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Tonsils and the Forties
At the end of W.W. II I was five and by the time of the Korean War I was ten. In that decade I was shaped and configured by my environment for the rest of my days. In the Forties I was most unaware of my self, impassive and passive, a receptacle for what I observed on my own and what was put into me by family and circumstances. Life as dumpster. As I look back, as Freud once said, metaphorically I was an archaeological dig, old and and newer artifacts placed randomly here and there crazily deposited by time and event.…
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I’m Here, for the Time Being
What an interesting thing, for lack of better words, to self-observe that the time left is shorter than the time I have lived. I associate to the lines in Julius Caesar that mark Cassius as a man who “dost think too much.” I think too much, too much. I remember my mother many decades ago labeling me, in effect, as too heavy for some work and to light for other work, in other words her unwarranted and unnecessary depressive description of me as useless. So I became a teacher, there you go. There is some truth in therapeutic circles that the neurotic…
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On Defoe, London and Stevenson
For some latent psychological reason, still dimly unaware to me, I’ve returned to a few books from my college days. Perhaps it is a return to the womb. The magic of the books when first read did not reappear again, not to be recaptured, my folly. I was disappointed. I had thought they were crackerjack when I read them as a young man. And so for equally dim reasons, I thought I’d read books that were valued for youngsters, such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe. By chance, a visit to a book fair revealed an edition from the Sixties with afterwords…
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After Reading a Few Pages of London’s The Sea Wolf
3 AM Musings From a literary friend and editor of an online mag a response to “Archipelago,” one of the stories I am working on now for my next book. Beyond the pale, beyond good or bad taste, it just exists, a written splat thrown up into the sky, hanging there insolently. As I try to hit the literary nail dead on in these stories I know I am not hitting them right on, for all is oblique and indirection. I am “field testing” some of them by submitting to journals online and off. The best time is at this moment as I…