I wish I'd gotten to see Lorenzo Carcaterra read on Monday. The man is a real-life writer, not one of these finicky academicians we get around here with their PC jokes—he got raped with a broomstick in a New York juvenile prison, if the accounts in his roughly autobiographical novel Sleepers are correct. We need more people like this (no, not necessarily more people who have been anally raped—you know what I mean) to visit here and lecture. Need I expound further upon why, aside from mentioning yet again my disdain for academic types?

I think being sick, though, has helped me feel more alive—coming out of the dazed, roaring trance of sickness is like being awakened again, à la Fight Club.

"It is only when we have lost everything that we are free to do anything."

"And then something happened. I let go. Lost in oblivion—dark and silent and complete, I found freedom. Losing all hope was freedom."

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