Category: Uncategorized

'No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way'. W. is reading out loud from Scholem's didactic poem. – 'How do you think it applies to you?', W. says. 'Do you get in your own way?' I get in his way, that's for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in him also gets in his way. It's my fault, he's sure of that. If it wasn't for me, would he reach the star of redemption? He'll never know, W. says. He suspects not.

How has it become coupled in us, the fear and loathing of the present world and the messianic sense of what it might have been? How, in us, the sense that our careers – our lives as so-called thinkers – could only have been part of the collapse of the world, combines with our delusion that we are the preservers of a glorious European past, and that we even have a share in that past?

How, in us, is the sense that our learning – which is really only an enthusiasm for learning, for our philosophies, all our literature - is of complete irrelevance and indifference, joined with our mad belief that it bears upon what is most important and riskiest of all, upon the great questions of the age?

In our imagination, W. says, our offices in our cities at the edges of this country are like the Dark Age monasteries on the edge of Europe, keeping the old knowledge alive, and our teaching samizdat, outlawed because it is dangerous, the secret police infiltrating our lectures and preparing to take us away.

Of course, when he says us here, he really means him, W. says. And when he says we know nothing, he really means I know nothing, because he at least knows something, W. says.

Only my viscera are honest, W. decides. Only there, deep inside my body, buried under layers of fat, is there anything like honesty. In a way, it's comforting, W. says, although it doesn't make me any easier to be around. That there's a kind of internal limit to my pretension.

You're not going to get away with it, that's what my stomach says. I'm not going to let you get away with it. That's my curse, W. says, and my judgement. It's what the samurai realised when they committed ritual suicide, their entrails glistening in the sun.

Sincerity belongs to the guts, W. says. And what of my terrible purgations – what of that terrible voiding that is like a parody of seppuku? It'll never come to an end, will it?, W. says. It's the double of my endless logorrhea, a trail of shit that runs along every line I write.

'Your stomach never lies', W. says. 'It's got more integrity than you have'. That's why I'm always in such an appalling state. Something in me must know, W. says. Something must know my lies and pretension, and that, in fact, my life is only a lie and a pretension.

'Have you ever had an honest thought? Have you ever been true to anything?' The answer is no, W. says. It's always been no. A great no should be roaring in the sky. The no should deafen me, W. says, and deafen everyone who speaks to me. No!, he cries. No!

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 …'

Your trip overseas. Your period as a world traveller. It's W.'s favourite story. You'd flown off to the Mediterranean, hadn't you?, W. says. You'd flown there as a world traveller, never to return! Did you speak the language? Had you made preparations for your visit? Did you know anything about the culture and mores of the country you were going to? The answer is no in each case, says W. You just went, didn't you? Off you went as a world traveller.

What did you expect? What did you think awaited your there? No sooner than your plane had touched down, no sooner than you were through the airport, but someone would recognise you for the wit and bon vivant you were, someone would invite you for lunch, someone for cocktails – you would be already on your way to becoming a local sensation, a favoured visitor from overseas, a man to be welcomed and passed around, introduced here, introduced there.

Soon, you'd be the centre of a whole circle. Soon, right at the heart of things, the social world orbiting around you, you'd caused a kind of frisson, women were throwing themselves at you, men were vying for your company. Your conversation was legendary, your learning magnificent, you could talk on every topic, from the petty to the world-historical.

Yes, you'd be recognised for what you were, at last. The world knew you, lauded you, carried you on its shoulders. All it took was a trip to another country. All it took was some resolve, a plane ticket, and there you would be, in a country that would celebrate your talents.

Was that what you dreamed of, W. asks, with your plans for world travel? Is that what you thought awaited you on the other side? And instead, what happened? You lurched from disaster to disaster, didn't you? No sooner were you off the plane than you were beaten down by the sun – beaten by it. You'd never experienced Mediterranean heat before, had you? You'd never seen a cloudless sky. And that blue – the fierce blue of a sky without clouds. It was too much for you, wasn't it?  

You became curiously mute. You'd been stunned into silence. You didn't say a thing. What could you say? What could you have said? Nothing was going to happen to you. You'd be picked up and carried along by no crowd. There was no one to whom you could prove yourself.

Who was interested in you? Who knew your name? If you were a little younger, a paedophile might have followed you around. A little younger, a little cuter, and some pervert with a camera might have taken pictures. But then, there, in the Mediterranean heat, no one wanted to know you. No one spoke to you, even out of pity.

Because you had the wrong personality, didn't you? The entirely wrong personality. You were not a world traveller. You were not a go-getter. You weren't a hail-fellow-well-met kind of person. You were surly, as you are now. You were churlish. You kept to yourself – who else would have you? You spoke to no one – who would want to listen?

What had the Mediterranean have to do with you? – that was your thought, wasn't it? What had it to do with you, the remorseless sky, the heat, the beaches, the sunbathers? And what were you to it in turn - the towns of white houses, the cafe bars, the tavernas? Where did the Venn diagrams intersect: the Venn diagram of the Mediterranean and the Venn diagram of Lars?

You slept rough, didn't you? You slept in a building site and then out in the open, on the rocks, the loop of your rucksack strap around your arm, for security. You slept on a beach, didn't you, and the sea came up? You thought: I'll sleep on this beach, how romantic, and then the sea came up and soaked your rucksack. The waves came in and you had to flee, didn't you, world traveller? Up they came, the waves, and off you went into town, towards God-knows-where in the darkness, because there you were lost, hopelessly lost on a Mediterranean island.

Why had you travelled to that island to the first place, anyway? Why did you book a ticket there, to island, among all the others? It was something about the Book of Revelations, wasn't it? It had been written there, hadn't it? Did you think some great vision was going to befall you? Did you think you'd see the end of the world? What did you see on the beach, as the waves came up? What, as you were driven into town, looking for somewhere sensible to stay?

How long did you last out there in the Mediterranean? How long, in your new life as a world traveller? A few days, that was it, wasn't it? A few days – a handful – instead of a lifetime. And there it was, green England, that you could see from your plane window. Green England – lush, verdant – and not the rocky Mediterranean. Had you had any visions?, W. says, rocking back and forth in laughter. Had you finished a new Book of Revelations? Had something of the apocalypse been revealed to you? Ah … it's his favourite story, W. says.

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.