is no longer dependent on masochism and exhibitionism. Before God, we are always in the wrong – Kierkegaard, in the guise of a Jutland Pastor wrote an edifying sermon on that theme. But before what is W. always in the wrong? Before what cosmic tribunal?

There are some thoughts that will be forever beyond us, says W. The thought of our own stupidity for example – even that's beyond us. We'll never understand, really understand, the depths of our stupidity, W. says. Since we've failed, and could do nothing but fail, we can never really understand the extent of our failure, the extent of stupidity.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

One day, says W., shit opened its eyes. One day, to the surprise of everyone, shit got up and walked around. – 'You were born'. It was a miracle, W. says. Shit found a voice; shit spoke; shit wrote – how extraordinary! But it was still shit, says W. – 'You're still shit'. I haven't understood that, have I?

Of course to me, everything's shit, it's all the same. – 'You're incapable of telling the difference'. I can't tell the difference between shit and non-shit, but there is a difference. – 'We were all so amazed that shit could speak, that we didn't think to tell you', W. says. Why should they tell shit boy? They laughed at him instead, who thought the world was made of shit. It's all shit, that's what was behind everything I said. We're all shit, all of us, that's what was behind everything I wrote.

'We thought it was hilarious', says W. 'But the joke was on us'. Because even he's losing it, the ability to tell shit apart from non-shit. It's hard to discern even for him, says W., the difference between shit and everything else. And meanwhile, there I am, happy as anything, a living piece of shit …

W. has always liked chubby men, he says. We remember the fat singers we admire, drinking wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. He's angry because he's fat, I said of the singer of Modest Mouse. – 'No, he was angry and then he got fat', says W. Do you think he minds being fat?, I ask him. – 'He has other issues'.

Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. Yes, but he was ill. – 'Blanchot was thin', says W. But he was ill as well. - 'I bet Brod was fat'. Definitely, I agree. He drank too much, that's why he got fat. – 'Why do you think he drank?', W. says. Because he knew he was stupid.

A year after I submitted the final copy of my manuscript, W. is still polishing his. – 'It's like Gnosticism', he says, 'if your book is full of typos, which it will be, mine has to be pristine'. Pathos is not enough, he says. He wants precision, too; jewelled writing.

It's time to make distinctions, he says, serious ones, W. says with great severity. Lines have to be drawn, demarcations made! This is no time for sloppiness of thought. W. is becoming a jeweller of philosophy, he says, whereas I will only ever be one of those elephants who splashes with a paintbrush.

'What are you interested in?', W. asks me. 'What, really? Because it's not philosophy, is it? It's not thought'. Still, I like reading about philosophy and reading about thought, that much is clear. It exercises some kind of fascination over me, W. says. There's something in me which responds. Something that is left of the good and the true, he says.

In the end, I've never got over the fact that there are books – that books of philosophy exist. It's always as though I've just begun reading, W. says, as though I've just been given a ticket to the library.

Coming in Autumn 2010 from Melville House Books: Spurious, based on some of the older posts at this blog.

I will be away until early January.

This was what I couldn't manage to grasp: the yawning gap, the absolute contradiction between the ease with which one can kill and the huge difficulty there must be in dying.

The quotation central to Stephen Mitchelmore's reading of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. A great post. But I like better the one which begins like this:

Eighteen months ago, in the monochrome sunlight of a January afternoon, someone close to me was involved in a road traffic accident.

This Space is the blog to which I've returned most expectantly this year.

I would wish it on no one to be me.
Only I am capable of bearing myself.
To know so much, to have seen so much, and
To say nothing, just about nothing.

Robert Walser

The first thing that struck me about Benjamin – indeed it was characteristic of him all of his life – was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment. If the two of us were alone, he would look me full in the face as he spoke. At other times, when he fixed his eyes on the most remote corner of the ceiling (which he often did, particularly when addressing a larger audience), he assumed a virtually magical appearance. This rigid stare contrasted sharply with his usual lively gestures.

