This story is not, however, from Diaries. It comes from The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, written by Dali himself and published in 1942.

From both books, I could quote many more such gruesome incidents — Cobain sounding like one of the Columbine killers, Dali confessing to his bride-to-be that he wants to kill her. But I think you get the flavour of it all.

George Orwell takes to task Dali's autobiography, and his art, in his exceptional essay Notes on Dali:

"In an age like our own, when the artist is an altogether exceptional person, he must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility, just as a pregnant woman is. Still, no one would say that a pregnant woman should be allowed to commit murder, nor would anyone make such a claim for the artist, however gifted. ... And, after all, the worst crimes are not always the punishable ones. By encouraging necrophilic reveries one probably does quite as much harm as by, say, picking pockets at the races. One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.' Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being."

Was Cobain a talented songwriter and performer? I think so, yes. I've enjoyed several of Nirvana's songs throughout the years.

But these diaries reveal that he was simultaniously a moral cesspool.

That is, as indelicately as I can put it, his own damn fault. Blame depression, blame bad homes, blame the drugs, blame whatever the hell you want — plenty of people face those demons. Kurt Cobain chose surrender to them, in the end delivering his life up to them. He didn't have to. He chose to. The mystique of his music shouldn't disuade us from realizing this simple fact.

It's not suprising that fans don't want to view this. To try and reconcile their brief and torrid love affair with the art of a monster.

Here's hoping that most of them are afraid of a seeing eye, not a mirror.