Elegy for a Fellow Recluse

"You take a look around your college campus, and the world, and politics, and one season of summer stock, and you listen to the conversation of a bunch of nitwit college students, and you decide that everything's ego, ego, ego, and the only intelligent thing for a girl to do is to lie around and shave her head and say the Jesus prayer and beg God for little mystical experience that'll maker her nice and happy."
- J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

I read Franny and Zooey a few times over in college. I had a bit of Franny in my brain, thinking about poetry, ego, and, of course, boys.

David Mamet: No One Said It Would Be Easy

IT IS NOT YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW THE ANSWERS, BUT IT IS YOUR, AND MY, RESPONSIBILITY TO KNOW AND TO ASK THE RIGHT Questions OVER AND OVER. UNTIL IT BECOMES SECOND NATURE.

I'm definitely of the school of thought that anything easy isn't worth doing. In my brain it ends up mashed and deluded until it's become: to do something worth doing, you must suffer.

But what exactly qualifies as talent?

"'Talent is everything. If you've got talent, nothing else matters. You can screw up your personal life something terrible. So what. If you've got talent, it's there in reserve. Anybody who has talent they know they have it and that's it. It's what makes you what you are. It tells you you're you. Talent is everything; sanity is nothing. I'm convinced of it. I think I had something once. I showed promise, didn't I? But I was too sane. I couldn't make the leap out of my own soul into the soul of the universe. That's the leap they all made. From Blake to Rimbaud. I don't write anything but checks. I read science fiction. I go on business trips to South Bend and Rochester. The one in Minnesota. Not Rochester, New York. Rochester, Minnesota. I couldn't make the leap.'"
- Don Delillo "Americana"

and she's in pain

FASHION & STYLE December 3, 2009
Skin Deep: Your Own Fat, Relocated
By CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS
Surgeons can transplant unwanted fat from a patient’s thighs or buttocks and use it to create bigger breasts; after being condemned in the early ’90s, this procedure is generating newfound excitement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/03/fashion/03skin.html?em

I'd like the fat sucked out and injected into my ankles. Next season it will be all the rage.

IT BEGINS

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like the blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson