Likes: boxing, dogs, sage, sage after rain, coyotes, raccoons, jellyfish, kickboxing, beer in steins, Eugene O’Neill, Malcolm Lowry, Homer, aloe vera juice, sandwiches with sourdough bread, lunch breaks spent reading – the lunch must be packed, hummus, pomegranates, weight-lifting, dreams, uneventful dreams, nightmares, natural associations, Ron and Fez, defunct online video games, whales, old forums, art museums, Harold Pinter
Dislikes: melodrama, sentimentality, Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry, leafy parsley, fine dining, cruise ships, social media, the NBA, Vladimir Nabokov, people who are overly socialized – who reduce people to social types with a cynicism that is really narrowness of vision and besides is unoriginal, people who go to art museums, German Romanticism, wine snobbery, sociology, Gilles Deleuze, New York, women
Likes: Soren Kierkegaard, Gustave Flaubert, pasta, the color green, racing green, green cars, sharks, birds, binoculars, Casio watches, cheap keyboards, thrift stores, bookstores, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Mariam Petrosyan, chess, go, poker, casinos, beaches with no one on them, Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, Dmitry Bivol, the USSR, the American South, willow trees, baguettes, tofu, the dark early morning hours
Dislikes: Jean-Paul Sartre, John Cheever (for the most part), Susan Sontag, internet humor, video essays, activists, pollution, littering, people who go to thrift stores, the term “discourse,” the primacy of gender and racial politics in literary criticism, autofiction, politicians, economists, Karl Marx, the Austrian school, epiphanies in fiction, Elon Musk, David Foster Wallace, the play ‘night Mother, musicals, artists, meetings of artists, the Aeneid, men, Camille Paglia
Likes: Arturo Gatti, Edward Abbey, James Salter, Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, the Olympics, cocktails, trailer parks – specifically the one near my old neighborhood in Texas which flooded during Hurricane Harvey, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, The Honeymooners, film noir, Raymond Chandler, the Mojave desert, the Sonoran desert, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, pickles, tea and lemonade, running – “roadwork,” old people, wryly resigned people, being drunk, the drunkenness of health after a run, Giovanni Boccaccio, philosophical nominalism, William James
Dislikes: psychiatry, the cult of enlightened psychedelic use – a bit of an anachronism in the 2020s, the Bloomsbury Group, online acolytes of the Unabomber, people who speak with sagacity the pithy thoughts of another – the young woman I heard declaim American Psycho was “a satire on masculinity,” people who laugh loudly, people with tattoos, women who can only talk about their marriage, women who can only talk about their children, Yukio Mishima, designer fashion, aspirants to defunct Euro-aristocratic lifestyles, bodybuilding, short form content, the mentally ill, phone calls, text messages, landlords, the Olympics
Likes: open spaces, silence, plants, the silent invisible growth of plants, the sun, the sound of rivers, cormorants diving in rivers, mergansers, surly but gentle dogs, Jim Croce, Blind Willie McTell, Ishman Bracey, whiskey, limes, Coca-Cola, humorous tenderness – laughter which does not judge us, untroubled awareness of one’s limitations, hikes, longhorns, dragonflies, the sound of ice in glasses, old barrooms, Bull Terriers, Bulldogs, friendship, combat, jump-roping, boxing shoes, landing a sharp jab, the shoulder roll, landing a roundhouse on the pads which sounds typically, tritely enough like a gunshot, Charles Bovary, Nirvana (to my adult surprise)
Dislikes: people who cry easily, people who never admit to crying, bitterness, grudges, therapyspeak, rap music, the elevation of rap music via longwinded cultural articles and analyses written by snide white people who also read Gilles Deleuze (a dying breed, maybe I’ll miss them), Jean-Luc Godard, La nouvelle vague en général, romantic effusiveness, undergraduates, undergraduates in the humanities, plastic surgery, graffiti, graffiti with a message, classic rock of the Queen arena-loving variety, Ezra Pound, Platonism, people who think art is ultimately self-expression, people who treat art as a vehicle for self-aggrandizement or even worse simple realization of a self they never had before picking up a pen or brush, orthorexics, Banksy, people who constantly inform you you’d be “better off” without them, people with eating disorders
Likes: forgiveness, gentleness, hands reaching across the table to touch ours, patience, the bearing with ourselves, the bearing with others, the bearing with others in painful extremity, love which is grinding and real, hatred, hate which is grinding and real, outbursts of hate, vituperation, insults, anger over glumness or frowning propriety, driving fast, harmonicas, flutes, the moon, the moon as the moon and not the Eternal Feminine or a man with a face, the moon as something white and gentle and shining and wholly unthinking, the moon as essentially a lucky rock, the planets, the planets as something quiet and alien and unfeeling, the planets like birds of paradise, lists, sex, Chekhov’s The Dangers of Tobacco, happiness, unhappiness, Jack Dempsey
Dislikes: cleverness, literature which winks, which sneers, which shrugs, literature that asserts, humanity, charity, the lack of charity, love, family, the unfeelingness of everything even feeling itself, the knowledge we possess about ourselves which limits our ability to know others, Simone de Beauvoir, menswear, Theodore Adorno, mysticism, Emanuel Swedenborg, marriage, tarot, when people say “energy” in the sense of mysticism or mood or emotional atmosphere, nose rings