1.      So how long did it take you to read the book? 

I didn’t actually finish the book. So when people talk about the ending (this happened the other day in the lime aisle) I have to front like I know what they are saying. Like yesterday, in the lime aisle, this elderly woman saw me with the book and said, “That’s a funny book. I like the monologue by the guy who draws the dwarves with giant penises. That’s the best monologue I’ve read from a mentally defective character since Faulkner.” And I just had to shake my head and smile and fake it. So.

2. Did you ever read the book in public places or leave the book out purposefully when visitors were over?  

Ha Ha.  Well, yes, as I mentioned the grocery store. I mean I know there’s like this Bolano surge right now and so then a backlash (Newtonian law there) and a lot of my friends (so-called) sort of rolled their eyes over me reading Bolano but fuck them. I walk alone, you know? I’m not going to have others deciding what I want to read. I mean that would be almost anti-literature. I couldn’t read something just to say I’ve read it. That would be like picking your college major because your parents want you to be like a landscape architect or something. I mean only about 20% or something of people even have a college degree. The entire point is to select your occupation, to attempt to create your destiny, and you’re just going to toss it away? You’re just going to abdicate free will? Fuck that. I’m not reading a damn thing for others. That would be death.

3.     How did you deal with the footnotes, I mean logistically? I know some people like to use two bookmarks. 

What in the fuck are you talking about?

4. Have you read other Bolano? How did this book compare?

I read The Third Reich. It was serialized in The Paris Review. I felt like Charles Dickens and shit reading a serialized novel. It was a strong book, very, very technical (something Bolano prided himself on, when he wanted to write a technical book) and with this ominous undertone, the constant state of threat, a character who really NEEDS TO HELP HIMSELF and knows it, but just can’t. You ever felt that way? I have. I could relate. You ever stuck a cattle prod down your throat but LIKED THE TASTE? (That’s a metaphor, BTW) I also read that short story collection where every story (IMO) is really about writing. Craft, how to write, etc. It might look like the stories are about something else, but you’re wrong. It’s called something last evenings? I don’t remember. But Bolano, in his essence, is always writing about writing. That’s what he gives a shit about, period

5. Did you ever read the book while on drugs or alcohol? 

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It is odd how a magazine that entrusts their readership with the most reputable of writing can simultaneously treat them so obtusely as to give them 8 links to the same subscription page in one notice, as if they needed such excessiveness to either help with a decision or to find the link. Obviously, the editorial and subscription departments are two separate beasts, the latter’s sense of rhetoric as blunt as a teenager with a hard on, dry humping the nearest throw pillow. I can live with the (3) “save 75%” and (7) “renew now” capitalisty buttons, and there’s something almost endearing about their final (8) footnote-ish “subtle” oh-in-case-you-missed-it-the-first-seven-times hyperlink, but (5) that Eustice Tilley has been reduced to a roll over link, the symbolic object of his lepidopterous preoccupation now cropped, is something sad. To say he is blinded by commerce would be too easy, thus their editors are free to call me. The race for high brow has gotten so high, over the scalp, the best hairlines are found at the ass. For the past year, I flip through the cartoons during dinner, finding it all kind of funny.