In his fantastic essay John Wilkins' Analytical Language, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarks on a classification of animals described in a certain Chinese encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge:

In those remote pages it is stated that animals can be divided into the following classes: (a) belonging to the Emperor; (b) embalmed; (c) trained; (d) sucking pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous; (g) stray dogs; (h) included in this classification; (i) with the vigorous movements of madmen; (j) innumerable; (k) drawn with a very fine camel hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) having just broken a large vase; (n) looking from a distance like flies.

Borges thereby reminds us that not all taxonomies are meaningful.
- Richard P. Bentall. "Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature"

After he puts the phone down he starts to think that maybe he has been too polite. She has obviously failed to understand his refusal. When he had said, laughing, that his participation was "unlikely", she had apparently failed to realise he had really been saying "No. Not in a hundred years. Not if you went down on your knees and begged me . . ."

One of these days he will set his paper boats sailing across the water and begin his conquest of the sea.

"A poet's work[:] To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, [to] shake the world and stop it from going to sleep . . ."
- from "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie

Stumbled on an ABC Radio National program about the DSM and the redefinition of variant behaviour as "mental illness". What the world needs is more public radio.

I'm not quite the hypochondriac I used to be but I'm still awaiting (with bated breath) the publication of the DSM-V, bearer of my definitive diagnosis. It should be out in 2012 and in its wake oceans will rise and planes will fall screeching from the sky..

"When he was young, he told her, each phase of his life, each self he tried on, had seemed reassuringly temporary. Its imperfections didn't matter, because he could easily replace one moment by the next, one Saladin by another. Now, however, change had begun to feel painful; the arteries of the possible had begun to harden."
- from "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie

Sign of Regression to Childhood: I need someone to read me a bedtime story. Not an actual, breathing person (heaven forbid!) but a disembodied voice like Dilly Barlow's or Jane Copeland's.

Signs of Approaching Middle-age: The lengthening list of things that annoy me. Item: the fact that, in certain circles, Freudian psychoanalysis still retains a degree of intellectual respectability. It's amazing how eloquent the deluded can be, how easily secular Faiths can arise and persist.

"Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed mainly to protect individuals, not just from the eye of the censor but also from those who read such narratives to discover who's who and who did what to whom, thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others' secrets. The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facets of their lives so that their secrets are safe."

-Azar Nafisi. "Reading Lolita in Tehran"

There are a hundred ways to lose ones soul in a city, he tells himself. In a few years he will have found them all.

"he would walk into a post office, it was said, go over the Wanted posters, and, just by looking at the mug shots say what crimes the various fugitives had committed."
- from Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Burn After Reading (2008)

(1) There is, I have to admit, a soft spot in my heart for pedants. Even for those individuals who allow their pedantry to bleed into casual conversation. Osbourne Cox points out to a guest at his dinner party who complains of being afflicted by "lactose reflux": "You either have lactose intolerance or acid reflux". And he was right, of course: There is no middle ground. About these things there can be no compromise.

(2) If I had an extended list of favourite actresses, it's likely that Tilda Swinton would be on it. If this were a Disney production she would be a supremely intelligent reptile, the wicked witch, the evil stepmother always ready with an acerbic comment, all her cognitive gears clicking away with inexorable, unremitting malice.

(3) We do not know ourselves completely. We never do. The people around us listen to our earnest lies and self-justifying fables and think "How empty he is! How evident are his limitations!" (and often with justification) - but we are granted only limited access to these truths, only a limited degree of self-awareness.

(4) Because we find before us such a bewildering array of choices (as we tackle the project of self-creation) we often find ourselves overcome by the illusion of control. Each of us, the commercials tell us, can become the person we want to be. If we are not beautiful it is because we have failed to make ourselves so.

(5) The Coens live in my universe. Everyone is quirky. Our rationality, our field of clarity, is just a small clearing surrounded by the darkness of ignorance, stupidity and dysfunctional cognition. People lie next to each other in the gloom and speak at cross purposes. Nobody listens. Nobody understands.

(6) Brad Pitt emerges from a closet with an idiotic grin on his face and gets his brains blown out. I wonder how that works for the family. Graphic Cinematic Death. It must be hard to stop the image from playing over and over in your head, from intruding in your dreams. This is a possible conformation of Brad Pitt's skull. This is a thing that could happen.

Not so FAQs

1.)  What speaks to your soul?
Pop music. Thankfully my soul is a bad listener.

