July 20, 2003 Brookline
Describing R.'s book to Aunt P.'s friend A, by the poolside. A. very shocked to hear that all of the victims of the murders in New York weren't taken care of, cashed out, give a golden handkerchief. So I suppose this is a book that would sell. To shock the tranquil and caring poolside set. I'm so mixed up about what to do with these pages that I have to coax out of my uncle's ailing printer. They're, literally, murder to read and painful to "correct." Three hours on my knees,screwing about with that shitbox printer. Watched Pulp Fiction again while so doing.

Q: So what are you going to do with no job? Be a bum?

A: I'm going to walk the earth like Kane. You know--have adventures.

July 2?, 2003 Brookline
Caught in what can only be called a torrential downpour on my way home this evening. Had that odd feeling of semi-cleanness after rainwater dries on your skin. Truth is, there is no downpour that can make you feel clean after a jolting ride on an unairconditioned subway car. It feels like your soul gets dialed down two or three notches. Crammed in there you can actually feel yourself age. How I felt evey day in New York City.

July 2?, 2003 Brookline
Running like hell. C. progressing on her studies of Rousseau. She's quite taken with an American critical volume and has even translated the introduction into French. Today I was so pressed for time my afternoon choice was either to piss or buy something to eat for lunch.

July 23, 2003 Brookline
Thinking about the real poverty of governmental imagination and public ignorance which explains the news is becoming too much to bear."Smoked" read the headline in today's paper beside a photo of one of Saddam Hussein's sons (killed yesterday) somking an oddly long cigar. Which America do these headlines play to? How good it was to be got gone. I've been too busy to really take note but, when I do--when I'm not too tired to think--doing so is a painful and profitless exercise. The United States used to represent a future that even I believed in. My young students here in Boston are largely unmoved, save for the powerful sympathies that arise from living in a foreign country and speaking a foreign language. We are living outside the law as a nation--even outside our own laws--and the more deeply we sniff up our own superpowerful scent the more the man in the street says "So what?" It seems funny to say this but I don't feel I left the United States as much as I abandoned it. You leave home, but you abandon a troublesome car or a shabby house.

Talked to R. in New York about the book. He seems to have some intellectual distance on all the horror he recorded, although I cannot imagine how he has achieved this. Ran a few suggestions by him and he listened in that careful quiet way of his. You can actualy feel the pressure of his attention, his eyebrows drawing together, and this makes me want to be very exact in my speech. Still wondering how I can be useful to him.

Will form my own nation, avec mes proches, and the rest of you can kindly fill out the visa application. But wasn't that always the deal, anyway? So why all the flags?

July 24, 2003
The director of our school said that I had set some kind of record for teaching in a week. 45 hours. It's a blur. R. writes apologizing for the difficulty of the task he sets before me, acknowledges that the apology isn't necessary. Haven't written, save these lines, in weeks. Vietnamese food this evening with C. The tables all around us filled with young doctors hysterical with fatigue. Who knew the world needed so many doctors? I miss the United States where people used to have steady, normal jobs, could goof off a little, buy used books and actually had time to read them.

July 25, 2003
Running like hell. All the French students go home, leaving extremely snarkish reviews in their wake. General consensus to be more demanding of any future compatriots. Teaching slows down. Nostalgia of a final day at school, but much less strong (I mean everyone still picks up his own tab). Writing this days after. Couldn't be more tired. Slept only six hours a night the last week. I'm lucky to have the work.