This book was a peasant boy made up in drag to look like a movie star (of questionable taste and virtue). Tacky but tactile and catching the light of sunrise in its gilt of questionable integrity, the volume was nevertheless lovely. It was like the image of a woman I remembered from a stereoscopic card from my aunt's collection, a souvenir from some forgotten childhood containing two (almost) identical images of a late 19th Century painted lady, a whore hidden under thick rouge and powder, painted just enough to disguise syphilis as freckles.
"This journal is not a mere literary diversion. The further I progress, reducing to order what my past life suggests, and the more I persist in the rigor of composition--of the chapters, of the sentences, of the book itself--the more do I feel myself hardening in my will to utilize, for virtuous ends, my former hardships. I feel their power." --Jean Genet
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