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A song was playing, Whitney Houston wanting to dance with somebody.
Less returned to dreamy, simple, lusty, bookish, harmless, youthful Freddy.
He was silent, but his gaze was that of someone memorizing a photograph.
Less’s latest novel has been living with his publisher for over a month, as any modern couple lives together before a marriage, but surely his publisher will pop the question any day now.
Bedouin music was already playing in his ears; camels were already grunting in the darkness; he was already standing up from embroidered pillows and walking out into the desert night, champagne in hand, to let the floury Sahara warm his toes as, above him, the Milky Way glowed with his birthday candles.
You know, there’s a retreat center very close to a resort I’m fixing up, friends of mine, beautiful place, on a hill above the Arabian Sea;
It feels cosmonautical in nature.
New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them.
It is a clown car of contradictory possessions: cashmere sweaters yet light linen trousers, thermal underwear yet suntan lotion, a tie yet a Speedo, his workout set of rubber bands, and so on.
before a series of backgrounds—blue sky and beach, tall tree and river, lobster and wineglass, disco ball and drugs, bedsheets and sunrise—but nothing is coming to mind.
“Take it again; no, take it from over there, hold the camera higher; no, higher; no, HIGHER!” “Howard,” Less says to his old lover, smiling. “You look wonderful.”
Less goes on, unable to let go until he is certain he has made his point, “that you don’t get attached to me.”
I remember Arthur Less in his youth.
he can bear only a private humiliation.
Flower to tomb; it is always thus.
Sunlight flows as sweet and yellow as the cheap champagne sitting, half-finished and now too warm, in the sand beside young Arthur Less.
“I think I am a little spreading,” he tells Bastian over dinner at his local Kiez.
Less French
“Well”—Lewis announcing over coffee and honeyed flatbreads—“we are being given an opportunity for a different experience than the one we were expecting.”
Hands on his hips, he smiled in triumph (by the way, everyone is completely naked in this scene).
Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.
Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.
he knows the absurdity of asking someone to explain love or sorrow. You can’t point to it. It would be as futile, as unconveyable, as pointing at the sky and saying, “That one, that star, there.”
A leaden river is coiling along a bank of reeds.
