My fantasy text: the poem, or novel, so completely ensconced within a normal period style that it in no way transcended this style. This is a fantasy because I'd like to believe that all texts, even ostensibly mediocre ones, have a residue of excess, something that is not wholly circumscribable to an a priori definition.

I once began a novel (I only wrote 3 or 4 pages; I am no novelist) in which one of the characters is studying the work of a fictional French writer who exemplifies the "perfect" text, that is, the text with no such residue: nothing that is not explainable by a set of rigid conventions. The hero of my novel was fascinated by this perfect conventionality; it allowed him to define the ruling conventions of this writer's work as a perfect structuralist critic. Of course the critic in my novel would have gone insane.

My interest in banality is thus two-fold: I am interested in why others don't necessarily see it where I do, and in the structuralist dream of the perfectly banal, conventional text, one that doesn't exceed the convention by the slightest hair. Once a text slipped into this complete, perfect banality, it would suddenly become an object of fascination again. Boredom is impossible.

The subjective sense of feeling oneself to be "brilliant." How odd that is! It seems to be created, confirmed, by the banality surrounding oneself. Jordan is right: I don't want to set myself up as an arbiter. What I'm trying to do is examine myself, avoid falling into the trap, whatever that trap is. Seeing oneself as "mystery genius"? (Jordan's coinage).