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directly hopeless

England was very gloomy and the area around James Senior's house was extremely gray and inactive. I typed letters and took the tube down to Victoria and then to Picadilly Station. My host was reserved and seemed physically at odds with his rather extreme ideas. John Duncan tape-recorded himself having sex with a corpse. With what he later described as "intense self-disgust" he returned to the United States to have a vasectomy, in order, he later wrote, "to make sure that the last potent seed I had spent was with a cadaver." When I saw her leave I got off of the crates which constituted my bed and stepped cautiously into the bare yard. On one side stood a whitewashed and crumbling stone wall, with a single picture dangling from a nail. It was a weatherbeaten watercolor of the sky, with a cracked frame. I stared into the vacant sunlight, the electric lines buzzing on all sides. It began to rain. It was then that I realized that I was still sitting at my table and looking into a jam-jar filled with water and the sheets of paper all around.