I had well over a hundred deviations rollocking around in there for a while; kept trimming them down. In the last two weeks I have got ahead and now my box is empty. Amazing. The other day I wrote something, which is more amazing, but it gave me the feeling of having done something, which means I do not need now to write anything else. However, I'm writing this, so it can't be entirely true.

You guys like reading about reading, right? I read another Kerouac - Visions of Cody - and although it had a lot of dreamy splurge in it, like Doctor Sax that I disliked a lot, it also had tonnes, lemington spa tonnes, full breasted tonnes of good wanderlust Kerouac. But besides that it gave off all his womanising ways which I don't remember from On The Road or Big Sur or Dharma Bums or any others - sure he mentions it slightly, naturally, but never so constantly, consistently and always as cunt. Always the women are cunt. It was like Bukowski, whose Women I read just before, and if you ever wanna read Bukowski I think it's a good idea to begin with Ham on Rye to understand what's going on by the time he's 50 in Women and enjoying himself sickly. Who would've thought, as me, several years ago listening to a girl talking about how much she loved Kerouac because of On The Road - the Kerouac superstar Beat guy - and to imagine what she would have made, then, of him had she read this. Only naivety, it doesn't make any difference now.

The sentences and pace of Proust's first 30 pages reminds me a lot of Kerouac, and Kerouac talks about Proust frequently in Visions of Cody, so no big surprise. It is interesting the links you find between disconnected authors - authors as characters in our minds, alive in the history of books...

I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It was brilliant. Then I played some more Fallout 3. [link]

Another amazing cultural thing these days is theatre. Summer theatre! Globe Theatre £5 standing thingies, and we're going to go watch The Cherry Orchard next month, which I read recently and liked. And more Shakespeare - The Winter's Tale - by the same theatre company at the Old Vic.

£2 charity shop books are thin on the ground in my mini library jumbled on top of my boxes in my room (I want to make a real book case or shelving attached to the wall, but I am neither a DIY man nor have I any idea really what to do beyond 'getting' some brackets and hammering them into the wall with the nails and hammer I purchased months ago for the task), which is mostly Amazon marketplace stuff or arbitrary trips to Foyles - my least disliked central London bookshop - , but this Chekhov slim volume of Four Great Plays was a find that I am particularly proud of. Bye.