Bored People, Unless They Sleep A Lot,

Nice Criticism Is Good When It Tells You Something. A Lot Of Negative "criticism" Isn't Criticism At All: It's Just Nasty, "writerly" Cliché And Invective.

Speech, Tennis, Music, Skiing, Manners, Love- You Try Them Waking And Perhaps Balk At The Jump, And Then You're Over. You've Caught The Rhythm Of Them Once And For All, In Your Sleep At Night. The City, Of Course, Can Wreck It. So Much Insomnia. So Many Rhythms Collide. The Salesgirl, The Landlord, The Guests, The Bystanders, Sixteen Varieties Of Social Circumstance In A Day. Everyone Has The Power To Call Your Whole Life Into Question Here. Too Many People Have Access To Your State Of Mind. Some People Are Indifferent To Dislike, Even Relish It. Hardly Anyone I Know.

My Dislike Has No Consequences. It Accrues Only In My Mind—like Preserves On A Shelf Or Guns Zeroing In, And Never Firing.

Hardly Anyone About Whom I Deeply Care At All Resembles Anyone Else I Have Ever Met, Or Heard Of, Or Read About In Literature.

The Writer Has A Grudge Against Society, Which He Documents With Accounts Of Unsatisfying Sex, Unrealized Ambition, Unmitigated Loneliness, And A Sense Of Local And Global Distress. The Square, Overpopulation, The Bourgeois, The Bomb And The Cocktail Party Are Variously Identified As Sources Of The Grudge. There Follows A Little Obscenity Here, A Dash Of Philosophy There, Considerable Whining Overall, And A Modern Satirical Novel Is Born.