A Little Cold, School, and Thoughts on Some Poets

Tuesday, September 11, 2012—Long Beach, CA

I’m not feeling too hot. Last Friday I felt a cold coming on and it’s been with me ever since. It’s a mild one, though, just bad enough to irritate me, but not bad enough to really slow me down. I’m not surprised I’ve gotten sick. It’s pretty typical for teachers to get colds at the beginning of the fall semester, especially those who haven’t taught summer school. Suddenly being exposed to tons of new people also means that one is being exposed to tons of new microbes. Actually I’m surprised that teachers don’t get sick more often—schools are meeting places for so many different types of people, who come from so many different places, jobs, etc., that campuses are essentially a gathering place for all the illnesses going on in a region. This creates the situation where teachers probably develop more extensive immunities than the general population, but we also get sick more often than most people, just because we’re exposed to so much more—even our gnarly immune systems can’t handle it all.

Speaking of school, I’m having a pretty decent semester so far. I’m ahead of the game, which is nice (the last couple of semesters I’ve been playing extremely stressful games of catch up). I also like my classes; I’ve got a good bunch of students who really seem to be into things. Still, I’m under-employed, which is a drag. My schedule is a bit problematic too, in that it involves a lot of time commuting. I’ve been saying some pretty disparaging things about teaching here, but I’m deciding that I should be a bit more grateful. Though my life’s not where I want it to be, I do have it better than most of the people I know. I basically enjoy my job and on most days I feel like I’m making at least a little difference in the world. There are definitely worse day jobs than mine …

As usual when school kicks into high gear, there hasn’t been too much time for anything else. H— came in from Claremont the other day and we went out for breakfast. That was really nice; we hadn’t seen each other for a long time and it was nice to get caught up. I’ve also been entertaining myself with my fantasy football team and listening to a lot of Angels games (they’re a frustrating team, though—they have so much talent, yet they’ve yet to really gel as a group). I’m keeping up with my Greek studies too, (though I’m not putting as much time into that as I would like). The writing has tapered off a bit, but that’s mostly because I’m not sure exactly what I want to do with the latest Backwaters book—the novel’s main conflict has not made itself apparent to me yet—so I’m just chipping away at it here and there.

On the subject of writing … As I mentioned a couple entries back, I wish I could write poetry these days—my writing life is so much poorer when that’s not happening. I did try reading some poetry recently, Penguin’s reader of Romantic poetry. I couldn’t get too far into it, though. That’s not an era, a group that really moves me much, though I do like some Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. My main problem with the Romantics is that I can’t shake the feeling that their metaphysical bent is a bit of a dodge—I feel that so often their swooning is unhealthy, is a way to avoid confronting the material reality of their days. Reading these folks, though, does make me realize how desperately the Western world needed Walt Whitman to come along. He really was the great broom of Western poetry, sweeping so much of what went before him away. Does Whitman negate Shelley or Keats’ Grecian urn. Of course not. But he does render Longfellow, Bryant, and many other lessor poets unreadable (In my opinion, of course)—he shows how of their time they were, how trapped in their time they are. Still I admit, there is much to laud with the Romantics, their dedication to their art, if nothing else. I also admit one’s taste has a lot do to with this. For example, I really enjoy the Decadents and even the Pre-Raphaelites, both of whom many people loathe.

Though I’m not writing poetry, I did recently unearth and revise and retitle an older poem of mine (from 1995—it’s now called “Suburban Installation”). I’d always liked the piece but I never quite knew what to do with it. With these minor alterations, though, I’m understanding it better. I’m choosing to see this as a good sign, a sign that I’m coming back to poetry, slowly, to at least a small extent …

Labor Day Ruminations

Monday, September 3, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Labor Day. I’ve got nothing planned. Sometimes we barbeque at my sister’s, but for whatever reason that’s not going to happen today. That’s OK with me. It’s nice just to have the day off from teaching. Besides, I have plenty to do around here—I want to finish a lecture I’ve been revising, along with a few other work-related things. Not that I plan on working too hard. Most of my day I hope will involve me lounging around and reading. The whole point of having a day off is to have a day off. Sometimes I forget that …

Actually I think that a lot of us in this country have forgotten that; we’ve been battered and brainwashed into thinking our lives’ main purpose is to kill ourselves for our economic masters. Not “working” (I define “work” as “a person giving up their precious time to largely line the pockets of the economic elite for relatively little compensation”—something one enjoys that primarily benefits the individual or that individual’s loved ones is not “work,” which is an inherently negative act, something perpetrated against someone in an unbalanced power relationship), I’m beginning to see, refusing to be part of the big soul-crushing environment-scouring system, can be an important act of defiance against that system.

