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“I Am Life, Mother. . . ” — Hair
I just caught “Hair” on TCM last night. I had seen it in 1979 twelve years after it was produced on Broadway and, in my mind and experience, ten years after the close of the Sixties; for me the 70s were post-apocalyptic and a very drab decade, although I was married in 1970 and struggling to make my way while raising two children. I had summered at a friend’s home in Woodstock in 1968 and 1969 and observed the revolution in that upstate rural town. There were artists, and mock artists, poets, head shops (do you recall?), and the glorious…
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That Old Black Magic
That impulse to lay down a few words is here once more. I try to leave a two day space between blogs just to let the unconscious percolate. in fact, it is my contention that books are written unconsciously and what we do is channel them. I say that because the first book of “i” was written in white heat in about seven days; what is remarkable to me is that it didn’t need much editing at all. So when I come to write I let it flow out and then I revise; I try not to censor myself, often…
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I Don’t Need This
I’m surfing aross the net looking for directories of literary ezines, online zines that review books such as mine; it is tiresome. I have no publicist, no order to what I’m doing except an inner pulse that moves me in this direction and then into that one. Clearly books are a product, and clearly marketing is the purpose for distributing this product. Marketing is America’s gift to the world, I have written in the Tetralogy. Toynbee in a book I read in my twenties, The World and the West, argued that the West has its “bag of tricks,” that is,…
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The Blur
Again, another day seeing the great Blur. And what might that be? The Blur, as I define it, is the passing not only of the natural world before our eyes — we rarely look up, rarely look down — but the peopled stream we find ourselves in. Day after day we go about our “business” blind to what is before us, and if I or you were to truly see it, what would we make of it? And then we die, all caught up in a blur. I find it troublesome, not a little strange, that today went by and I went…