It’s macabre of me to be reading The Collected Stories of Patricia Highsmith during Christmastime, but I am. And I’m loving it. They’ve all been pretty great so far but two in particular have really blown me away. “One For the Islands” and “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving.” It’d be dull of me to describe their plots. What it boils down to is that they’re both quite short and concrete yet mysterious. That’s so hard to do well. Alberto Moravia manages to do the same things in The Fetish. The Highsmith stories are melancholy, but it’s a sort of chaotic melancholia. A disruption of identity. 

One day you look around you and you don’t know how to relate to the familiar objects and people that have surrounded you for so long. Is there anything scarier than that? I think it’s even more frightening than being forced to confront the unknown. Because it’s the known becoming the unknown. One of the things that affects me strongly when it comes to Cronenberg and his stuff. I read that his first novel will be published next year.