Status Updates From Brief Interviews with Hideo...

Jeez. The interview with the guy who says he gets laid by exploiting his thalidomide-like birth defected flipper arm for sympathy. The son of the bathroom attendant describing the mere facts of his dad's job as an endless cycle of indignities with his face in the basest of realities. Writers have to be self-involved. The self-involved probably think others are like them but you never can really know, can you?

I read an interview where DFW said that as he got older he became more interested in trying to give people that feeling of recognition of themselves in his writing, that he had realized it was something rare and special. I don't really get that from his writing much. Lately I am really getting it from Smog/Bill Callahan's music. I think I'm reaching some kind of monklike enlightenment thru isolation. Or hypomania.

"looked to her more like emotional detachment, like clinical distance, like mere professional interest the depressed person was purchasing instead of the intensely personal interest and empathy and compassion she often felt she had spent her whole life starved for. It made her angry[...]being nothing but the object of the therapist’s professional compassion"-footnote to "The Depressed Person"

Not reading in order. Still awake 5am. Guess I'm doing fine as the Beck song goes.

Seems to be about narcissism, loneliness, wanting to be liked, etc. Listened to his "Bookworm" radio(it was 1999) interview about it on YouTube. He always seemed so painfully self-conscious. Characters honest/unlikeable/messed up with insecurities/type of consumerist market research, focus group, invasion of the personality vs others.

I folded and picked this up...