ROSEMARY CLOONEY AND MY BEATNIK YOUTH

"Hey, there, you with the stars in your eyes...." Ah, Rosemary Clooney and my youth! My age is showing. All I can say is that I'm happily writing again. Busy on rewrite of a novel I now call The Reprogramming of Frank Singletary.

My poems have appeared in Adelaide. I think I already reported that. Still waiting for poem in Zero Dark Thirty. Covid-19 may be delaying getting that literary magazine out. They haven't notified me.

I am quite happy to be writing again. Fulfills me to no end. The other night, I was reading a short story by Hemingway, "Banal Story". It inspired me to start one just like it, only set in our times. However, I was tired, it was late, and I couldn't get very far along. By next morning, the feeling that inspired the story was gone. So. There it sits in a computer file, a couple of inspired paragraphs that may never see the darkness inside a closed literary magazine.

WHEN HEMINGWAY WAS A BEATNIK

More semi-success with poetry. The respected journal Plainsongs has forwarded "one or more" of my  poems from my cancer ms to final judges. I won't know final results until April.

Not much else to report except that I'm currently reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast with great interest. I find my approach to short stories somewhat match his approach as it existed when he was a youth in Paris. 

Very shortly I will have reworked all my most recent short tales and built a ms for entering into contests. Maybe about 250 pages of fiction there. Still, no one has bitten on one of them to place in a journal. One story is still at the magazine that asked me specifically to send another piece of fiction.

URSULA, HEMINGWAY AND ME? FANTASTICAL.

Here we go. It's been awhile, but little to report. I seem to be stuck at 30 stories. I've been working on a story Weighty for some time now. Stuck. Probably because I ventured into unfamiliar territory. I'm a realist. Can't do much but stay there. I know. I know. Realism is a figment of anyone's imagination. One person's reality is another person's fantasy....and so forth and so on and such and such. Yeah!

Ursula

Recently was viewing a documentary on Ursula K. Le Guin. I was enjoying it until her hatred for Hemingway peeked through. She sneered at him as if it were his personal fault that most readers enjoyed his work so much that her own stuff did not make the cut for many years. I have had my years reading science fiction. Was a member of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club as a youth in the Navy. Had books shipped to me at several duty stations. Nowadays, fantasy and science fiction demand large audiences. If you ask me, reality is taking quite a beating. Pushed to the side. Maybe? Maybe not?

BEATNICKING ALONG THE BEAT ROAD

Thirty stories now completed. Have been working today on my ms You Wake One Morning, Remembering. Rearranging the contents. I want to enter it into contests. Nearly 50 poems based on my dance with prostate cancer—it's discovery, treatment with radiation and hormone therapy and semi-recovery. The cancer's still there. Much reduced. My urologist says I'll die of something other than prostate cancer. Only time will tell. He's the one who likes to say, "Everyone's got to die someday."

Lately my rejections have been accompanied by requests to resubmit. Either editors are becoming kinder with their rejection letters, or I'm getting closer. I'm reading Hemingway's short stories recently, having finished Raymond Carver's. It's been a half year since a poem of mine was included in Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro's project, Washington Poetry Map. It's there near Huckleberry Mountain just north of Interstate 90. My record is pretty consistent—one or two publications a year. Nothing spectacular. Not bad for a writer who is a stranger to most, if not all, editors of literary magazines, internet as well as hard copy.

The recent photo reveals the fact I'm letting my hair grow long on the top. On top that is.

CLEAN AIR AND SHORT STORIES

I feel the necessity to comment even though demand is

photo by Greg Moser

down. Since May 9, I have created 24 stories, beginning with "The Line Ahead". I just finished the 24th story, "The Phone Call". All this began when I picked up an old collection of Ray Carver's tales Will You Please Be Quiet Please that was yellowing on a bookshelf in the office. So he was influenced by Hemingway and Chekhov? Now I'm influenced by his writing. I also doted on Hemingway and Chekhov back in the 1960s. I believe a line can be drawn through the connections. What a bitch that Carver died at age 50 of lung cancer. He was a smoker. Now e-cigarettes are killing people with lung ailments. Drawing anything but air into our lungs is risky. Thus the need [political opinion follows] for protection of our atmosphere. Clean air is a necessity for the human species. For all mammals to be exact. Even fish need oxygen. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOGvQsWW1As

MYNA BIRD BEATNIK

Eighty-six people checked in so time for another entry. I sent off a short story ms to a prestigious competition. I believe I have no chance. A name writer will have the best chance. The press will want to make money on their publication. A name draw will do that. Still, I had fun putting the ms together—stories written in many styles over the years. In truth, I think I've been a myna bird kind of writer. A copycat of styles. I read something and a story pops into mind in that writer's voice. The stories in the ms represent Hammett, Allen [Woody], Carver, Hemingway, Salinger... at least that many voices. Maybe Dickens in spots. I don't seem to have developed a voice of my own. Maybe I'm just an inauthentic character in someone's novel without a voice of my own.