I’ve been thinking a lot about economics lately, economics and power, in massive terms. I’ve come to the conclusion that since the rise of the first state societies (civilizations) several thousand years ago the overwhelming majority of labor done by people falls into two categories: that which is part of a system which has as its primary purpose to funnel the a huge percentage of that which is produced (wealth) to a small elite, or efforts thru which people eke out a living where much of that produced go to those producing it, but because so much of the available resources are controlled by the elite class that wealth potential for others is so limited that the wealth obtained thru this labor provides little basis for power, or in many case even enough to live anything approaching a full, healthy life. Nothing of course has changed today. Most people I’m sure don’t realize (or if they do they try not to think about it) that the primarily purpose of their job is to in some way help transfer most of the planet’s wealth to a tiny ruling class; any benefit seen by the worker is usually the minimum amount the elites can give to the worker and still have him or her be willing to do the job. In other words, most people’s lives are spent making other people rich at their own expense.

In recent decades it has become apparent that we are now dealing with something more than just a social problem. Due to massive increases in human populations in recent centuries and the rise of more complex technologies, the basic exploitive nature of hierarchical societies is gutting the planet and will soon make it unlivable. In fact, it is already nearing that point for the majority of the world’s population, especially those living in so-called “Third World” countries. Though it’s a complex question as to why some states have more power than others, the fact is that the wealthier parts of the world have gotten that way (or at least stay that way) because of their ability to strip resources and coerce labor from the world’s poorer regions (by which I largely mean those that have little control of their economic, and by extension, social destiny). Leaving aside the horrible direct human costs of this colonialism, it by definition creates an unstable ecological situation that seems to be coming to a tipping point.

The late Roy A. Rappaport, a very influential anthropologist, called this “ecological imperialism,” and pointed out that the power differences between nations creates a transfer of wealth, which creates unstable ecological situations at both ends of the spectrum: poor countrys' ecosystems are essentially destroyed to provide resources for wealthy nations, while these resources allow the wealthy to develop lifestyles that foul the planet (the dependence on fossil fuels would be a prime example). This, if left unchecked, will eventually cause a complete collapse of the biosphere. This shows a direct correlation between hierarchical societies (and especially their current capitalistic systems, which I see simply as a spreading out of the exploitive qualities from a smaller hereditary ruling class to a larger and therefore more destructive business class) and the degradation of the wild ecosystems on which everything alive must ultimately depend.

The reverberations from such an analysis are staggering, for they call into question nothing less the evolutionary viability of hierarchal societies. Human power is ultimately based on the control and exploitation of resources. However, this generally destroys wild ecosystems, which by definition are self-regulating. Human survival again is dependent on these ecosystems. This means that in order to survive as a species power in society must be decentralized—the more spread out this power is the healthier our environment, but also the healthier our society, in that human potential will not be harnessed to the machine of elite accumulation, but to fulfilling the individual’s needs (nutritionally, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc.). Is this a kind of proof of the anarchist dream or a recommendation for the New Paleolithic of the Deep Ecologists (I draw from, respect, and perhaps am of both camps)? I don’t know—but big changes will soon be coming one way or another …

All of this is my way of saying that I never want to “work” again. The machine has had too many of my years and from now on I’m going to fight hard for every minute it tries to wrestle from me. From the chiefdom to the devine ruler to the manor farm to wage slavery the elite classes have attempted to harness the majority of us to help fulfill their own misguided wants. Now not just the people but the planet itself is groaning under this weight. It’s become an ethical duty not to “work.” Personal fulfillment and social responsibility are one and the same—if we don’t all start seeing this soon catastrophe is in evitable.

Happy Labor Day.

Of Poetry and Death (Mine!)