2.)  What is your favorite time of day? Why?
Night. It reminds me that everything ends (and that in this lies consolation)
   
3.)  What do you obsess over?
My relative poverty. My absolute ignorance.

4.)  What could you never have too many of?
Empty pocket notebooks.
   
5.)  What is your favorite smell?
Half-burnt turkey (seriously)
   
6.)  What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being seated at a dinner table with garrulous relatives around me.
   
7.)  What's playing on your stereo?
Don't have a stereo but I've got "The Essential Leonard Cohen” playing in the background.
   
8.)  What is your most marked characteristic?
Unremitting pessimism. The tendency to (as the saying goes) "look around for a coffin when I smell flowers".

9.)  What inspires you?
The thought that someday if I work hard enough, I could have my own private Romanian castle, my own little army of indentured servants to do my bidding.

10.) Can't leave home without?
My personal digital assistant and an SD card full of magazine articles to read on the train.

11.) What is your idea of earthly happiness?
A quiet room with a locked door.

12.) To what weaknesses are you most indulgent?
Watching bad movies.

13.) What books are on your nightstand?
On the coffee table by the couch lies Germaine Greer's “The Whole Woman”, sullen and unread. On the surrounding carpet, in artless piles, books I do not recognise and cannot remember buying.

14.)  What is your favorite virtue?
Self-righteousness (it's a virtue where I come from)
   
15.)  A famous writer said that you should always be in search of something-an object, a raincoat, anything. What do you find yourself in search of most often?
The TV remote.

16.)  What is your principle defect?
A persistent failure to empathise, to fraternise, to smile when socially appropriate.
   
17.) What do you value most in your friends?
Their nonexistence.

18.) Who is are your favorite artists?
I have no favourites. I wish I did.

19.) What quality do you most admire in a man?
Cultural literacy

20.) What quality do you most admire in a woman?
Immoderate wit and intelligence.

21.) Top six places in the world you would like to visit?
Rome, Reykjavik, Tokyo, Beijing, Bombay and New York (but not in that order)

22.) Michael Crichton said in his book Travels, that at thirty-something he had already accomplished everything he had ever dreamed of and more. Do you feel like that you have accomplished all you have dreamed about or do you feel like you have much more to accomplish? Where do you feel you are on the your path?
I lost the path in the darkness of Youth and wandered off into the wilderness. Now, warm by a campfire and several hundred miles from civilisation, I have forgotten that a path even exists.

23.)  What are your top three dreams of accomplishing/becoming?
To write a book that many will buy, no one will read, and everyone will praise.
To build my own Fortress of Solitude and live the rest of my days within it with my broadband internet connection and yearning heart.
To join the Conversation, in my own time and on my own terms.

24.)  What is your guilty pleasure?
Trawling through Amazon.com in the wee hours of the morning ordering books I never get round to reading.
   
25.)  Do you play it safe or take chances more often?
Play it safe. Walking on the wild side has never appealed to me

26.) Do you make your bed everyday?
I sleep on a couch (and have been doing so for a few months now). I am not a bed-making person.

27.) What are you seeking?
I seek a way out of the maze, a warm patch in a cold world, at a distance from those who have come to know me.

28.) Most unforgettable experience?
I am told I almost died once- but details of this incident escape me. I am, you see, incredibly skilled at forgetting.

29.) How often do you search for freshness and inspiration?
When I feel compelled to: When the greyness becomes overwhelming.

30.) Favorite item of clothing?
My brown military jacket - slightly worn, reasonably comfortable, and inexplicably reassuring.

31.) What is your greatest fear?
I have for so long pretended not to see, and fear that I will wake up one morning and discover I am blind.

32.) What is your favorite journey?
The walk home from the Tube Station. Shutting the door and feeling the rest of the world recede.

33.) On what occasions do you lie?
When I see no compelling reason to tell the truth. Frequently.

34.) What is your greatest regret?
That I failed to put the energies of youth to good use.

35.) How do you tell time?
By the digital clock in the corner of my Windows desktop.

36.) What is it that you most dislike?
Myself, in the mirror. The person I have become.

37.) What is your motto?
Onward, through the fog.

I have my cineworld unlimited card now and I intend to cram as many movies as possible into the empty spaces of my life. Or maybe I should have said into the Emptiness of my Life - because the image I had in mind was of standing at the edge of a ravine and throwing in old television sets one after the other. Pointless, but at least it passes the time.