I was reading a life of Paul Bowles, by some three-name woman writer--don't get me wrong, it's a great book--she leaves the writing to mostly quoted stuff she claims came directly from old Paul himself--and it does sound like old Paul--come one, he's made films, folks, where he says the same things he says to this three-name woman writer, though I've never heard the whole jest of his life like it's panorama-ed in this book. But Bowles mentions that the best of his writing or composing, whichever, was done unconsciously--and that he was jealous of writers, like his wife, Jane, who could write maddeningly no matter where whether bar, cafe, Lesbian dancing club, or while riding on a crowded bus. He liked to be in isolation -- sort of present-unconscious-consciousness.
This is evolving out of me yesterday checking the blog hits for The Daily Growler--it's doubled it hits since April of this year but the recent check revealed that in the past ten or so days it'd had only 4 hits. Jesus, I whined, that's depreciating--it was really a growl but I'm getting docile recently--I mean the temperature right now in Manhattan is 62 degrees, and, hey, it's August 20th and that's summer and usually this time of year right now in Manhattan the temperature is usually in the 90s and we're all cookin' unless we're rich and have central air (think of breathing that reused air all day long--but rich people live forever--no matter, poisoned air or being shot up with poisons--look at old guilt-ridden Brook Astor, bless her old worthless-other-than-she-inherited-the-Astor-fortune self, a fortune made off the early land development of downtown Manhattan, building the first developed addition in NYC, rows of Federal-style houses up and down Spring Street, Vandam, King Street, those areas, and some of those houses are still standing--the Ear Inn on Spring Street is one of those buildings still standing--except barely--almost ruined by developers building huge ugly Plexiglas and aluminum stud and thin concrete slab eyesores on both sides of it--these heavy structures built on landfill underwhich the tide still comes in--the Ear Inn had to constantly shore up its basement--the building doing the most damage to the Ear being the glassy, steely-Dan-ish, out-of-sync audacity of a hi-rise luxury apartment building built by the luckiest rich son to come along since Harry Helmsley's weirdo son died and lost his daddy's fortune to play with to mad and a little crooked Mamma Leona--but not the Dumbass...er, I mean, the Donald...oh shit...I quit right here. Donald Trump is a ruthless, pompous, ego-maniacal fool of a boy-man who has been propped up for years by NYC rich developers simply due to the reputation of old Donnie's daddy, the Trump who made the real estate fortune that Donald got to use as his high-school graduation present--and believe me, it wasn't easy for the Donald to get out of high school. (By the bye, whatever happened to Trump University? Jesus, that would be like graduating with a Master's Degree from the University of Phoenix or how about Florida International? And whatever happened to Trump Vodka?--though the Donald assured us he was antialcohol due to a problem in his family--yeah, Donald, you hypocritical asshole...GET THEE BEHIND ME!
(Hey, did you like my impersonation of Jesus Christ? I used to love writing my impersonations of Jesus Christ down. It always amused me as a kid as to why my adult parents were so obedient and asskissing to this figment of some ancient Jewish scribe's imagination, this probably little squat and smarmy Jewish man from Nazareth, but not really Nazareth but an adjacent slum of Nazareth, who had somehow down through the years grown in height and body structure, thinning down, his head changing, his facial structure changing--why Jesus over the holy years had become an Aryan! And maybe that's true; wasn't Jesus supposed to have a brother who went to India? or was that Japan? I know the martyred Apostle Thomas ended up in India and it was there he lost his life by being run through by a spear or maybe it was a sword. The Book of Saints--is that it--I'm too lazy to look it up--by Glenway Westcott--I used to love to read about how the old saints got martyred. I like it that the Apostle Mark, for instance, who was said to be a cripple (of mind and body, I assume), ended up in Alexandria where the heathens got hold of him and dragged him to his death behind a chariot racing through the streets and pulling old Faithful Mark to dog-size-gulp pieces). Anyway, that amused me as a kid. So much so, one of the first stories I have from that period developed into a novel called The Evolution of an AntiChrist--of course I've never submitted it for publication--in fact, it's living an isolated existence on a laptop I don't use anymore and am too cheap to go buy the right cable where I can download it onto the laptop I now use--either that or I copy it by sight off the old laptop screen--and god-damn that's a lot of work.)
