Read last night, listening to Tom Waits (Swordfishtrombones). I have the second of John Crowley’s Aegypt books which like the first is out of print and I had to acquire at some expense. My only serious objection to the book is that he harps on his points a bit too much. (The malaise of postmodernism.) My real frustration reading the book, though, is that the previous owner read it with a pencil and underlined and annotated about a third of the pages. I also underline, but only in histories and poems and the like; I don’t much mind lines. But the annotations are so banal, so self-serving, and so patently–a thousand curses–directed at some future owner of the book, that I have to read the book with an eraser.

So whoever you are, your mission has failed: I am eradicating every trace of your existence from this book so that no one will have to endure your observations that “that’s why I’m reading blah blah blah” and “just like me!” I am even going to erase your signature from the back of the book.

I also own an old American literature reader which has been heavily annotated. In pen, so I don’t have the option of cleaning it up; also, the comments are at times insightful (though whoever it was has The Waste Land all wrong). All the same I try to ignore them, and probably for the same reason I ignore criticism on the whole.

This morning I dreamed of a woman whose love I had to earn in a room full of other men, old ladies, and a fox, and when she kissed me her tongue tasted like the sea.