Thursday, January 28, 2010

"Don't ever tell anybody anything.


If you do, you start missing everybody."

rip, j.d.

(A nice post on Holden here from my friend Brendan McKennedy:
Holden
(second post down)

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Bukowski on starting at a new job.


"I always started a job with the feeling
that I'd soon quit or be fired,
and this gave me a relaxed manner
that was mistaken for intelligence
or some secret power."
--Factotum, 1975

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Thursday, January 21, 2010

Nobody writes quietly enough.


It may be impossible to write quietly enough.
I predict the greatest writer of the future
will be the quietest writer who ever wrote.

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Zombies & Personal Electronic Instruments.


The force that drives the zombie to bite a human being
is the same force that drives a human being to turn into
a slave to the computer, the cellphone & the other things people
look at & can't stop looking at & checking every two seconds.

The thing about zombies isn't simply that they
need the blood or brains of a human being for sustenance & survival,
or that in obtaining it they create another vampire or zombie,
or so I understand it, but that they are irretrievably self-centered
& occupied with their own internal processes & urges. I.e., zombies
are the rudest things there is.

I finally got a cellphone out of fear I'd be stuck broke down in
my car somewhere at night & not be able to find one of those phone
booths they used to have. I made the mistake of giving people the
number. If they want to call, fine, but they text. I don't text.
If I want to write I'll be making out a grocery list, or working
on a novel, or doing a tenth step. Getting sucked into the realm of
texting, in my opinion, is like getting bitten by a zombie--you
become one yourself.

Texting is bad enough, but somebody checking their cellphone
every four seconds when I'm talking to them in person, that's over.
If somebody can't have a face-to-face conversation with somebody
else for a few minutes without fixatedly checking their cellphone,
then they are a zombie and good-bye instantly to them from now on.
I cannot wait till I get the chance to do that, and it will be
very soon.

Never talk to anybody when they're at their computer, and this includes
me. If you do, if you have to talk to them then, ask them if they can
not stare at their screen for a couple minutes of human being conversation.
They won't be able to do it. Even when I turn sideways to talk to
somebody, I'm still looking at my computer out the corner of my eye,
in case an email comes in or somebody posts to that wonderful thread
about commas, or I lost track of that metaphor that was forming in my
big genius head. Anybody who you try to have a conversation with when
they are in front of their computer is a zombie, or, in my case, part-zombie.

Do not become a zombie. Or do not become any more of a zombie than
you absolutely have to. Unless it is already too late.

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Sad for the World.


Somebody, maybe me, said the world was not a happy place with sadness
in it, but a sad place with happiness in it. The sadness will eat you alive
if you let it. It'll eat everybody alive. Even if you don't believe
in happiness, like Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies, please try to help somebody
who does believe in it have a little more of it maybe, or at least don't
take theirs away.

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Monday, January 18, 2010

Writing in the Rain.


Not literally.
It's raining out there finally in sunny SoCal.
Supposed to rain for a couple days.
Time seems to stop.
Looking out my writing window through a ficus & trellis
into the sizzling city.
Perfect for writing.
Coffee.
Had to turn the little writing lamp on to cut the gray.
Perfect for writing without cease.
Might as well check the sports page first,
see when the Lakers are on.
7:30, TNT.
Now to writing.
I ought to pet my cat a little first,
he's going to be in all day,
roasting by the heater.
Check my email, get that out of the way.
Turn the cell off.
Check it first.
Now, to write.
Oh, time for lunch!

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Sunday, January 17, 2010

What music did Charles Bukowski listen to when he wrote?


Classical!

Bukowski will clean your writing pipes right out.

Just read his The Captain is Out to Lunch and The Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship (2002, Ecco, 144 pp., illustrated by R. Crumb).

He wrote it 1991-93, died in 1994, so he was 71 or 72. Certainly mellowed some, a little, not drinking (as) much, married, 9 cats, funny as ever, just as hard-ass on people, the human specie, mainly at how walking-dead they are, still a writer above all else, basically going to the racetrack all day & writing (at the computer) at night.

"For instance, every day as I drive to the track I keep punching the radio to different stations looking for music, decent music. It's all bad, flat, lifeless, tuneless, listless.... It's horrible, horrible drivel entering the minds of young heads. They like it. Christ, hand them shit, they eat it up. Can't they discern? Can't they hear? Can't they feel the dilution, the staleness? ... Well, yes, there is classical music. I finally have to settle for that. But I know that is always there for me. I listen to that 3 or 4 hours a night.... Think of all the people alive who have never heard decent music. No wonder their faces are falling off, no wonder they kill thoughtlessly, no wonder the heart is missing."

Then you also get stuff like this, the night after a rare bender the night before:

"It's good sitting here tonight in this little room on the second floor listening to the radio, the old body, the old mind mending. I belong here, like this. Like this. Like this."

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Thursday, January 14, 2010

Question for those who have seen Avatar.


Any good conversation in it?

A recommended movie with lots of it:
"The Secret of the Grain" (French-Tunisian).
There are at least five extended scenes in there that
are powerful & beautiful in their depiction of human
beings expressing themselves passionately in words.
Money back guarantee.

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