This weekend in Toledo I also read "H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life." I had not read any other Michel Houellebecq, though I know how to spell his last name. People find his other books cold and weird. I just loved, L-U-V-ed, this Lovecraft book. I feel a little shame at liking Lovecraft as much as I do, which isn't a huge whole lot but is enough. To compound my shame, I think he's one of the writers that I started to read because Harlan Ellison told me to when I was 14. Borges, Lovecraft, Lem. I genuinely like these writers and I'm happy I picked them up before I had too much to worry about pridewise. I think anyone who finishes and enjoys The K*** R***er has a lot more to be embarrassed about.

This book's explanation of Lovecraft's racism made a lot of sense to me. Lovecraft was a genteel racist, the upper-middle-class New England type that I know, until he moved to New York and lived in poverty. His dealings there with immigrants and lower-class people inspired him to create his stories' creepy races of half-human half-monsters. And, says Houellebecq, all he and his protagonists could do was wait to be inevitably beaten by this stronger race. It definitely is an old-New-England type of feeling. Fear of the vigorous Italian, who is destined to overrun your old town. I'm sure my nat. fath. looks at his daughters married to Poles and Irishmen and sees his great legacy laid to waste in a similar manner.

The other day I was talking to an interior designer and he shared his theory with me: that interior designers are the modern equivalent of the hermit. Because they're in society but not of it. They step into people's lives and then leave them and go back and live alone. So I started reading about Thomas Merton, in Guy Davenport and Ralph Eugene Meatyard's "Father Louie," which is the only book about hermits I had around the house. Thomas Merton sounds like a complicated guy and I guess now I have to read "The Seven Story Mountain." And make an effort once again to understand the Black Mountain school. But one thing Thomas Merton did is, he wrote the coolest book title ever. "Cables to the Ace."

When I'm loitering around on the Web all bored, it's nice to know there are huge archives at exile.ru. This morning I read a Mark Ames review of an underground club in Moscow that contained an accurate description of what it felt like after seeing the Butthole Surfers in what I assume was 1988. I remember walking down an empty street in Pontiac, Michigan, in a haze after seeing them for the first time, in euphoria, feeling like I had seen something no one ever had before. (This also was the first time I had seen a g-string on a live woman, and actually, come to think of it, probably the last time.) Or seeing an exhibit of Joseph Beuys at the museum in Darmstadt, Germany. All the American kids were talking about this weird part of the museum with felt and lard and dishes of bees. I remember wandering through the galleries, room after room, knowing nothing about the artist, and all the labels were in German, and being so intensely, mystically moved. I really couldn't tell you why. The more I read about Beuys later on, the happier I am that the first time I saw his work I had no clue what it was about, because evidently I felt what he'd intended his viewers to feel. Usually when I'm given hints on what to feel about art I go ahead and feel it. As long as I like the art, I'll go along with what's asked of me. But I'd have had a hard time going along with an order to feel the oneness or whatever I felt at this show.

That said, we saw "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" yesterday. All the actors in it were charming, like heart-eyes charming if you know your old Monkees shows. I didn't walk out of the theater feeling like a new person; I felt like I had spent the exact amount of time in the theater as I actually had.