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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

thinking about Quentin Crisp

Squire and I are being more than a little in love with the Englishman in New York these days. For lots of reasons: Squire
mostly admires his unapologetic style; I'm mostly intrigued by his
clarity about adherence to manners being separate from adherence to
convention, because I find that an interesting place to put my brain.

"The essence of happiness is
its absoluteness. It is automatically the state of being of those who
live in the continuous present all over their bodies. No effort is
required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration
is needed to abandon everything else."

I don't know if happiness is the most important goal; I used to think it was because I believed it was impossible to be perfectly happy when another person suffered. I now think it is possible for many people to be happy while smack in the face of extraordinary
suffering and I've since modified my "most important goal" to "being
good" which is simultaneously very sticky and difficult to grasp, but
it keeps me busy doing and thinking and we like that much better than
brooding, not that I manage to entirely avoid that. In any case, I think Crisp was interested in being good more than in being happy, because I find
it too hard to believe that a self-aware human who wants to be happy
voluntarily picks up the phone whenever it rings. I think a person who
is AWESOME might do that, but I'm at babysteps right now: I'm working on not wanting to punch people. Abandoning the fear that people will be stupid or mean or whatever, and the resultant anger from that, is more concentration than I have; wanting to talk to them will clearly take a little more time.

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