16th June 2002 - 11:49 p.m.

People don’t know very much at all about Jandek. A stack of albums, one after another over a period of twenty something years. Each album with a cover virtually indistinguishable from the last, blurred photos of a house, the same house each time, shades down in a permanent grim summertime. One single monochrome print of a face, almost bleached out by developing fluid. The face of a thin young man, blonde, perhaps photographed by accident. It’s an uncomfortable image. It might not be Jandek at all, we know, but it is part of his legend. And it feeds into all of the myths built up around him, gradually, over all these years.

I first heard of Jandek on Saturday afternoon. A curious fascination emerged - a bit of an obsession, if truth be known. I didn’t want to hear the music. That was such a small part of the myth, and a part too tangible, too concrete, to sustain the obsession for long. But there’s something special in this story, some idea of a lone man in a house with the blinds down, playing the guitar in a permanent bleached out summertime. The suspicion that this man, this insect-man, could be one of the neighbours. A sickly outsider in another world, somewhere down the road.

I don’t want to know any more about Jandek. The thought of him makes me claustrophobic, makes me long for rain to wash the sun off the streets. It makes me think of all the other insect men, underground men (is there a female literary equivalent?), caught in a world without romance or tragedy, this sickness unto death. Trapped and scratching at the walls, prints with clawmarks. People who emerge from their houses rubbing their eyes, on their way to dark bars and darker encounters. People on whom one can almost smell the dust. Uncomfortable, it is, even to share space with these people, just as uncomfortable as it is to see that print of Jandek, or someone else.

I think of Jandek, and I think of the others, and I clench my fists and wait to be released from this burden.

Do you know Azure Ray at all? They turned up on my computer on Saturday evening, all strange and new. They were on the Saddle-Creek website, and the ebb of the cello, and the faltering of the voice, came as a relief to me. They swept a myth assunder, took the dust with them, and caught me unawares. We adore them for that, for that one song. Life flows on, for some of us.

And there are more myths that we shall do away with, like the myth of Passant-the-Dandy. People don’t look hard enough, don’t see the creases, the worn shoes, the failure to afford dry-cleaning. They don’t see the cheap fallings apart. Perhaps I don’t stand for dandyism anymore, perhaps the direction of this diary is testament to the fact. Perhaps there are bigger things to stand for, or fall for, and perhaps they occupy my attentions these days. Poverty, my friends. Abject poverty. Do you know it at all? Let me tell you about it.

Life grows heavier, weightier, until one flirts with the idea of throwing it into the street in hope that it will no longer have to be borne in this fashion. Debts and obligations multiply, clothes diminish ever more. Someday there will be nothing left other than a beloved pair of Jeffrey Wests. Thoughts grown strained, impoverished. The thought of selling all of my books, selling all of my records, and the awareness that this was something to do with a casting aside, a stripping away of life. And the thought that this was a point on the way to there being nothing left at all.

I'm under strict orders, self-inflicted, not to quote Somerset Maughan. Consider it done.

It’s easy to create myths, but still somewhat surprising when people believe them.