When I reflect on what it was he had in common after these first encounters, I can cite a few things that are not to be overlooked easily. I can describe them only in general terms as a resoluteness in pursuing our intellectual goals, rejection of our environment – which was basically German-Jewish assimilated middle class – and a positive attitude toward metaphyiscs. We were proponents of radical demands. Actually, at the universities the two of us did not have any teachers in the real sense of the word, so we educated ourselves, each in a very different way.

Associating with Benjamin was fraught with considerable difficulties, though on the surface these seemed insignificant in view of his consummate courtesy and willingness to listen. He was always surrounded by a wall of reserve, which could be recognised intuitively and was evident to another person even without Benjamin's not infrequent efforts to make that area noticeable.

from Scholem's The Story of a Friendship, my favourite non-fictional work I read this year.

My passivity. Every story I recount is in the passive, W. says. – 'You're never the agent in your anecdotes. You're always acted upon, never acting.'

Of course, I always tell him it's all about the middle voice. It's in the middle voice, I tell him of my anecdotes, or rather, my approximation of the middle voice, which, after all, is lost in modern European languages. I never say, It happened to me. There was a Schiessen, I tell him. There was a soiling. There was a faecal emergency, I tell him.

I like to make great claims for the middle voice, although I have no real idea what it is, W. say. I make it into a mystical thing. It's a matter of things befalling me, of my undergoing or downgoing, W. says. It's never my fault! It's part of the movement of things! It's part of fate, of being happening to itself!

I'm Der Untergeher, as in Bernhard's novel, I always tell him. – 'You're Der Idiot', W. always tells me.

I'm always overawed by Oxford, W. knows that. Overawed, and therefore more contemptuous. I hate it, W. says, because I love it. It disappoints me, W. says, because I have disappointed it: didn't I apply here to study as a student? Didn't I visit the city as an interviewee?

W.'s dad, who was very wise, banned him from applying altogether. – You don't belong there!', he told him, and he was right. W. has always been free of any Oxford influence, he says. He's free of the attraction to Oxford, but also the repulsion from Oxford: he doesn't hate it as I do.

W. likes being with me in Oxford, he says. It seems to drive me to extremes of hatred and venom. I become Cynic-like, W. says. I all but assault passersby. Parrhesia, that's what I call it. Drunken abuse, that's what he'd call it, W. says. Shouldn't I just set up my tub in the middle of the traffic?

W. loves nothing better than taking the path through Christchurch meadows, following the Cherwell to the Isis (that's what they call the Thames here, he says, pretentious fuckers). He loves watching the froth form on my lips as we turn back to look at the spires of Oxford in the distance. Is it a sign of prophetic frenzy or rabies?

A novel, Spurious, based on material here at the blog, will be published by Melville House in 2010. More details to follow.

A Book of Revelations: was that what I was going to write? A new Book of Revelations, a new Apocalypse: is that why I journeyed out to that Greek island? It's the funniest thing of all, W. says, the thought of me heading out on the ferry from Piraeus with my divine mission in mind. How hilarious! What did I intend to do? What did I think would happen?

Of course Piraeus is disgusting now, everyone knows that. Was it really where I was going to begin my mystical journey? I must have been disappointed, W. says. I was, wasn't I? Athens was bad enough, that's what I told him, but Piraeus! Piraeus was an abomination. But I was borne along in a dream. I had my dream. I drifted along, a young idiot.

'And what did you have in your rucksack?', W. asks. 'What was in there?' He knows, he says. He knows full well. It's a detail I shouldn't omit. Your typewriter!, exclaims W. Your typewriter … It was some time ago, W. says. Before laptops, at any rate. Well, before they became cheap. And a pen and paper wouldn't do, would it? Not for taking dictation with regard to the apocalypse. A typewriter! A typewriter was essential!

'There you were', says W., 'on the ferry with your rucksack and your typewriter. What books did you bring? Did you take anything to read? Oh I forgot, didn't I?', W. says. 'You were going to give up reading. You were going to let it go. Books were going to drop out of your hand. What were you going to do instead? Act? Step into the world? Hilarious', W. says. 'The temerity!', he says. 'Write? Yes, that was it, wasn't it?', he says. 'You were going to write. To write as a man acts. And write a new Book of Revelations.

