I don’t know.

I wrote an essay about this quote

Gumaro drank a lot, but he almost never showed the effects of alcohol. When he got drunk, he would pull his chair over to the window and scrutinize the sky, saying:

“My brain needs air.”

This meant that he was elsewhere. Then he would start to talk about vampires.

“How many Dracula movies have you seen?” he asked Pancho.

“None, Gumaro.”

“Then you don’t know much about vampires,” said Gumaro.

Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman, p. 225

and then thought to myself, “this essay dude sounds kind of like a jerk.

“Because the way I’d really like to describe liking this would proceed roughly from my idea of ‘arrogant art,’ which is especially things from someone already recognized that, sure, maybe there are nice ideas in it, but that’s presented in a way so boring or off-putting that without their name attached to it, no one would bother looking at it, like a movie that you’d turn off after the first twenty minutes, and then mention the David Foster Wallace quote but also that, in the version presented, he kind of failed at that with The Pale King (which isn’t his fault, obviously, because the book wasn’t done. Maybe it would have been totally different if he lived), and then just say, bam, Bolaño seems pretty great because despite his desire to really bludgeon a reader with his passions, creepy conspiratorial shit and horrible violence, he also writes in a way that is fun.

“And I’m trying to do fun.”

But I didn’t write that essay. Instead I wrote something else, but it was pretty crumby.