Am alarmed to be feeling so down. In some ways it makes sense—financial issues are closing in (am meeting with my new accountant on Wednesday), I want to sell my apartment but have to make minor renovations first, my stories are coming along but not being written fast enough, work at the office has piled [...]
Thursday
Had dinner with one of the writers from the Sunday writing group. We stayed till closing time. She is so lovely and positive. I’m a little in love, and I told her so.
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A dear friend from college has two children.
Another close friend from college is trying to have a baby.
My best friend from high school just had twins.
Yesterday, the young assistant said to me, “Don’t you want children? You’d make a great mother.” She said this in all sincerity.
But I’m more comfortable with the word aunt.
My biological [...]
A week ago I met an Author who was going to share a table with Edmund White at the Strand Bookstore’s eightieth anniversary literary festival, and I kept asking him what they were slated to do, because I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that the festival’s daylong schedule of Author appearances included not [...]
I haven’t written down a great deal about myself during these days, partly because of laziness (I now sleep so much and so soundly during the day, I have greater weight while I sleep) but also partly because of the fear of betraying my self-perception. This fear is justified, for one should permit a self-perception [...]
In the large room there was the clamour of card playing and later the usual conversation which Father carries on when he is well, as he is today, loudly if not coherently. The words represented only small shapes in a formless clamour. Little Felix slept in the girls’ room, the door of which was wide [...]
A promise of some kind of happiness resembles the hope of an eternal life. Seen from a certain distance it holds its ground, and one doesn’t venture nearer.
—Franz Kafka, January 6, 1915, from Diaries: 1910–1923
It’s true that I’ve been going to bed at 5:00 a.m. lately, but it’s 1:00 a.m. that means more to me, with how it simultaneously ends and starts the day, how there’s the promise of an intimate discovery at that blended hour.
And if I hadn’t been so enamored of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude [...]
Every year around Xmas I tell myself to use the weeklong holiday break like I’m at a writing retreat and write. If I can just take advantage of my time wisely (I add), removing television and the Internet from my life, I can finish the novel in a week of solid writing. But what invariably [...]
A brief explanation for the name of this blog: I’ve been reading short novels lately, many of them by Eastern European writers such as David Albahari, a Serbian living in Canada in self-exile, and these days the late Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, on whom you can find comprehensive coverage in James Wood’s 2001 overview and [...]
A loud solitude occurs at one o'clock in the morning.
E-mail me: loudsolitude (at) gmail (dot) com.
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