I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something…about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.

I thought about the elements of a thriller, as a genre: danger, death, uncertainty, violence, crime, corruption. Certainly all of these things are in the ether as we speak; and suspense, well, we are all undeniably suspended in some way right now.

I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.