If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.

I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering.

Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.

I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.

Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing - a kind of night vision.