Saturday, September 1, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Haven’t been in the mood to write here much lately. I’ve started back teaching and that’s been eating a lot of time (as well as screwing up my sleep patterns so I’m always a bit tired when I do have some free time). I’ve also been working on the latest Backwaters book and when that’s flowing it will always be given priority over these pages. It’s been going well, slowly; the deliberate pace is fine by me. I see it as turning out much less frenetic than Backwaters of Beauty or Mother Earth and the way I write books tends to reflect their nature, which means I’m probably on the right track. Plus, I’m still a touch burned out on the Backwaters universe and so I can at the moment probably only take this third book in small bites and have it still hold my interest. I’m still feeling like I should be writing other things as well. I’m not sure if this is because I haven’t accepted that this book is simply my lot at the moment or if it should be paired with something I’ve yet discovered. What I wish I could do is write poetry—I’ve been stuck in the world of prose so long that I’ve almost forgotten the rush and then contentment of pulling off a good poem. Poetry is simply more personal and profound than prose. I’m really missing hitting those deeper places …

In regards to my poetry drought, I’m beginning to see that it stopped flowing for me in relation to how much I’ve been teaching. Right before I went back to teaching I’d hit the most productive poetry phase I’ve ever been in; the verses were coming at a sometimes frightening rate. The first year I taught I was very much part time and I still was writing poetry, though not as much as before. When my teaching duties more or less became full time the poetry stopped cold—I have not written a single worthwhile poem since then (the well has gone so dry I haven’t really even turned out many failed ones). Since poetry is in a sense life (or the most telling window into the one's life, in regards to those who practice the art of writing) I can’t help but to ask myself if my teaching has essentially sidetracked my true life, what I should really be doing. I’ve filled more pages here than I like to admit with complaints about teaching. But I’m beginning to see my bitching perhaps hasn’t even scratched the surface. Perhaps what I’m doing for a living really is killing me …


We spend our lives working to increase the material wealth of a very few at the top, while squandering our real riches, which are the days and nights of our lives and the contemplation therefore of. Poets are not respected because they know too much—if they were taken seriously by those in power the whole “civilization” edifice would vanish like chalk in the rain …


I’ve got to get out of this appalling situation before my poetry is gone forever.

Languid Thoughts and Doings

Sunday, August 19, 2012—Long Beach, California

Hot apartment, still (as in both continuing and no movement, of the air). 1:27 AM, lying on sweaty sheets, listening to the Grateful Dead, Dick’s Picks Volume 8 (live in Binghamton, sometime in 1970—I forget the exact date). I’ve been reading Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, by Peter Marshal. Though I’ve never read it before, at times I feel like I have—many of the threads of thought it discusses are very similar to what I’ve been thinking for a long time. Other than a bit of Emma Goldman, I’ve never read any anarchists thinkers. It’s interesting how I came to such similar conclusions on my own, thru my own hard experience. Back to the Dead. I’ve been listening to a lot of them lately, been reading too Dennis Mcnally’s biography of them, A Long Strange Trip. Rediscovering something special in my life I’d lost touch with. I’d love to go to a Dead show right now … but the long strange trip has fragmented, hasn’t it?


The following afternoon. Early this morning I felt the compulsion to write, but one paragraph in I suddenly became really tired and crashed. I can’t really pick back up on the sweaty languid mood I had going then, though I am feeling a similarly ambivalent. Realizing that I’ve been working too hard for a long time. I want more nights of lounging around listening to music. I’ve neglected myself in recent years. I don’t want to work my way thru life anymore—I want to do something more like dance my way thru it. I define work as doing that which does not fulfill you (in other words, if you enjoy it it can’t possibly be work, though it might involve a great deal of effort). Given that definition, nobody should ever base their life around work—it should be something to be banished from your life. There, I figured it out, said it—now I’m done working forever!

Speaking of not working (writing), I got the new prototype of Edgewater in the mail yesterday. The book has turned out great. The painting looks like its painted right on the cover, which is what I was hoping for. I like the white paper we’ve chosen for the cover; it’s like a snowy version of the old Black Sparrow Press covers. Eric printed the insides on white paper, just because that was what he had, but I think it looks so good with the white cover that I’m going to stick with it instead of the natural colored paper I’d planned on using. I also like that I got rid of the bullshit blurbs on the back (I replaced them with an email to a friend concerning the book). All and all, I couldn’t be happier with it. All we have to do is do a few minor tweaks and print it up. It should be officially released early next month, only a week of two later than originally planned before all the cover issues arose.

