Heavy Sweetness

Oddly, in last nite's sordidness I attempted a blog post, an inexplicable quote from the novel I am writing ("Did you ever think you just failed?"), don't blog when yr smashed kids is the disturbing message here. Found that my ipod that had stopped working yesterday and was now covered in beer was working again! Hard to explain that one. Doris and John found me on the side of the house after sushi, curled up in the fetal position and coughing like a newborn. Weird. I blame the Ouzo from Taverna afterwards. I came in and danced a jig to Hollywood Seven and then slept on the couch and spilt beer on my ipod. 

Having awoken from the couch I am now sitting up in bed listening to glass candy and writing this up. Climbed Arizona's tallest peak for the second time earlier this week. 

It's 12,500 and I do it so I can appreciate chili and beer from Brews and Cues splendidly afterwards. Also the air is good up there, the lungs like it, but otherwise it is hell. 

We housesat a housecat who scratched Doris across the bosom, he is no longer living with us, but photographic evidence shows that he once did. 

Since I finished school and started night auditing I have become quite the demon reader. Currently rereading On the Road and can clearly see its influence on a young me. Thrilling, really. Flying in to Denver next month for a spell. Gonna hang out in Neal Cassady's Rockies with Chaser for a few days. Though Gatsby's prose is more killer, there's something about On the Road that makes it so American, so Ford. What are the others? Portnoy's Complaint? Glamorama? Amis, I recall, arguing for Augie March. McGuane in the Paris Review (1984) sez Percy was bigtime.

"I remember that Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano just floored me. Incidentally, I consider that to be quite a funny book; a lot of it isn’t funny, of course, but its perverted energy is obviously akin to comedy. Fielding, Sterne, Joyce, Gogol and Twain were heroes. So were Machado de Assis, Thomas Love Peacock, George Borrow. There has never been a period when I was not reading Shakespeare. I loved Paul Bowles when I was just starting to write, and I loved Walter van Tilburg Clark. Stephen Crane seemed to me a fabulous writer, especially the stories. Knut Hamsun, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, William Eastlake, Walker Percy. You know, Barry Hannah and I were talking, and we agreed that The Moviegoer is one of those books that, for a lot of writers, was looked at like The Sun Also Rises was by writers back in the twenties."