Down to the bone

Shoelace Hardly anyone reads the old books anymore, in the old way, listening for a sound, or something familiar. People are forgetting what words are, how they operate, how the order is crucial. A writer worth his salt can play his mind and yours like its a piano, and make it look like he's not even trying. On the issue of order, you can't get that right unless you've first spent some time gutting your own soul, pared away the layers until you're open, pulsating vessels like a pike in a Hong Kong fish market. If you're willing to do what it takes, you can take a lot of the hard things. What the subsidy chasers and the networkers haven't figured out is that in the end you lose your teeth anyways.

I've been thinking about Rudy since that San Francisco junket, and wondering what his gig was with this Queer Identity construction he always harped on about. It's about orifices, it's not about identity. The thing about fifty per cent of the queers is that they like taking it up the ass, and the thing about the other fifty per cent is they like sticking it up where the sun don't shine, and all the public hand-holding on Fisherman's Wharf and all the cooking classes and queer identity construction identity doesn't alter those basic figures a whit. Of course, when you think about it, those stats are impressive - by my calculation about 97.8 per cent of the general population are taking it up the ass on a regular basis. Maybe the queers are some kind of superior later evolution and we're the orangutangs. Bukowski read the old books. He spent time in old libraries. He did time on skid row, and in the army. And nobody could touch him when he laid it out. Bukowski didn't give a shit about narrative or form. Buke could lay out a line so fiercely that you'd fear ever running into a man like that. There was beauty in that dirty old man. He had elegance. A gentleman in the end, somebody who could take it on the chin. I talked to this woman who calls herself a writer. I couldn't make head or tails of a word coming out of her mouth. I reached for a volume of Buke, and fell across a poem "The Shoelace" "...the dread of life is that swarm of trivialities that can kill quicker than cancer and which are always there - license plates or taxes or expired driver's license, or hiring or firing doing it or having it done to you..." I could feel the eyelids dropping, and the mind slowing down again. Buke could take away the loneliness and make it his. He was a saint that way.

janvier 1961

Cendars par Modigliani

janvier 1961 Le vieux bourlingueur à la main coupée,

S'assoit chaque jour sur un banc à la gare de l'Est, Il attend l'Orient Express sur le quai numéro 7, Qui arrive en provenance d'Istanbul à 14:17.

Il cause à son chien ratatiné qui s'appelle Wagon-lit, Son regard d'acier fusille tout ce qui passe. Ses yeux gourmands délectent tout, Une gitane Roumaine, un dandy anglais, Les vendeurs de journaux et les vendeuses de sévices, Un va-t-et-vient de promeneurs éphémères du monde entier. C'est l'œil du poète qui les guette; C'est un phare qui brille dans le brouillard. Les routards quitte la scène, la gare recule vers l'horizon; Laissant en rade une barque abandonnée, Au rez-de-chaussée rue José Maria de Heredia, Dans un 7ième arrondissement entropique et marécageux. Deux femmes découvrent un marin-poète maigrelet et desséché, Echoué sur le trottoir, avenue des bureaucrates, Gueule de crustacé sous l'ombre de l’Unesco, Sans le sou, comme au premier jour. Le souffle profond d'un vent maritime dans les poumons, La barque vire, louvoie, saisit le courant des Açores, Et vole vers la mer des Sargasses; Et plonge vers la plaine abyssale de Nares, Là où pour la première fois, La vie s'est manifestée et a jailli des profondeurs de l'océan et du soleil. Sans sépultures et sans sarcophages, Quittant pour toujours les charniers terrestres, Squattant dans une voûte aux Batignolles, Son obscurité parfaite, sa mission accomplie. Il n'y a pas de vérité, il n'y a que de l'action.

Montreal sky

That's what is left after you leave Montreal - the sky. The streets are rubble, the viaducts collapsing, still, and Santropol still making your food stick to the roof of your mouth. They stick the food into slices of bread the way a journeyman pastes mortar between bricks. North America smells like rubble these days, the homeless seem to be recently issued from the middle classes, anyone with money moves around in mobile citadels, SUVs, email, blackberries, gated communities, closed minds, desperation everywhere. Montreal on the other hand has been rubble from the word go, and comes by its seed honestly, like Buenos Aires and Pigalle.

But tomorrow we return to the flatlands, and...

Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons, plus ca devient plus ce devient bête!!!!

impostors and hangers on

Jade wasn't too happy about me showing up at the door - it wasn't consignment day - bringing your books into the famous shop is like showing up at the welfare office on the 15th of the month. The Ferlinghetti boutique is the American version of Shakespeare & Company - a museum staffed by literary majors, and the same rules as the church. You're allowed to depict men being crucified, but don't speak when the priest is giving his homily. TS Eliot is a fascist ergo, don't have to read him.

The place has a few decent photos of Ginsberg and the boys, a Bukowski poster, it's even got books. But, not mine, it was too well bound to be a chapbook, and it's not a zine, so the only way is to go through the distributors - being a writer these days is like being a pitbull taken out for a walk - sixty different ways of getting muzzled.

The bitch at the front desk spent her time apologizing to Jade for bringing her to the front desk on a non consignment day. It was all pretty reminiscent of that old lecher George at Shakespeare & Company, even past age eighty, he was reeling in the pussy on the dreams of literary glory and grotesque. Goes to show - you can be a toothless sturgeon and still bring it in, if you're making the right noises. But what does it have to do with writing?

The Gatekeepers

They stand vigilant at the portal, ready to strike down those who would blaspheme, ready to reward those who have meekly awaited their turn at the trough. They are fed themselves by the beast, they bear the scars of their tainted fare, and for suffering, they have taken their place in the hierarchy and now sit in judgment on the lonely scribe who places no filter between his thoughts and the page.

They lurk at the edge of the public agora, huddled, sweating, neurotic, murderous, jealous, obsessed, deranged, desperate, obsequious, knowing the end is near, but unable to pull out of the gyres spinning them madly counter clockwise into greater acts of folly.

They sit at the gates of hell. If you pass through the portals your fate is sealed, you are thrown into the Hades, or to a sisyphian fate, endlessly pushing a boulder up a slope for the sin of pride - daring to think you had genius. Daring to think you had anything to say. Finally, daring to think at all.

They are our leaders, the culterati, talibanistic, subsidized throat cutters. Fear them, as you would fear fear itself. Seek their reprobation, smile at their ostracizing, welcome their opprobrium. Then turn the eye away and look at life itself, at everything it has to offer, provided you are willing to embrace it alone.

The Amoral Writer

Those who have made the leap into what a writer truly is – an amoral scribe of his times – are not devoid of a conventional humanity. All that of course has to be extinguished insofar as possible. There's a price, as the realization grows of what he should be doing and writing. The best and the strongest – like Cendrars – leave the world to wonder and gaze at the sidereal tracks they have left behind. As for his basic humanity – his eldest son, Odile, showed up at his door after a seventeen year absence. It was during the war, and if the father was penniless, the son lacked even a roof over his head. “I cannot help you, you are not staying with me,” was the response of the son, and no amount of begging could change his mind. In a later letter, he defended his refusal to pay any money for the support of his children. “They will see one day that I am their best friend”. There is no-one we can count on, and there is no one who can rely on us. Everything changes, mutates, extinguishes, regenerates. The rest, all of it, is the eternal stupidity, the cretinism that binds us together, the brick and mortar of our dense mortal minds, as we huddle together in the slaughterhouse, hoping desperately for a last minute reprieve.

"The Flagship of Eternal Stupidity"

Some say this is the flagship. Others see it in Mies van der Rohe himself, or in Ayn Rand, or in the Tower of Babel, or cut rate Sudanese hashish, or in a man hanging off an oak tree in his back yard. The only thing observers agree upon is that the stupidity lives on and is passed from one moron to the next, in a historical recognition of our unerring capacity to contaminate everything we touch. We are beasts and imbeciles, one and all, but occasionally a cretin among cretins rises from the sludge and drudge of our crustacean half-lives and builds a towering monument to patriotism, to greed, to self-aggrandizement or to its opposite, the collective, engraving our endless stupidity into something more permanent, a symbol and an icon wrenched from our lives, erected into a cathedral wherein future idiots may worship and chant hymns to the gods of stupidity:

Om dummy padme stupidity

Om dummy padme stupidity

Om dummy padme stupidity

Oh, it is great and wise and idiotic

To be parked in a lot with your head up

your arse, your pocket filled with junk bonds

and subscriptions and appointments with cosmetic

surgeons.

Oh dear God of stupidity, please give me dividends

cut off my body parts and replace them with new ones

Teach me to run when others would fight

and to pander to bullies and agree with pedants.

Om dummy padme stupidity