Feeling again the urge to paint; I haven’t touch a brush since I finished the cover painting for Edgewater. I have some interesting ideas abound combining abstract images with text. Images of passages from Thoreau (why his work I’m not sure) partially extant thru structures of color, waving, bleeding, chipped—the equivalent of archaeological site in paint: inscription partially worn away, fragmented by time replaced by these emerging colors. I’m not sure if I’m explain this well, but the images are pretty strong in my head, stronger than painting ideas have been in a long time.


Odds and ends. Still not writing much. I’ve got a good opening to the new Backwaters book, but at the moment am lacking the inspiration to continue it—still too burnt out on that series. I also feel like the next move with it is still jelling in my head. My first day back at school starts tomorrow. Not looking forward to it. Not dreading it either. I’ve arrange to buy Greg’s Seagull acoustic guitar from him (how I’m going to get it here from Santa Cruz I’m not sure). I’m really looking forward to playing again—it’s been many years. Though I’m not writing much, I do feel creative at the moment. I think this means I’m in a good place to start relearning the guitar. There must be a reason I’ve decided to pick it up again now … Still working on my Greek, though I’ve lost a little of the intensity lately, mainly, I think, because my apartment has been so hot I can’t concentrate. Missing Greece too. Though I know it was the right decision, I can’t help feeling that I really missed out on something by not going again this summer. Gavdos sunlight calling me from the other side of the world ...

A Little Fatigue and Boredom / Margo Dreams

Wednesday, August 15-18 , 2012—Long Beach

Tired. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because I’ve been getting up earlier because it’s been so hot in my apartment. I’ve also been doing a fair amount of “mind work,” which always wears me out. I’m dealing with a bit of eye strain as well—too much computer work, too much reading. Because of this I should probably be trying to get some sleep (it’s 12:17 AM), but I’m feeling restless, like I should be writing something. What I should be writing about, though, I’m not sure. Lately I’ve been feeling a little lazy in regards to this diary. There are lots of big ideas rolling around in my head, but they’re not jelling into anything overly coherent. I get the feeling that if I were to try and put them down “on paper” (says the computer addict) that I might be able to make more sense of them. But that just seems like so much work, much more than I can bring myself to take on. Maybe, though, I’m not being lazy. Maybe the reason I’m not pushing myself is that I know that certain things aren’t yet ready to come out. In fact, that’s probably the most likely scenario: when I don’t want to do something there’s usually a good reason for it, whether I’m consciously picking up on it or not …

Feeling restless about more than just writing these days. My routine is starting to bore me. Having to go back to teaching next week isn’t thrilling me either: that routine interests me even less. I’m beginning to realize that I’m thru with teaching anthropology (though it’s not quite thru with me). The years I’ve been teaching have taught me a great deal; they’ve helped me to understand where my writing needed to go after my Heaping Stones/Edgewater break thru. Partially because of my teaching in the social sciences I’ve figured out that my writing needed to begin looking outward. More specifically, teaching helped me get from the previously- mentioned books, which were about me (in the broad emotional sense) to the Backwaters books, which are more about community. But I’ve made that journey and I know it’s time for me to do something else. It’s time to put my new books out and make my way thru them—teaching has gone from a learning experience to one that is becoming increasingly confining, boring.


