And then, Good Friday...


One reads about the writing that comes out of the Creative Writing programs these days.  The imitation of writing that pays no homage, has no knowledge, to the body of literature the human creature has created, no deep root in tradition, no ability to read closely the old words, and of a style that has a self-important lack of need for actual skill, actual narrative work...  And I should talk...

(Found, via Facebook friend, Quillette.Com, "With stories like these, who needs talent," by Sandra Kotta, a four part series.)

But literature will always come back.  No matter what they try to do with it, with fancy theories, and the imposed tastes that discredit the great honestly of literary work trying to make sense of life and the human condition...  It, literature, real poetry, real prose, real thoughts, real issues, literature will always come back.  Because it is organic.  It is in me and you.

Through all our own winters, it is there, still live, still breathing, just a bit dormant, waiting to gather its forces when the time is right.


There'd been a night, thirty years ago, wintertime.  I was living at my dad's.  And I was helping out with Don Beebe, landscaping, and we had a little project to prune the branches lining the streets of Waterville, down the road.  A job in the cold time of year, and then you'd go back to the cab of the pickup, pour some coffee and talk a bit, waiting for lunchtime.  So I called my college princess, and it was not early in the evening, but probably around eleven at night, and it rings and she picks up the phone, and I ask her, "hi, too late to be calling?"  And all I hear is, after a pause, not a long one, "oh, god..."  and the voice drifts away from the phone, and I am a creep, and she hangs up.  And I do not call her back.  Who am I?  I'm some poor shit fallen college student who has no idea what he wants to do with himself.  Well, he wants to, given a good education in English literature, be a writer, but he doesn't know how to do this, to be a writer, and he barely has a job.

And so I remember the golden light of the sun, low, there that morning, the morning after, as we are sort of pointlessly  clipping back with branches with the long pole-pruners, pulling the rope, pruning, the cut branch falling to the freezing cold bluish white ground covered lightly with snow.  And, well, of course, I just accepted it all.

And I guess with that, I knew that I was in some sort of exile, and that I needed probably to go somewhere, I don't know, some adventure, some big city, where I would be lonely and suffer, in hopes of becoming a writer.



When I got to DC, after I stayed with college buddies, two different classmates, wearing them out I suppose, I found a place to live.  It was a big deal for me.  Foxhall and MacArthur, and I lived in a small house, one split down the middle into two, with a quiet porch and a backyard with a tub and  a garden in it,  living with two women, a younger one who's boyfriend had a mustache like Tom Sellick, and Sandra, who'd lived in Europe, was a good cook, worked in jewelry and who hung her italian fine lingerie drying on a special rack in the bathroom.  They had a cat, and they liked that I liked cats.  Somehow they fixed upon me to be their roommate, in their selection process, just to mix it up a bit, I guess.

I remember once walking with Sandra, I suppose we were down on M Street near the Four Seasons, walking along, summer day, not too hot, and she gently starts asking me maybe like what is my plan, my plan for life here.  And I'm a kid, twenty three or so, but not a man at all, with my busboy job and my temp job at the George Washington University Health Plan during the day, sleeping on the weekends until I gotta go run my butt off at the old original Austin Grill, running all night, listening to Marty Robbins White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation, and Hank Williams Why Don't You Love Me Like You Used To Do, being taken advantage of, running all the night so as not to feel lost and depressed and bereft over losing Princesses and direction in life...

And all I can come up with for her is Kerouac.  I want to be a writer like Jack Kerouac.

And she knows who, of course, Jack Kerouac is.   Hmmm.  Now is that much of a career choice...

She was very kind to me.  She helped me out.  She made soup for me with chicken and pumpkin and it was the best thing I ever had.  She cleaned up when I ate late night pepperoni pizza with my Grill buddies rom the old Adams Morgan Trio's and vomited in the hallway trying to get outside but not making it as the bathroom was in use...  She gave me a paperback copy of George Orwell's Down and Out in London and in Paris and played Tom Waits for me on the stereo in the living room.



But why, I wonder, would you want to be, want to be, a writer?  By choice.  Inspiration, sure.  But something organic.  Something within human beings...

And I also wonder, if it is not a bit insane to try to be a writer...  or is it a chicken or the egg sort of a thing...

One knows himself as a pip-squeak.  Ineffectual.  A good for nothing.  Good at nothing practical.  He hates to hear himself speak on recordings.  He's stopped wondering why women want little to do with him, beyond politeness and friendship.

He doesn't even know when he's going to write.  What he's going to write... absolutely no plan.  Doing it blind.