feuilles d’automne in silk and velvet; over the hair-tips of fair mink the brilliance of ripe grain; bucolics in the tortoiseshell inlays of Boulle furniture; abundance of fruit petrified in rock crystal and rose quartz; oxblood in the gold-embossed leather of old bookbindings (and everything else besides) . . .

Interspersed: the bright, smoky-marbled evergreen of malachite: La vieille Russie: hunted around for Fabergé writing paraphernalia: Monsieur collects.

•

(to Schwab, in a parody of Nagel:

“—in the insatiable hamster-bustling of the battened and fattened, whose hunger grows as their larders fill, as though they knew instinctively that soon they will face a winter that knows no mercy . . .” )

Next: lunch at Prunier’s:

surrealist food (the corpse flesh and vaginal forms of mollusks; the barbed armors, nippers, pincers, antennae of crustaceans: horror-movie material) . . .

the afternoon outdoors, to mull over the treatment.

Versailles (the castle in the glass coffin of autumn air: Disneyland)

or Fontainebleau (park landscape in Technicolor: the foliage colorfully discolored—pretty much the only thing that, along with the breasts of aging international stars, still fills the word “resplendent” with substance);

occasionally, a quick and useless visit to the Boulogne studios to view the newcomers: new faces inspire new ideas . . .

sometimes, scribbling a few notes on some café terrace, for instance Fouquet’s—for sentimental reasons—if the tables are still out. (I don’t know if they really are. I’ve been locked up here too long, and it’s October);

once, at most twice, a week, dinner with Nadine, a chat and some fornication to avoid creative differences about the movie;

and in the very last week, a week of unleashed, unreflected writing (it wouldn’t be the first time, God knows);

in short, living the life.

•

After which, to be sure, I would reach the far end of never-never land: where you have to eat your way out through the enclosing mountain, and it’s not made of rice:

for six solid weeks: critical objections from the piglets (compared with whose artistic empathy Nadine’s is a gift of the Muses); at least six more weeks: changes from the distributor (it is not true that man is descended from the ape: the ape is a man who has imagined himself returned to nature out of shame of his humanity);

another six weeks: changes from the director (who, soon united with Nadine in spirit and in bed, has a dreadful say in the matter)—

summa summarum: four and a half months of coprophagia.

But that’s the normal steep cost of doing business: I have to take it into account.

•

I had taken it into account when planning to do what I had originally intended to do: misappropriate four of the eight weeks from the movies (and from cineastic existence) and write in monastic isolation through the blue-gold days and the quietly misty evenings—

not the agreed-upon screenplay, but my book . . .