On another topic, I’ve been thinking about relationships lately, about me maybe again being involved in one. This is a very interesting development. For years I have not allowed myself to get remotely close to anyone: the last time I fell in love—one of only two times in my life this has happened—I was so badly wounded that it’s taken me nearly a decade to … I don’t know, I was going to say “recover,” but that’s not the right word. What’s really happened is that it’s taken me all this time to understand what happened, why it happened, and to integrate what it means into my life (I’ve probably made an overstatement—I do not yet fully understand what went down and probably never will, but I’ve made huge strides in this area). What happened to me with, I’ll call her Margo, completely short-circuited my life and I’ve been rewiring it ever sense. Or to be both more melodramatic and trite (but at least as accurate), there was my life before Margo and my life after her—and they are not quite the same life. My problem is that what happened between Margo and me was so profound (for me), was so powerful that I don’t think I could settle for less than that intensity of feeling again. The question is then can I be moved like that (or in a different way that’s just as absorbing) in a healthy relationship. Recently I’ve begun to ask this question, which could be a good sign …

Speaking of Margo, for ten years now she’s been haunting my dreams (I may have mentioned this in some earlier diary entry). The early dreams were horrid and always pretty much the same. The scene and backing cast would change, but in all of then she was incredibly popular—everyone loved her, despite the fact that she was obviously a completely self-absorbed user, which drove me crazy because no one but me could seem to seem what she was really like—and I was so in love with her that I was desperately trying anything to be with or at least near her. There was usually another guy or guys she preferred, which was something she’d make brutally obvious in my presence. She wouldn’t quite ever let me go free, though—she showed just enough interest in me to keep me around, to keep me thinking there was hope; I sensed she enjoyed being so worshiped. Often in the dreams she’d be sitting on my lap or lying with me in a bed. She’d let me kiss her in and sometimes do a lot more, but she almost always was indifferent to my touches. Or worse she acted like she was doing me the greatest of favors. I woke up from these dreams feeling angry, bitter, broken ... like a complete loser …

Over the last few years, though, my Margo dreams have become less frequent and there’s been a huge change in their tone—mainly because I’m viewing her differently. In these dreams she’s usually as self-involved and before, and sometimes she’s with other men, but I don’t hate her like I do in the earlier dreams. This is because I don’t need her. In these dreams I’ve learned to accept her behavior as that of someone who is deeply frightened and insecure. Since I don’t need her anymore she can’t hurt me. Without this pain of need I’m finding myself seeing a beauty in her cruelty, an understanding that comes thru empathy—I know she’s been deeply hurt in her life as I have and that she’s simply trying to deal with this pain: by trying to control the men in her life as a form of protection. In these dreams, despite our past, I have warm feelings for her and consider her my friend. I’ve also accepted that she doesn’t, can’t love me because of who she is and who I am. I’ve woken up from these kinds of dreams feeling good about things, about my past. The self-loathing that came out of the earlier Margo dreams is nearly gone.

Last night, though, I had a Margo dream that was at least partially a throwback to the earlier ones. I don’t remember the exact scene, but we were in a house. I think there was a party of some sort going on. I was back to needing her (though not as much as in past dreams). I don’t know if she’s with me in this dream, but she’s at least implied that we're together. But she keeps going into this bedroom where she is being fucked by this huge black guy who looks a bit like the actor who stared in The Green Mile. And when I say “fucked” that’s what I mean—she just being bent over by this guy and rammed, while he says abusive things to her and she gets off on it. In between being fucked by this guy she's in the living room sitting on my lap, kissing me, with cold indifferent lips. In this dream I’m feeling something close to the desperation and hate I felt in the old Margo dreams. I woke up feeling deeply hurt, by this dream Margo and myself—I thought I was past such self-tortures.

What interests me is why I went back to this type of Margo dream. Perhaps I just needed to clean out the attic, so to speak—perhaps there’s still some pain lurking around hidden places inside me that I need to flush out. As I’ve said, I’ve recently been considering the possibility of a new relationship and maybe I’m just trying to get everything in order so that can happen. I’m leaning towards this explanation, mainly because the aftermath of this dream was minimal, compared to the past. Back then after a bad Margo dream I’d feel like shit for hours, sometimes all day. Within an hour or so after waking up today, though, I was no longer in pain and could examine the dream analytically. For whatever reason this dream cropped up, largely because of my reation to it, I don’t think it has much to do with backsliding—I think it’s mostly about something new. Another reason I think I’m in someplace different is Margo’s persona has changed. In the other dreams she’d never have allowed herself to be sexually used as she was in this dream (or maybe she was using the guy in some convoluted way?). I’m not sure what this means, but it’s interesting.

