i am not as hardcore as richard yates

from the article about yates in the newest new yorker:

He lived in New York, in Iowa, in Los Angeles, in Boston, and, finally, in Alabama, yet his homes were identical in their shabby discipline of neglect. In each there was a table for writing, a circle of crushed cockroaches around the desk chair, curtains made colorless by cigarette smoke, a few books, and nothing much in the kitchen but coffee, bourbon, and beer.

I love the detail about the crushed cockroaches in a circle.

and here I sit, with a laptop connected to the internet, blogging. I have to say, if you hadn't already guessed, I am a total sucker for this idea of the writer as the ascetic visionary, which I can see yates as. revolutionary road is a fucking good novel, and it's plenty antisocial. (the preview with kate winslet and leo looking angry is horrible; I hate that cat power cover.) I was in the bookstore the other day and read bits and pieces of this book and found that I fell into the camp of people who just want their myths of writers to be preserved; don't tell me kafka was a socialite who loved whores. the whores, okay, that I can deal with, even joyce liked whores; but it's true that the photo of kafka smiling with a dog and a woman is a great deal less impressive than the one taken months before his death.

the funny thing is that we require these things to be nonfiction; if someone wrote a novel about such a writer, we would probably all call them out for being pretentious. however, if this glamorous image is applied to a writer who actually existed, it becomes too holy to be desecrated even by truth.