Aesthetic Distance

What most rouses our passions we are least able to write about in the moment.

I have the summer to write. Finish this novel by August. Spend a month working on poems.

Reading Roberto Bolaño's Savage Detectives. A cat who responds to the name "Murphy" is asleep on my desk. I named him Morphy after the great American chess master, but he knows nothing about chess and thought I was saying Murphy. He is a devoted reader of Becket.