I don’t write in a journal everyday, but I have accumulated many entries over the past 50+ years beginning in 1966. Some items evolved into longer works. Among the leftovers little pieces survived. I thought a collection of these with a piece culled from the same date in a past year would make an interesting yearbook. The consistencies and inconsistencies of mind, skipping back and forth across time, provide varied perspectives. It is difficult to remember the context of the past we’ve lived; we also make suppositions about times that predate ourselves.

The few alterations from original drafts were to improve clarity. The worst of my work is not included. There remains enough mediocrity and immaturity to make me feel humble and you feel smart. There are also moments of accidental insight and incidental humor.

Author Stephen Crane referred to his little pieces as pills…apparently they were small and somewhat hard to swallow, but good for you.


Comments Welcome!

Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Random Notes

 

from this week in September, 1977  (I was 32)

 

         Random Notes

Hemingway, from “Indian Camp”:

“is Dying hard, Daddy?”

“No, I think it’s pretty easy, Nick.  It all depends.”

 

Wilde, “De Profundis”:

“It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much and live with her too little.”

 

Rimbaud, “Illuminations”  (at age twenty):

         “Perfect and unpredictable beings will offer themselves for your experiments.   Around you the curiosity of ancient crows and idle luxuries will move in dreamily.  Your memory and your senses will only serve to feed your creative urge.”

 

Huddie Leadbetter:

Take this hammer (wahh)

and carry it to the captain (wahh)

 

Wilde, “De Profundis”

“…there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.”

“…Christ’s place indeed is with the poets.  His whole conception of humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realized by it.”

 

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