'Of course, you never got to your island, did you?' It'd gone wrong at Piraeus. I'd asked for the wrong island, or they misheard me, or they wanted to misdirect me. But I was heading for Paros, not Patmos. Paros, and by mistake – the party island, what an idiot! That was my mystical journey, W. says, to a party island.

'What did you think as the ferry docked? Patmos has become very commercial – is that what you thought? It's very noisy here – is that what you thought? People don't wear much on Patmos – was that it?

'Still, you made good. You slept on a rock and woke in the sun. It was Sunday. Old ladies gave you collaver. And then, rucksack on your back, up you went to the monastery, the deserted monastery. You had one of your pantheistic little ecstasies, didn't you?

'Imagine it: a Hindu in a Greek Orthodox monastery, completely deserted. A Hindu ready to write a new Book of Revelations. Paros, not Patmos'. W. still finds it funny. 'An idiot with a typewriter, on the wrong island. An idiot on his mystical journey, and no books to read, on the wrong island …'

Alfonso Reyes, the great Mexican writer, said to me: We publish in order not to go on emending rough drafts. And I know he was right. We publish to be rid of a book, to forget it.

Borges in conversation, from Borges at Eighty

Like Chekhov, [Joseph] Roth took his beginnings in sketches, humouresques, satire, and, like Chekhov, he never seems to have abandoned his belief that the human character is basically flat. Trotta in The Radetzky March, Tunda in Flight Without End, Taittinger in The String of Pearls, are basically all one and the same: dutiful, helpless, out of their depth. The view propounded in his books that though the world and our lives are complicated, we are simple, seems to me to have much to be said for it.

[Roth's] men – not even hollow men, but flat men, cardboard models, clothes-horses – are the perfect servants of, ultimately, a hollow empire; able to swell a throng or progress, to look good on parade – effectively, their last hurrah – but not to fight a war. Their separateness, their anonymity, irrelated and irrelevant little statelets into which they will ignorantly or viciously disappear.

from Michael Hofmann's introduction to The Radetzky March

What will happen the next day – the day after we destroy ourselves?, W. asks. A holy silence. Birds singing. A great sigh will go up from the whole of creation. Have I ever felt, as he has, that the world is waiting for us to disappear? That the knot will be untied, the damage undone? Meanwhile, our lives. In the meantime, our friendship, which is really the destruction of friendship.

Something has gone very badly wrong, W. can't avoid that conclusion. And in some important way, it's all our fault. W. holds us responsible, he's sure not sure why. But what would I know of this? How could I understand the depths of the disaster? It's my idiocy that protects me, W. says. It burns above me like a halo.

'If you knew, if you really knew' … but I don't know, says W. I have intimations of it, to be sure. I have a sense of the disaster, but no more than that. Only he knows, W. says. Only he, of the pair of us, knows what will happen.

The chicken won't stop, we won't stop. It's disgusting. Disgusting, but time moves us on. On, on, and what's it got to do with us? Death is everywhere. Death is falling from the heavens like manna.

And who are we, wandering in the desert, two members of a lost tribe? The desert is our lives – is that it? The wasteland of our lives. And manna? The axe blade that would fall down to us from on high. The blazing axe to cauterise all wounds …

It's not enough to die. All trace of us would have to disappear. The wound of our lives. The scars …

Waggish brilliantly perceptive on 2666 - I'd missed entirely Bolano's subversion of the Bildungsroman. Archimboldi's introspection is dissolved; the writer disappears/ emerges into history. It happens so many times in Bolano's fiction, I would want to say (and would have to substantiate). It's the key, the central movement.

From the study into history … is that what disperses the poet-heroes of The Savage Detectives? The slaughterbench of history: is that what we see – taste – in The Part About the Killings. 2666 (the date) is only a name for the slaughterbench, for an apocalypse without God, when the absence of God reveals the absence of plan. Chaos. Scattering. The Sonora Desert …