My Audient

Q: Who do you write for?

A: Owen had a fan he called his audient.

I don’t think I have anyone in mind when I write.

I try to make my books read like a letter to a friend. But which friend?

I think I try to please myself.

To get at, and witness to, the truth. But also to entertain myself.

If it feels right, it is right.

At least, if it doesn’t feel right, it isn’t.

It’s like who is going to buy this book, and why would they buy it?

I don’t know. It’s not a question I ask when I sit down to write.

Q: I think you do ask it and you jump through hoops so as not to admit you do.

A: Maybe.

Why do we write?

To still the voices. Habit. What else am I going to do?

To become rich and famous. To get strange pussy. Beautiful masseurs are waiting for you.

Q: Beautiful masseuses.

A: Whatever.

Simpering Byzantines.

Thoreau said he meant Walden to be a sincere account of his life such as he would send a kinsman from a distant land.

Q: “For if they have lived sincerely, it was in a distant land to me.”

A: Yes, but there’s a bit of the anthropologist about it.

A bit of the archeologist.

I keep a record of whatever comes up. Noting where it came from, in what order.

I keep a record.

My books are a record.

This period we’re living through will be as strange, looking back, as looking back at swingers.

Wife-swapping.

Toni home permanents.

Cuff links and a boutonnière.

Q: The Melanesian Gambit. The Murngin Boojum.

A: Who was Balzac writing for?

He was just trying to pay his coffee bills.

Q: Walden meant a lot to me in high school.

A: It means a lot to me now.