Stupid Hot and Other Stuff

Sunday, August 12, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Hot. Hot. Hot. Hot. Stupid hot. Angry hot. Several days in a row of blazing heat with at least that many on the horizon. As usual when it gets like this my apartment becomes all but unbearable (people are always commenting on what a great rent I have, but they don’t seem to understand that I get what I pay for—a uncomfortable crumbling one-bedroom place in a ugly, worsening neighborhood that turns into a furnace at least a couple months of the year and has no heat when winter comes around). What’s bumming me out is that I have a lot I need to be doing now—prepping for, school, BSP stuff etc.—and it’s too hot in here for me to think. I think I’m going to head over to the Downtown Branch of the LB Public Library next week and try and get some work done in its air-conditioned environs. The situation in Chez Rob is ridiculous …

The weather is seeming even worse than it is when I compare it to last weekend, when I went up to my cousin’s wedding in the Lompoc area, which was much cooler than it is down here, especially at night (we even got rained on a little bit on Saturday morning, which is really unusual for August in these parts). Speaking of that trip, I enjoyed it. The wedding was one of the nicest I’ve ever been to (no phony religious crap or tedious traditions to be found). I was a little depressed for a day or so after it, though. My life feels so stuck these days: I feel like I’m more than ready to move onto to something else and I can’t quite put things together enough to make it happen. Watching E— and L— get married, watching them so happily moving into the next phase of their lives, got me really thinking about where I’m at at the moment, which is a significantly different place than I want to be.

Like I just said, this bummed me out for a few days, but I’m feeling better now. Things aren’t quite right with me, but when I look at the big picture I know I’m making the right moves, or mostly right moves at least. My days of making stupid decisions are over. The question is now how much can I recover from my previous wrong moves, my formally faulty vision. I think I still can make some big strides; the game's far from over and I can see a lot of interesting times for me on the horizon.


Since I’ve been back I’ve mostly been fighting the heat and trying to get some prep work done for school (I have my first faculty meeting next week). Greg’s been in town the last few days, though, so I’ve been hanging out with him a bunch and getting less done. Besides that I’ve mostly been reading and doing a bit of writing (on the latest Backwaters book, not in the diary obviously). Eric and I also seem to have finally gotten Edgewater ready for printing. We’re looking at paper samples and we should be able to let that rip by the end of next week. Hopefully it will be officially out by the end of this month.


Getting a little worried that gluten might not be what’s causing my health issues. I did an experiment at the wedding last weekend and ate quite a bit of gluten and had no reaction. Since I’ve been back, though, and gluten free my bloating has returned in a pretty big way. I’m very confused by all this.


Realizing that I’m a little weird as far as diarists go. Most diarists seem to be obsessive about their diaries. I’m not. I do it because I enjoy it and learn from it, because informal writing like this helps me as a writer (it keeps my chops up, if nothing else), and because other people seem to find it interesting. But I don’t stress when I’m not writing. Maybe it’s because this is an internet diary and my options as to what I’m comfortable doing are limited; maybe the aspects of my life that I might be obsessive about are the ones I feel the need to eliminate in this endeavor. I do wish I had more time to write here, though. I feel like I lose the deeper threads when I’m away from this diary too long. Once I’m back at work and trapped on the backside of Orange County with time to kill and work to bitch about I’m sure my focus will return.


Keeping up my Greek studies. I’ve hit a point where the learning curve has gotten a little steep, but I’m chugging along—slowly. It’s really hard studying a language when you’re completely divorced from its day-to-day use. None of the schools around here even teach Modern Greek. My goal is to learn as much about the structure of the language, its grammar as I can and build on that once I’m around Greek speakers again—vocabulary and pronunciation can come later.

Laying Back, Paul Bowles' Travels, a Dream

Monday, July 30, 2012—Long Beach, CA

Feeling a little out of it. I’ve been battling an on-again off-again sinus infection this whole summer and lately it’s been acting up (it can take forever to get rid of those things, sometimes many months). I also have a minor muscle pull under my left shoulder blade, which is just painful enough to be annoying. Other than these issues things are going OK. It’s a bit slow around here: I’ve been doing little besides working out, doing some light school prep, and reading. I’ve also been writing a bit, experimenting with an essay about my days in Hawai’i. I’m very much feeling my thru it, am not sure where it’s going. As I’d mentioned, I’d been playing around with ideas for a novel set in Hawai’i that ultimately didn’t work and in a sense they haves morphed into this essay. Hopefully I’m now on the right track with it.

