Notes 1

I had made some random notes in a paper notebook. Here I am transcribing them on to the other "medium".

In Speak Memory, Vladimir Nabakov's description of his father being tossed on a blanket by cheering Muzskiks, has an astonishingly subtle foreshadowing of grief and mourning.

How to build a working airplane out of coconuts.

Good writing isn't just about forming the technical guts of a good sentence. It's also about figuring out how to hew serviceable planks in one set of tasks and then in other duties, build syntactic confections that don't taste like wood.

Straightforward envy over everyday objects grew into a kind of existential restlessness.

Andy Warhol once wanted the word "figment" engraved on his tomb.

Capitalism and Christianity conflates into a single ideology.

The narrative freight.

Twenty years ago, Irvine Welsh roared onto the British literary novel that traced the exuberant depravities of Scottish drug fiends. What marked the book wasn't its subject--artists have been mining the manic energies of addiction since the unlikely poetry of its language, a droll brogue relish transcribed in precise phonetics.