This is a sidecar page to my entry “First Sentences” from 23 May 2022. What follows is a list of each of the boox of My Public-Private Diary, followed by that volume’s initial sentence.
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Book 1
Instead of posting many single separate updates elsewhere, I want to begin the habit of collecting writings or readings or nonsense in single entries here on this boring blog, but it's hard to begin a new form, because INITIAL ATTEMPTS always feel to me like they should be SO IMPORTANT yet I want to remain casual; so I'll just begin wherever I think to begin, & keep doing it if I find it passable.
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Book 2
As the owner of a restaurant, if I were to witness a beautiful woman attempting to pour orange juice into a coffee cup, I would stop her politely and explain:
Only vodka goes in coffee cups, madame — the proper way to drink orange juice is from a collins glass brimming with white rum.
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Book 3
I haven’t been updating this diary as frequently as I should (the rules demand at least one new entry per day) because I fell into the trap of believing that inconsequentiality is a BAD thing; whereas the fact that what I write doesn’t matter is a VERY GOOD thing.
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Book 4
Dear diary, last night I wrote a long entry to you, and this morning I woke up and added to it; then I photo’d a couple of line drawings for imagery, but when I inserted these pics via Hypertext Markup Language, mistakenly they eclipsed the entry itself — that is, the text that I had written disappeared when I added the pictures — and there was no way for me to replenish what had existed.
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Book 5
I’m still sad about John Ashbery being dead, so I won’t write much here today; but I think it’s important that I at least try to click a few keys and mumble some words, if only for the sake of going through the motion of composition, the way that it’s important for a soldier who’s imprisoned by the enemy to continue his daily hygiene routine — shaving, paring the nails, applying the war paint — so as to lure back normalcy’s head from its ostrich hole; in the name of “fake it till you make it.”
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Book 6
Is my brain still attractive?
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Book 7
I haven’t reported to you for ages, which is to say about fourteen moments, because, in the space between the previous entry and now, I’ve translocated to my new cell (I should say “my new house”, but it still feels like jail), and there’s been no time to write.
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Book 8
In this entry, I’ll try (again) to figure out what caused me to become what I now am.
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Book 9
When is it good to be messy, and when is it good to be neat?
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Book 10
I read a lot of poetry last night.
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Book 11
If a goddess were to tell you that your house looks pretty, what would she mean?
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Book 12
I have a bad son, his name is Covid.
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Book 13
What does it mean to say that sharks are the dogs of aquatic life?
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Book 14
I’m told that James Joyce died at the age of 58, and William Shakespeare died around the age of 51.
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