Like I just said, I’ve been reading a lot. I read a lot of novels in the first half of the summer, but since I’ve been back from up north, it’s been mostly non-fiction, political and economic stuff, history, travel writing. I’ve burned thru a couple of Noam Chomsky books and in the middle of a third one. I’m also reading a history on Vasco de Gama’s Indian voyages well as essays by Orwell and a collection of Paul Bowels travel pieces. The Chomsky stuff I’ve been reading mainly for his perspectives and the massive amounts of information he provides (he’s a pretty lousy writer). With the Orwell’s stuff, though, I’ve been studying his technique. He’s nearly in a class of his own as an essayist. Even in his lesser works the writing and the thought shaping it is always razor sharp; he never wastes a word or goes on any tangent he doesn’t eventually drive right pack to the heart of the piece. I’m perhaps finding the Bowels’ book the most interesting, though. As a novelist he’s very frustrating. His novels start off so promising, but every one I’ve tried to read begins to let me down about halfway thru; it’s as if he’s become bored with his own creation and doesn’t quite have the energy (or the vision, which is partially born from this kind of energy) to see things thru. His travel writing, though, thus far really shines.

The book is simply called Travels and collects a lot of his travel pieces from 1950-1993. Some of the work has appeared in his books, but a lot of it is stuff that was published in magazines and newspapers and has never before been collected. It’s obvious that he’s toned down his style a bit at times for more mainstream audiences (the icy detachment of the narrator of The Sheltering Sky and Let it Come Down would no doubt freak out the readers of magazines such as Holiday), but his voice still comes thru. It’s a voice suited for this kind of writing too. With his novels Bowles always seems burdened by his plots, by having to tell a story—for him, you get the feeling, that the landscape, the climate, the people going about their daily lives is enough. Travel writing allows him to concentrate on just those things and he brings them to life marvelously. So far my favorite pieces have been set in his beloved North Africa and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). There are some that take place in Europe too that are interesting. When I’m done with this book I think I’m going to check out the rest of his non-fiction, including the travels books some of the pieces in Travels came from. He also published a dairy from his time in Tangier I want to track down.


I went to the Lakewood Mall today in search of a shirt to where to a wedding I’m going to in Santa Barbara this weekend (I came home empty handed). Going to malls has become a very weird experience for me. I simply don’t go to places like that very often. I don’t buy things in general. I don’t even watch TV much, which means I don’t see the commercials most Americans allow themselves to be bombarded with. Today I began realizing how disconnected I’ve become from the American capitalist enterprise—I truly don’t understand the mindset of the people who hang out in malls regularly. Nor do I really get why anyone would want to spend their lives selling and making most of the stuff sold in them. People shop, I think, because they’ve largely lost the ability to create their own lives, their own value systems. So they try and buy those things one step removed. It of course doesn’t work. And when it doesn’t they feel bad, which provides the impetus to go off on another buying spree to try and solve that problem (which is really of course just an expression of the first problem). And so on and so on … I’ve reached the point where, except for stuff like food, I hate to buy anything, not because I’m cheap, or even because I usually don’t have that much money, but because I know whatever it is will likely become more baggage in my life, something I have to wash or dust or do an oil change on. Stuff, in other words, equals work. I’m amazed that more people don’t see this. Freedom is a light backpack and a (relatively) full bank account.


I’ve been having lots of weird/bad dreams lately. Most of them are gone soon after I wake up (I mean within seconds) and all I’ve got left of them are the uptight or outright bad feelings they’ve brought out in me. I do remember bits and piece of one of these dreams, though. One which loosely ties into my previous discussion of shopping malls. I can’t recall exactly what was going on, but I was at a beach somewhere and I remember that everything you might to have at the beach had to be bought from vending machines that lined the cliffs above the sand—sunscreen, towels, and even surfboards had to be purchasest like this—you weren’t allowed to bring your own from home. I think there was even someone you had to pay a toll to for each wave you road. It was all just a handful of steps away from ultimate capitalist landscape where there’s a surcharge for breathing …