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Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

As the cult of martyrs developed in the West;

You get the impression SUVs are decadent, somehow.

Brandishing a phallic wand, an archaeologist with clear blond eyes, a Bob,

I guess I’ll woo these impolitic wonks

At the necropolis, ha!

Striding among them,

A charioteer, I watch as some are wrapped

In spotted pelts and set alight like dogs. This post-flight ritual

Stands as a contemporary analogue.

Military leaders lead themselves.

—T. A. LOUDERMILK

Thirty-Five. Love

Thirty-Five

Love

Clare is, even, writing.

She knows the story is fake and sounds nothing like her, but she has discovered that one way a person can write is not to. Clare shouldn’t write, because Clare cannot. However, Clare can write something that someone else would write, no problem. And there happen to be a lot of prototypes floating around.

Clare thinks, for example, about what other students are producing: the tale of the demise, by compression van and obstructed rearview, of a hapless young husband on Rollerblades in an icy moonlit parking lot; the legend of the conflicted political allegiances of an entrepreneurial DJ and former child chess prodigy in Buenos Aires; a prose ballad concerning the mystery of one incommunicative mother and her real-estate addiction. What these well-crafted works share is an overweening dedication to both psychological and empirical detail; their authors seem to believe in the existence of an actual, real world subject to capitalism but also, and more significantly, to the laws of attachment and causality. Romantic and/or familial love is the eternal cultural dynamo to end all cultural dynamos and/or mediating entities. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. It makes some sense.

Too much sense, if you’re asking Clare, which, let us check for one brief moment—ah, yes, no one is!

Clare, having descended into solipsistic obsession regarding the story she has not yet written, missed the university’s registration deadline. She had been thinking, before she lost track of the calendar year, about enrolling in a Sanskrit reading course or maybe something on documentary film, but now she’s come up against a virtual barricade in the online catalogue. No amount of refreshing can save her. She has been forced to turn herself over to the administrators in Building 109, who have pertly informed Clare that her options are few but luckily there is more than one way to skin a cat and there does happen to be a seminar—if Clare will condescend to take a class in the department from which she is receiving her degree—with some availability.

This is how Clare manages to become the unique pupil in poet Don Hillary’s Spring 2004 offering. This seminar bears the extremely disheartening one-word title “Love.” Thanks to Clare, it will now not be canceled.