When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet.

I began the day standing at a threshold of time—the beginning of something, the end of something. I had a method for standing that was called art, then writing. The way I stood allowed me to see how things could begin and end this way—simultaneously.

  In the midnineties, I was a jazz head. I was a poet and I was a jazz head. I loved to read and I loved listening to music. I collected vinyl but also CDs. I shopped at Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco and brought home records by …