Which leads me to remember a great post on "editors" posted at www.languagehat.com by
l hat a couple of posts back--check it out--he's an editor now and I once was an editor, too, and oh the fun of being a too knowledgeable and absolute rule-abiding editor as opposed to an editor who says, hell, is this the way you write? then therefore and from hereafter I'll simply stick to sending you queries and it is through queries that an editor shows his or her highest catbird seat position (or glory) in the editing world. I once lost an editing job because I over edited--too many "editorial changes"--they couldn't charge the author or the printer--arggggghhh, my editorial director said, "I hate to do this, Wolf Man, you are one of my best editors, but the publisher is pissed at all those charges he had to pay to make your, and I add right here 'very correct', changes--'Fire the bastard,' he said, so I have no choice but to give you your walking papers." And there went one of the easiest and most lucrative editing jobs I ever had in New York City--and referring back to the Ear Inn, it was at my special seat at the bar in the Ear Inn that was my office--I was there at opening time--6:30 a.m. until closing at 4:00 in the next a.m.--an it was there that I edited my manuscripts and cookbooks and poetry books and nonfiction books while I drank pints of Bass ale--ate my lunch at noon, worked through the afternoons at the bar, and when I finished my editing, I bundled it up and ran it home and put it to bed and then I returned to the Ear to eat dinner and then "cool out" (a Hemingway term) by drinking and mafficking the night away--WHAT a life, folks, but I did it--and as an editor--at the same time able to finish 7 novels--later destroyed by a jealous woman--and I was told as a young Louisiana writer that the one city in the world where if I couldn't make it as a writer (or a jazz pianist, too, in my case) I could always land a free-lance proofreading or editing gig and soon be back in the money again, working on my own time, being my own boss--"As a freelancer," they said, "you can just get up and walk out if you don't like the way you're being treated"--because of that last advice, I always presented myself before potential employers as a serious PROFESSIONAL person same as a doctor or lawyer. How's that for being naively pompous? Yet, it worked; I eventually became one of the highest paid editors in NYC--wanna bet? As a writer? Shit, I managed 35 god-damn crappy books for the Catholic Church--parish histories--good bucks, don't get me wrong, seven hundred and 50 bucks advance then another thousand when the book was finished--I figured the Good Lard Press, who I was a contracted writer for, was making ten times that kind of money off the parishes--these books were sold by the parish priests to the parishioners, who were used to it since churches that lasted say 25 years always published "jubilee" histories or 50-year churches had to have their "golden" histories--I even wrote one history for a church in Michigan that was 10 years old--I made big bucks on that one and got a trip to Michigan out of it--I also travelled to San Francisco, Boston, D.C. (the District of Corruption), and Seattle; then in 1977, the publisher had me write a book on the new Polish pope and that led to me being an official press corps member when that Polish pope came to the US in 1978--I got two books out of the pope and made close to seventy-five grand off them--one becoming a "bestseller" in the Catholic world, even though the pope refused to bless it on the tarmac in Boston because he said it was too kind to the Polish Communist government at that time--and then I had a huge fight with the publisher and his swishy sidekick and I fired his ass--he had commissioned me to write a coffee-table history of Greenwich Village in NYC--a project I probably should have stuck with, but then he started pressuring me to finish it and I told him one day to take the manuscript he had and roll it up real tight and stick it up his ass--big mistake--probably, but then I'd never gotten to blog like this if I'd a made a fortune off that damn Greenwich Village book!
Which brings me back to getting hits on these stupid hundreds of millions of blogs. Every now and then I'm tempted to follow Google's orders and check out their Top Blogs of the Day--and today I fell for it and went on a blog called "Adventures in Writing." I don't know what I expected. First of all, I was a little hit by it being a well-done (formatwise) blog--it was pretty--I mean The Daily Growler is template dark and black--we like it like that, don't get me wrong--but this one had color about it and it had great things to click on and then photos and then even some streaming audio and streaming video for all I know. Then I started reading it--to see just what adventures in writing meant to this blogger. There seemed to be chances to read wannabe writers's efforts--I supposed that--one book was entitled The Red Dagger Capers (sic)--or some such nonsense by a writer who said he was an archetypal Leo. A what? Henry Miller believed in astrology, even knowing that astrology as it is today is based on a totally wrong star system--an ancient one long since proven to be bassackwards, like the star system presented on the ceiling of the giant room at Grand Central Station in NYC--the painter painted it backwards--like painting from a photograph, a photograph giving you a backwards image--like looking in the mirror, right?
Then suddenly "Adventures in Writing" turned into a magic history or something--about how card throwing got started in magic acts. Whoaaaaa. Not my kind of adventure in writing. Continuing on down the blog, I soon decided to abandon the adventures--they weren't my cup of the latest trendy tea.
I much prefer my own adventures than those of others. Yes, I'm conceited, but I am an animal that runs with packs--packs of other adventurers, most of whom offer me better adventures in writing than this dude's blog.
Boo that blog. BOO.
Using the Bowles Method
Concognizant...
if popped...
if plunked...
if spiffed...
if spiked against its will on
a Kaiser-Fraser hood ornament...
or was it a Ford?
or was it a Hickey with a feather in his avuncular cap?
How would I know?
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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