Phone Message Transcript: Jan. 29, 1997
[appearing on Anne's fan phone line]

"Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, January 27, 1997 and for once I'm sure of the date because I'm staring at the calendar. I want to thank those of you who turned out for Alice Borchardt's book party for her new novel BEGUILED, that's my beloved big sister, and she writes better than I do. Thank you, thank you, thank you, and thank you for putting up with my giving just a plug to another author although there's a long literary tradition for that. I also want to thank all of you who called in recommending various movies. I did see EVITA on tape while I was in California, and I thought it was absolutely spectacular. I highly, highly, highly recommend it for Antonio Banderas alone...Madonna is flawless, I think she's fantastic. I thank you for your recommendations on The English Patient and other films, I haven't gotten to see them yet.

I wanted to mention two authors to you since I'm reading, I'm deep into reading again the short stories again of Frantz Kafka and I wonder if any of you have read these stories. THE METAMORPHOSIS, THE PENAL COLONY, THE JUDGEMENT, anyway, Kafka is gonna be all that I'll be reading along with Shakespeare and the Bible, while I'm writing Armand. So I know it's going to show a great deal in this novel ARMAND; the other play of Shakespeare that I'm reading on that I'm absolutely infatuated with is OTHELLO. I highly recommend it to you it's just filled with incredibly beautiful lines at every juncture. Here's one line where Casio gets drunk: "Oh God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains." I just thought that was so breathtaking. I read this in the early hours of the morning and I get up and write these lines on a wall with Unipaint pens so that I'll remember them. But everywhere you turn there is now some incredible embellishment of language in Shakespeare, and I want ARMAND to be a very intense book with that kind of embellishment of language...embellishment isn't really the right word, I want the language to be deep and to be sensuous. Armand's tone is definitely turning out to be different from Lestat's tone. He's a much older character for one thing, he goes way back to the Renaissance and he speaks in a different style. Anyway the book is going very well, I thank you for all your calls... I cannot answer personal messages on this line. I'm sorry, I wish I could, there's a one minute message time and I love hearing from you all, and I send you my deepest love, take care and thanks again."