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In writing you must slide along. The words can be crippled and choppy but if they slide along then a certain delight lights up everything. Careful writing is deathly writing. I think Sherwood Anderson was one of the best at playing with words as if they were rocks, or bits of food to be eaten. He PAINTED his words on paper. And they were so simple that you felt rushes of light, doors openin, walls glistening. You could see rugs and shoes and fingers. He had the words. Delightful. Yet, they were like bullets too. They could take you right out. Sherwood Anderson knew something, he had the instinct. Hemingway tried too hard. You could feel the had work in his writing. They were hard blocks stuck together. And Anderson could laugh while he was telling you something serious. Hemingway could never laugh. Anybody who writes standing up at 6 a.m. in the morning has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.
Tired tonight. Damn, I don't get enough sleep. I would love to sleep until noon but with the first post at 12:30, add the drive and getting your figures ready, I have to leave here about 11 a.m., before the mailman gets here. And I'm seldom asleep until 2 a.m. or so. Get up a couple of times to piss. One of the cats awakens me at 6 a.m. on the dot, morning after morning, he's got to go out. Then too, the lonelyhearts like to phone before 10 a.m. I don't answer, the machine takes the message. I mean, my sleep is broken. But if this is all I have to bitch about then I'm in grand shape.
No horses for the next 2 days. I won't be up until noon tomorrow and I'l feel like a powerhouse, ten years younger. Hell, that's to laugh – ten years younger would make me 61, you call that a break? Let me cry, let me cry.
It's 1 a.m. Why don't I stop now and get some sleep?
1/18/92 11:59 PM
Well, I move back and forth between the novel and the poem and the racetrack and I'm still alive. There isn't much going on at the track, I'm just struck with humanity and there I am. Then there's the freeway, to get there and back. The freeway always reminds you of what most people are. It's a competitive society. They want you to lose so they can win. It's inbred and much of it comes out on the freeway. The slow drivers want to block you, the fast drivers want to get around you. I hold it at 70 so I pass and am passed. The fast drivers I don't mind. I get out of their way and let them go. It's the slow ones who are the irritant, those who do 55 in the fast lane. And sometimes you can get boxed in. And you see enough of the head and the neck of the driver ahead of you to take a reading. The reading is that this person is asleep at the sould and at the same time embittered, gross, cruel and stupid.
I hear a voice now saying to me, „You are stupid to think like that. You are stupid one.“ There are always those who will defend the subnormals in society because they don't realize it is that they too are subnormal. We have a subnormal society and that's why they act as they do and do to each other what they do. But that's their business and I don't mind it except that I have to live with them.
I recall once having di
Finally, I said to the people at our table, „It's pretty bad, isn't it?“ One of the people at our table turned to me, put on a sweet smile and said, „I like it when people are happy.“ I didn't respon. But I felt a dark black hole welling in my gut. Well, hell.
You get a reading on people on the freeways. You get a reading on people at di
So, I got to the track today and took my seat. There was a guy wearing a red cap backwards. One of those caps that the tracks give away. Giveaway Day. He had his Racing Form and a harmonica. He picked up the harmonica and blew. He didn't know how to play it. He just blew. And it wasn't Schoenber's 12 to scale either. It was a 2 or 3 tone scale. He ran out of wind and picked up his Racing Form.
In front of me sat the same 3 guys who were there all week. A guy about 60 who always wore brown clothes and brown hat. Next to him was a crooked neck and round shoulders. Next to him was an oriental about 45 who kept smoking cigarettes. Before each race they discussed which horse they were going to bet. These were amazing bettors, much like the Crazy Screamer I told you about before. I'll tell you why. I have sat behind them for two weeks now. And none of them has yet picked a wi
You must understand then, when I come from the track and off of the freeway, why this computer looks so good to me? A clean screen to lay words on. My wife and my 9 cats seem like the geniuses of the world. They are.
2/8/92 1:16 AM
What do the writers do when they aren't writing? Me, I go to the racetrack. Or in the early days, I starved or worked at gut-wrenching jobs.
I stay away from writers now – or people who call themselves writers. But from 1970 until about 1975 when I just decided to sit in one place and write or die, writers came by, all of them poets. POETS. And I discovered a curious thing: none of them had any visible means of support. If they had books out they didn't sell. And if they gave poetry readings, few attended, say from 4 to 14 other POETS. But they all lived in fairly nice apartments and seemed to have plenty of time to sit on my couch and drink my beer. I had gotten the reputation in town of being the wild one, of having parties where untold things gappened and crazy women danced and broke things, or I threew people off my porch or there were police raids or etc. and etc. Much of this was true. But I also had to get the word down for my publisher and for the magazines to get the rent and the booze money, and this meant writing prose. But these… poets… only wrote poetry… I thought it was thind and pretentious stuff… but they went on with it, dressed themselves in a fairly nice ma
It was getting clear in my mind then that I would have to get rid of these soft toadies. And gradually, I found out their secret, one by one. Most often in the background, well hidden, was the MOTHER. The mother took care of these geniuses, got the rent and the food and the cloghing.
I remembered once, on a rare sojourn from my place, I was sitting in this POET's apartment. It was quite dull, nothing to drink. He sat speaking of how unfair it was that he wasn't more widely recognized. The editors, everybody was conspiring against him. He pointed his finger at me: „You too, you told Martin not to publish me!“ It wasn't true. Then he went to bitching and babbling about other things. Then the phone rang. He picked it up and spoke guardedly and quietly. He hung up and turned to me.