My generation is often caught by children’s entertainment. In some areas of the world, in some verticals of time, the preponderant relationship to art isn’t of emotional validation and then also concurrent with that nobody cares about the lives of the actual artists unless there was something ‘good’ there. This starts stories like that. In ‘The Rich Boy’ it’s pretty great. I also really liked ‘Winter Dreams’ and that chapter in ‘May Day’ about the drunk guy and the pretty girl and her losing interest while he wept. I’d read ‘Babylon Revisited’ and ‘The Freshest Boy’ before. It was like seeing a show you’d already watched the clips of. None of the stories were bad, and he’s a talented writer. He’s a bridge between the classical and the modern though he really isn’t much – at least in these stories – of a modernist. He does, whether old, new, or not, take a hard interest in emotion and while it’s not Edith Wharton it’s as if he saw this money, class, and luxury as an aesthetic quality which profoundly prompted romantic desire and as such was necessary to describe; as if it was as a process a living breathing thing which I think is a confusion of aesthetic, nostalgia, and money, which are all separate things that only sometimes and to give him credit in his stories combine. Because it’s not ‘there’ right, it disappears when you glance for it. Some of the language around women was pretty harsh. In that it made me cynical over my own life when he actually meant only to illustrate his views. Any mention of girls being ‘easy’ really bothers me. Not because I want to defend those girls but because in the past it was used against me. Which I guess was how money was for him in that boarding school.