9 September 2001

Catherine Camus, on her late husband: “This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves.”

I finished Down and Out in London and Paris tonight — excellent book. My dad says that it falls in the same category as This Side of Paradise and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a “novel of initiation.”

A germane entry from my diary:

 Mon Oct 12 00:29:22 1998 We met in front of the church between harvard square and Matt's apartment, right near the theatre. I was standing there listening to some bums on the steps talk. One of them said: ``I wasn't homeless before last year. I used to have PILES of gold!'' 

Peter Mulvey: “And if I sound like all the world, all the world will sound like me.”

Geeks and golf.

I even have an MPEG of Ryan’s graceful swing.

Bunker Hill.

That picture reminds me a little of San Francisco the way it looks in Hitchcock films. Joe and Ryan and I played catch on the lawn with a half-empty bottle of Gatorade until it split along the top and started to leak.

T.S. Eliot: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

A couple weeks ago, I found an old manual typewriter at a yard sale down the street from my apartment. I bought it from a senile, toothless man for five dollars. This weekend, I finally got around to getting a ribbon for it. The output is absolutely beautiful:

(800×570 2310×1644)

I especially like the X-outs.

On the bathroom wall of a bar in Ottawa.

This struck me as a pretty funny sequence:

 Wed Dec 2 00:33:02 1998 Sick. Worried about classes. Can't sleep.. need a few hours shuteye so I can finish my problem sets and be ready for today's quiz. Ugh. Not a good situation. Okay, off to bed. Wed Dec 2 03:34:37 1998 Oh my god. I somehow woke up. I MUST NOT GO BACK TO SLEEP. Staring at screensaver... Wed Dec 2 03:43:51 1998 Still awake by some miracle. Another few minutes and I might be up for good. Suppressing urge to crawl back into bed for "just a few minutes..." Wed Dec 2 03:46:45 1998 Still awake... but I haven't gotten anything done yet. Going to stare out window. Wed Dec 2 03:47:39 1998 Pretty out, but boring. Wed Dec 2 03:50:14 1998 Getting more and more tired. Wed Dec 2 06:49:49 1998 Fuck, fell asleep. 

Sadly, the above is fairly representative of the tone of most of my entries from back then. It seems that I mainly wrote in my diary when I was unhappy, so it’s not a very good cross-section of my life.

This whole posting-old-diary-entries-on-the-web thing is starting to feel hopelessly self-absorbed.

Jacob Berkman, feeling the flow.

Holy shit.