DE NIRO, SCORSESE, AND A BEATNIK MEMORY OF DESPAIR

I'm on page 288 of remaining 402 pages of Ghoul World. With only 113,812 words remaining, I'm sure to get below 400 pages and maybe below 100,000 words before rewrite is completed. The publisher I intend to send Ghoul World to says they prefer novels to be above 80,000 words.
  
As is obvious to anyone reading Silent Boomer, I've been on a tear for last year. Inspired by Han-Shan, I wrote many more than 100 lüshis. Now back at novel rewrite. Have in back of my mind writing another screenplay but subject matter is cloudy. Could be based on Ghoul World for all I know or another novel of mine, The Porn Writer.

Watched one of my favorite movies last night. Taxi Driver. Before I quit drinking, I often had moments when I felt like Travis Bickle [minus murderous thoughts], alienated, angry, alone and despairing. I used to call it existential angst. Was it so philosophical or was it merely feeling sorry for self? No matter what I call those moods, I was driven once to crash my car on purpose, accelerating while going around a corner so fast I knew I couldn't make it. The act was totally unplanned,  happened in an instant on the spur of that cornered moment. I'm so far removed from those days I can't bring the feelings up anymore. Sometimes, for the sake of my art, I'll wish I could, but do I really? My thought as I accelerated was, "They'll be sorry." The women in my mind at the time shall go nameless. That's everything I know about suicide. How many times have I told this tale?

BACK TO THE STINKING WORLD OF GHOULS FOR THIS OLD BEAT

Thanks to all who continue to check in on this writer's blog. I think my muse has finally gotten through to me. Time for change. I wrote something like 150 eight line poems. Nothing much has been stirring since, but, then I'm also not reading the lucid and peaceful poetry of Chinese poets inspired by Buddhism, the Tao or Confucian thought. The end to writing poetry means that I will return to another rewrite of Ghoul World and the two item bucket list beginning next week, probably, unless this old brain forgets what it thinks it might do today next week. 

The human animal, well "me" at least, is odd. Just a month ago, I thought I had maybe a year or two ahead before the return of my high risk prostate cancer would take my life. Told I'll "probably" have 8-10 more years and die of congestive heart failure, I've gone back to obsessing about politics, and will Lebron leave Cleveland. Doctor was funny too. At one point, I said to him, "I'm not ready to go yet." A little later he said, "In 8 years you'll be a different person." Took me awhile to realize that in 7 years most all my cells will have been renewed with accompanying miscommunication failures. I might be ready to turn in my steel suit and retire from the battle against evil        

....IF?

THE BEATNIK APPEARS NEAR COLD MOUNTAIN

Professor Heinricks

Sixty-three people looked in yesterday to Silent Boomer, and I'm shamed that I'm just not keeping up with writing blog entries. I'm nearing the end of the 8 line poems for my ms Wrestling Hanshan. I must still look over seven more of Hanshan's lüshis with an eye to wrestling with him over them or singing harmony with him whichever occurs as best. It's a very friendly musical contest between poets of like temperament. Next project is to return to the novel Ghoul World to rewrite and correct several accidentally comic passages. Another movie is in my mind, but it's so awfully serious, I don't know if I have the temperament anymore to pull it off without laughing like Hanshan.

I was encouraged when I emailed Robert G. Heinricks, Preston Kelsey Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at Dartmouth. Beside his other accomplishment, his translation of Hanshan's 300 poems were the ones I first sought after Gary Snyder brought Hanshan [Cold Mountain] to my attention 25 years ago. You see, I have doubts about this little known poet that I am attempting to compare and contrast my poetry with the impressive lüshis of Hanshan. I sent along three of my 8 line poems, and Professor Heinricks was kind enough to answer and encourage me. He thought my work sounded like Hanshan's work and that is exactly what I want my work to do. Interesting to me that a happily married city atheist like myself can feel in his bones very like a semi-religious hermit poet from China who wrote 12 centuries ago. But I have had some legitimate fears about how men and women who read Chinese and who have studied Buddhism and Hanshan will respond to my presumption. Thank you, Professor Heinricks, for your encouragement. 

