The other night I went down to Powell's to attend a Clear Cut Press reading. I am a subscriber to Clear Cut and am supportive of it of course, but I was there mostly to see Matthew Stadler, Clear Cut's editor. He was there to promote the press, naturally, not his own novels, but I wanted to hear him speak. Few novels I've ever read have gotten to me the way his have. My attachment to his novels is a fact in my life just like my birthday or my lefthandedness. I rarely want to meet or interact with the authors of novels I love, author celebrity is a completely different animal from other kinds of public notoriety, at least to me. I never imagine writers' private lives or yearn to talk to them. I prefer that my experience of their work remain uncorrupted by first-hand knowledge of their personalities or facts about their so-called real selves. But with a couple of writers it's different, I feel compelled to know something, I just don't know exactly what. It's like they have some impossible knowledge of me and I want to rebalance the equation. A couple of months ago I exchanged a few emails with another of my favorite writers, Gary Indiana. I don't know what I needed from him, I suppose I simply wanted to make him aware of a mysterious link he couldn't possibly know about. Novels and other works of art breed relationships, sometimes very intense ones, but the vast majority of these relationships are unknown to one of the parties involved, it's kind of strange when you think about it. This correspondence with Gary Indiana wasn't as awkward as I'd imagined but it petered out anyway, because after one has gushed there isn't much left to say. The reverberating silence left in the aftermath of such a surge of overheated praise is like a crackling electrified emptiness, it's excruciating.

While at Powell's I picked up another couple of James Purdy novels. He's another one.