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Obviously the best book about or set in a sanatorium is "The Magic Mountain." Thomas Mann.

A sort of latter-day adaptation of the sanatorium, one employed often by Milan Kundera, is the "spa town." These are big in Central Europe. Little towns built over hot springs with chinzy psuedo-medical facilities and lots of naked bathing and promenades. My personal favorite spa town novel is "The Farewell Party" (aka "The Farewell Waltz") which features a fraud doctor specializing in the treatment of infertility. He's the best in the field, cures nearly everyone, and eventually you find out that all he's doing is injecting his unsuspecting patients with his own sperm. He spends one scene dreaming a future Czechoslovakia where everyone looks like him. Then half the characters eat poison.

I could use a sanatorium or a spa town or some poison myself right now. New York. Ugh. This last week I worked five days, 9 to 5 at the United Way, doing data entry. First of all New York rush hour, morning and evening, is an intensely psychologically brutalizing experience. There's really nothing I can compare it to. Every morning I watch grown men and women literally fight each other over the privilege of standing with their face in a stranger's arm pit. There are simply more people than space on the trains. I usually have to let two or three trains go without me being on them, all the while jockeying for position on the platform so that when the next one comes I'll be close enough to hold my own in the subsequent skirmish. Then you get to work, which is another matter entirely.

As far as I can tell, New York offices serve no legitimate purpose. They are not involved in the production (or destruction) of any object. They contribute in no way to anything. All they seem to do is to provide a place where people can roll their little rock up their respective hill (said rock often taking the form of incomprehensible digital data). Then you get paid, and can then pay your rent, bills, and go shopping. It reminds of that scene in the beginning of "City Lights" where you see a shot of all these people coming up from a subway station and over that image is quickly imposed an image of cattle being herded toward the killing floor in a slaughterhouse. Real fast, then the commuters are back and then it cuts and you're like, "Did I just see that?" Yes, you did. And that shit is real fucking life. I have been more or less against capitalism all my adult life. As a younger man I was literally a card carrying member of the Communist Party. I joined on the Internet, hoping to get placed on an FBI list. Then the Party started sending me newsletters telling me to vote for Gore, and emails addressed to Comrade Brandon which ended with the sign-off, "Yours in the Struggle, Comrade So-and-So." What I'm saying is I drifted away from Marxism for reasons that should be obvious. But being here, seeing the way New York City is essentially a giant labor camp, and living it like this, well let's just say it brings back memories and a burning sense of class rage.

I finished "The Brothers Karamazov" a few weeks ago. There is this incredible chapter in it where Ivan Karamazov talks to the Devil for a good long time, then a trial scene. The ending is very strange. I don't know if I have anything super intelligent to say about it. I'm still trying to get my head around that ending, which will probably require that I read the book again sometime in the next year. It all goes back to the Elder Zosima, and Jesus, but I'm not sure quite how.

Next I tried to read "Extinction" by Thomas Bernhard, which is basically an unremitting symphony of hatred. I loved it, but then Thanksgiving came and I was feeling so much hatred that then reading about hatred created this overload that began to push me into dark areas. So I set it aside, to be resumed soon. Bernhard is fucking great by the way. Austrian, '60's and 70's. "Frost" and "The Loser" being both excellent.

I just finished, about ten minutes ago, "The Dark Side of Camelot" by Seymour Hersh, who is a national treasure. Fucking great book. Portrait of the President as Caligula. It deals in equal depth with Kennedy's power trips, particularly successful assassinations of foreign leaders such as Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Rafael Trujillo in the DR, and Diem in Vietnam. And of course the Castro mania. Also corrupt dealing with the mob and the Soviets. Then there's the sex. Lots and lots of sex. At this point in history everyone knows Kennedy had affairs. But no. Constant sex, neverending fuckfests with two or three or four or a dozen hookers in the White House pool, with both his brothers and their friends present. According to someone quoted in the book, Kennedy once explained this behaviour by saying: "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass everyday."

Am I writing? Other than scrawling the word "fuck" repeatedly in a notebook, no, not at present, though there are some ideas kicking around. I'm translating CA Conrad into Spanish. It works really well because he's so linguistically intense, which means you can use Spanish words like APESTOSO, meaning incredibly smelly.

And finally, a response to Abbi's question: What is an author?
An author is a creature who was invented by writers a long time ago to try to pass off what they did with their time, namely writing, as something more respectable than it really is. This was a dishonest act on the part of said writers. Writing is not supposed to be respectable, and if it is you're probably not doing it right. (I leave the inevitable sexual analogy to the reader's own mind.) The author then became a device by which "successful" writers could differentiate themselves from novices, upstarts, amateurs and genuine talents. Think about it. What kind of a prick douchebag says "I am an author" in response to a banal "Whaddya doo" type question? Then the author got highjacked by French intellectuals who, after the Second World War, were busily attempting to make European culture commit suicide. To this end, they postulated all sorts of theories of who or what the author was. The author either didn't exist, or was guilty of some bad postmodern thing (such as being French). Roland Barthes was the principal offender here. Nowadays the author does not exist. The author does, however, appear. This occurs during Author Appearances at places like Barnes and Noble and the Library. It is part of the now mandatory push to promote the latest Best Book Ever during the short window of time that exists between said book's publication and everyone forgetting that it ever existed. The author, then, started life as a line of bullshit and to bullshit the author has returned. Ashes to ashes.