The Paris Review

"Going to the gym is mostly a slog, drudgery in service of vanity."

One thing I should put out there before giving my first last thoughts about Gary Indiana is that it doesn’t matter what I think. I learned this from him.

At the heart of this book there is a dream I’d had before I ever started writing and drawing in these notebooks. I have managed to make sense of some parts of the dream, but others I still don’t understand.

“Bed at 11:23 P.M. Up at 8:17 A.M. I never have trouble falling asleep, I realize. Just the staying.”

We travel to Lake Clark, Alaska, in a four-seater prop plane—my partner and I, the pilot, and the housekeeper for the residency where we’ll be staying. When asked which seat he wants, the housekeeper says, “I’ll take the leg room, I’m a big bitch.” I think, Queer? I ask about his work and over the racket of the plane he shouts that he performed for a decade as a drag queen at a famous Los Angeles bar. He quit during COVID. “People are gross,” he says. Though later he will tell me it was performance itself he tired of, finding it antithetical to intimacy.

“Today, two ducks fuck just outside my bedroom window, a soon-to-be-dead silky rooster and four geese circling them.”

I love density. Compression is nuclear. Big family, small house—no room (Jeezy). Used to act up when I went to school—thought it was cool, but I

Augusto Monterroso’s The Gold Seekers is a fun mix of personal archaeology and literary autobiography in an erudite yet concise package.

Kinsey (2004) dir. Bill Condon ★★★☆☆ Biopics Are Always a Little Disappointing … No matter how well scripted, they’re hidebound

It was in Beaune that I saw the wildest grimacer of my life. We’d been warned the place was overrun with tourists, by a tourist who was convinced we