Writer's Diary
5/31/26
No good art goes unpunished.
Friday. I go for a walk along Park Avenue at two in the morning. There’s a full or almost full moon and the streets are entirely empty. There is one jogger shuffling along intrepidly. The Upper East Side feels cool and timeless in the dark and under the moon. The doormen are asleep at their posts. JG Melons is closing up. Steam billows from underground vents.
My brain feels overtaxed thanks to Red Bull and Zyns. I’ve also spent the last few days shuffling stocks around in my account, trying to make some money off the mania that the stock market seems to have entered into in the last month. And I have made some money, and I find that money brings me comfort because I really don’t have enough of it at all, and I’m embarrassed to always have to worry about it.
I live on the Upper East Side, but I have none of the bourgeois solidity of my neighbors, I don’t think. I feel almost like a spy here, a member of the precariat nested amongst the affluent.
I walk by the Sotheby’s building, which is in the old blank building quad. Look this up, I forget. On 75th and Madison. The new upscale restaurant they built on the bottom floor is empty. Staff are cleaning out, the lights are on. I watch them from outside and jazz music pumps from underneath the outdoor tables. It’s like a scene in a movie.
I have so little interest in the theater world, in fact an antipathy towards it. I feel myself drifting away from it. Not from writing plays per se, but from the general task of making it or trying to fit in or maintain a niche.
When you haven’t made your name, there’s greater incentive to be witty and a personality at parties to kind of compensate for the fact that nobody knows you or cares about you. Once you’ve made your name, the incentive is sort of the opposite, to deflate and obscure oneself. To deflect and make dull as a kind of apology for the name being known in advance. When you become someone, you become no one really. So there’s an attraction in being no one again because then you can be someone again.
If I had to describe myself, I would say that I’m a cautious gambler.
I guess my question is, how does one recover a sense of vocation from the ruins of obligation?
Books should make the soul float.
Artists are existential athletes. They live for something to represent. Representation is the real living.
A sentence lies at the end of a forking path of thought, or forking paths which converge upon the form of the thought.
A good sentence has very deep roots, it seems, that are concealed below ground.
In your late thirties, some days your body, when you go to the gym and work out or play sports, feels twenty-five and some days it feels fifty-five. The number of days it feels fifty-five gradually increase.
The naivete of great art often resembles the naivete of bad art. Therein lies much confusion.
I feel the same way about theater right now.
Just wait to you get to 45.