DAMS, DAMN IT

Coming out of my cold at 15 days time, still coughing, however, from time to time. Three lüshis yesterday and four lüshis today. They must have been stuck behind the damn of phlegm in my throat, waiting for the strength to push their way out. That's all the news I've got today. Thank you to those still following this ancient beatnik from the Silent Generation. These days, I feel my not so silent observations come from a unique viewpoint in time, so listen up, everybody. Laugh here if you must or want to. I'm so glad I discovered Hanshan [Cold Mountain] 25 years ago during a summer of great internal freedom.

BEATNIKING MY WAY BACK TO POETRY

I'm sorry. Twenty days plus since my last entry. Here's why. I've done little to no work towards either of the entries on my bucket list. I've been working on old poetry and a few new poems that represent my style since my lyric days are past, the poetry of my past that came alive from dreams and intuition. I plod nowadays but am rewriting and reworking old poetry. My next goal is to enter into contests a book of poetry that I wrote 25 years ago in a certain pedestrian style that was inspired by the poetry of Hanshan as translated by Gary Snyder. Here's one of them:

DREAM OF FAME

Twenty-five summers since I wrote these poems, Han-shan,

Inspired by the pedestrian style that shunned the forms and fashions

Of the Tang Dynasty you were living in, abandoned on rocks,

On cliff faces that you passed by in your wanderings. Unlike you,

I must admit that all these years I’ve craved fame and found none.

Now the lyric flights that rose from my dreams have flown away. I’m left

Barren, abandoned, old master, limping along with unanswered questions.

Did you dream of fame as I did, and why did your thoughts turn to stone?

The reference to stone comes from the fact that no one knows who Hanshan was and by the fact that "his poems were written on rocks in the mountains he called home." Quotation from Wikipedia.

SALINGER & HAWTHORNE: STYLISTIC TWINS?

you know who

If what I say today sounds a little blurry, it's because my eyes are dilated. At exercise today, a beautiful new inky floater bloomed in my right eyeball accompanied by a ton of tiny circular floaters. After my cataracts were removed, I was told to watch out for this phenomenon as it might be a sign of retinal detachment. Thus I hurried to a nearby optometrist and had the eyeball looked into. No detachment, but now I have a bleeder on my optic nerve, the sign of a "violent" but fairly common detachment of vitreous matter [floater] from the back of the eye that will now drift in my eye in perpetuity. 

Salinger at war. PTSD in later life?

As to literature, the supposed purpose of this writer's blog. I'm giving up at the halfway point on reading House of the Seven Gables by Mr. Hawthorne. When I was working on my Masters, I was drawn to his writing, but no longer, it appears. His rhetorical flourishes are too much for me. However I was surprised when, as an antidote, I picked up Ten Stories by J.D. Salinger and realized that Salinger's method of writing can be traced back to Hawthorne — the p.o.v. of their narrators', the rhetorical flourishes and asides they employ, the way both take the reader into their cubbyholes, so to speak, to talk to them about their subjects and subject matter. If ever there were a scholarly article, there is one to pursue, i.e. similarities in technique and p.o.v. between Salinger and Hawthorne. I did a quick Google and found none. For reading, I've got Durrell's Judith and, somewhere in the limbo of inter-library loan, Ron Padgett's poetry is plodding its way toward my home. 

Durrell

It's obvious to me now that I can no longer write lyric poetry. My lines no longer sing, but Padgett's poetry may be my out. I've now written 6 or 7 poems in the style I imagined I saw in the Jarmusch movie, Patterson. So I continue to rewrite some of my 8 line poetry in the mode of Han-shan's poetry with an eye to creating a chapbook length work for submission to contests, etcetera, while also trying to create a few original poems. Still in the tube, the rewrite of my science fiction novel Ghoul World to remove some of the cleverness I thought was just too precious for words. And another movie???