At SIU during my first stab at a Masters In English, a fellow TA [Terry Brown] asked me to type up a ms for him, a paper he wrote on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. I couldn't help myself and began to imitate Swift's style, altering the style of my friend's paper quite a bit. He couldn't believe I'd done such a thing. Looking back, I can't believe I did it either.

I've written 17 stories in the past two months. Reading Carver set them off. Him being a recovered alcoholic might have something to do with my sounding like him and their themes being similar. I seem to be happiest when I'm writing or when I'm in my wife's company. 

NO MOMMY TO COME TO THE AID OF THIS OLD BEATNIK

I've let too much time between entries elapse again and have no excuse. I've been working hard on poetry as my last few entries reveal. I've been sidetracked toward the short stories of David Foster Wallace — his Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. A suicide. I must admit all my early years I was unknowingly attracted to the writing of alcoholic males so who could I be but one of those? Only later did I find out how true that was. It's not the sort of thing that a young man can see into about himself and his taste in literature. Of course I was attracted to the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton too so it's no wonder that at age 31 or so, I would crash my car on purpose by going around a curve at a speed I knew would cause a wreck. Lucky for someone they weren't coming around the curve the other way. Lucky for me too, because three years of counseling and ending drinking eventually led me out of the despair I was living in. Unlike Sexton and Plath, my depression seems to have been curable, situational rather than genetic, but I lived in deep enough despair for long enough time to get an idea what that feels like. I feel sad for Sexton and Plath and Hemingway and Williams. 

I keep turning my mind to rewriting my sci fi novel and others too, my basic bucket list, but poetry has me by the throat and won't let go. I always want to put short poems into my blog but, recently, I've noticed that some lit mags don't want to read anything that has appeared even on a blog. The hell with it. It's not one of my best, but it's recent and it's all this 80 year old can do... and it happened to me so why not? My wife will like it.

A CHILDHOOD SURPRISE

Tricycles are fun.

Tricycles are safe.

You won’t fall over unless …

you peddle too fast,

and get all caught up in the joy of speed,

and your shoe slips from the peddle,

and your toe is grabbed by the spokes,

then you tip over quite violently

and cry and screech till mommy comes

if there’s a mommy to come

but if there’s no mommy to come

then you cry for a very long time

a very long time indeed.

THE SILENT BOOMER LOOKS FEARFULLY TO THE MILLENNIALS

It’s 4:50 am. My interior alarm awakes me in a sweat. At this time of the day, the world always appears extremely dark (unless you live at the North Pole during the winter solstice). I’m a worrier. Always have been. Proof of that fact is the fact that I’m 76 and worrying over a future—over a fictional tale about reality in my brain—that will have no real power to affect me but that really affects me as I worry about it.

Find photo here...

In another 50 years—I tell myself—the bookless and newspaper-less world as I know it will be so different, I truly can’t imagine it, but I’ve got a few favorite dystopian ideas. I see a world returned to the Dark Ages. Lots of information at humanity’s fingertips, but each man jack of us, at his or her starship computer station, will be tuned solely to their favorite world views. Like a villager at the mythological time of Jesus, we won’t know what’s going on in the next village except the hottest gossip and most frightening and disgusting news as distorted by world leaders whose best interests are served by the distortions. Charlatanism will be the order of the day and all sorts of fake systems of knowledge (like clairvoyance or telekinesis or theology) will have new power in the stories that people tell themselves about their personal realities. Meanwhile the zillionaire rulers of Planet Earth, flitting here and there to secret meetings on yachts all over the globe, will be uncontrollably dishonest, beyond punishment, as they accumulate more and more of the world’s wealth, leaving the rest of us to take the hindmost. No longer will there exist a fourth estate with the money and reach to watch over the plutocrats and sound the alarm.

Then, again … the sun also rises and the sky lightens, and I return to the hopeful business of writing a futuristic novel about a worldwide plague as if the bookless dark age ahead will have any place for my fantastic novel.