Excerpt from developing novel of Roy Sokolov.

[leondacter]

I live in an apartment of infinitesimal proportions; at times I am not sure I truly exist. The apartment is in Los Angeles, California. When it rains, I stand on the walkway and imagine the droplets as lines tracing downward from heaven. It is grandiose and cloyingly romantic. At times I also fear that my romantic nature will never translate.

Comments

[beautifulgame]

this is good. excpet that, reading it again, lilly's voice is roy's.

one and the same.

maybe you disagree.
maybe we'll see.

-ZGS

Doppelgangster!

[leondacter]

Yes, their voices are one and the same in the letter. I agree, though the slight difference in poesy is due to the fact that almost the entire letter is composed of lines from 17th-century metaphysical poets. This whole journal is like a sketchbook for me. And the novel is an extensive project which I refer to only theoretically, as a nascent body in emergence or whateverthefuck; I write profusely, but I've never written a novel. I should have ostensibly finished one for an independant study in high school, but instead one of the pieces I wrote for that got me arrested. When I had a conversation with a screenwriter named Tim Schlattman, he inadvertantly angered me by telling me I have to focus on one area of writing, that I shouldn't try to do television and feature film, that I should focus on one or the other, and I thought in the back of my head, You fucking ambiverted cog I'm going to write both formats and I'm going to write poetry and at least one novel, and I'm going to direct films; I have more in mind for myself than

urban monasticism

[vinylin]

And that letter is theirs, not hers: all those Los Angeleans screaming in Roy's house. Nothing's more powerful than the postal service. Maybe t'ain't nothin' more honest neither.

Why do monastics become them?

I've been a sort of monastic recluse here all this year up until a month ago. When I began spending more time in the house with everybody else, I was socially inept. It took a couple weeks for this to wear away, for me to develop a natural-going sensitivity. But I feel comfotable now, and we spend hours each night talking about vacuous things.

[leondacter]

I would have liked to have met John Dos Passos as I often wonder what undetectable or charismatic faculty he possessed that allowed him to report on the various lives of everyday history that populate his books from the U.S.A. trilogy. I always wonder at the various forms intense observation can take, whether a person sits outside of things unthreateningly and reports judgment or submerges themself in a scene and picks it apart from the inside as if dissembling, parsing their own existence apart as a character. I've always been drawn to a specific monasticism whereby I can observe people without being cloyingly admired for my silence and my intellectual responses to brash and stupid provocations. But then people tend to deify you when you are reticent and thoughtful and offer more when you speak than a positive or negative reinforcement. Girls think you're mysterious and guys think you are a novelty of lexicographic knowledge or movie trivia or whatever your overt interest is taken to be. I'd like to think I can be witty on any

[opheliareborn]

Sorry I haven't been reading your stuff recently. I'd been without a computer. I thought this was rather interesting. I'll have to re-read it a bit later.

I heard you're moving to Cali soon?

[leondacter]

No need to apologize, Stace.

Yes, indeed I will be living in Los Angeles and chasing the dream in mid June.