Here I am again, kids, two weeks behind on the blogging!! I guess it's a good thing that nothing has pissed me off enough to have to blog but I, at least. should have stopped by and said hello!
I have had a few minor irritations this week but not really enough to base a blog on. Work on the book has been slow but steady. I've made acquaintance with a wonderful Australian author now living in Switzerland, Derek Haines. He has a spy book out called "Louis" which I have just started. It is very good, and shouldn't take long to finish. It's an easy read and really pulls you through. Check him out on Amazon!
I've squeaked out a few short poems over the past few weeks. I wrote an interesting one today from a poetry prompt from a site called 21st century poets. It turned out really well and is available for view on my facebook page. It's written from the view of someone who has experienced the afterlife. Now, of course, me being me, it doesn't exactly fit into premeditated forms or extant theories.
I took an opportunity this week to read huge sections of letter of one of my literary favorites, William S. Burroughs. If you've never read Naked Lunch or The Nova Express your missing out! The surrealistic plots and characters are a study in brilliance.
Now there, kids, is a dying art-- letter writing. My fellow Gen X'rs are probably the last ones that actually wrote letters, if nothing more than the crazy love notes passed in the halls at school! It's mostly text messages or e-mail, now. But, alas, it's just not the same. You had to invest soul, sense, and emotion in letters. You had to SAY IT, Putting yourself out there in precious cognitive order. Now, it's all fragmented in a hundred texts a day in an abbreviated language our grandparents wouldn't recognize. I'm not saying it's bad, but in Burroughs' letters (written in the hip jargon of that time) you can see the warmth and the intervals between letter and response, chunks of time spent wondering if all was well with friends scattered from San Fran to North Africa. Now, the response is instantaneous, and so the language is cheaper, the emotional investment, less.
Now, I am a huge fan of all of the beat writers, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, Snyder, McClure. I identify with their "outsider" legacy. I identify with their literary and societal rebellion. I identify with the idea that to change society you have to first free your mind. That life is better spent chasing your dreams, loving your friends and just having a good fucking time, man, turning up the radio to DANCE! Write-Sing-Chant-Scream. Live life to it's fullest!!!
Now, I know what you're thinking, kids.
"Well, that's all well and good there, Mr. Poet Buddy, but some of us have to work!"
True, but you don't have to BE your job. You can't let commerce control your life! Or else your going to find yourself rolling around on your death bed with some serious fucking regrets and you know you can't take it with you!
It's like that Don Henley song says, "You don't see any hearses with luggage racks."
