THIS OL' BEATNIK POET WILL BE READING...

I'm honored! I've been invited by Poet Laureate of Washington State Tod Marshall to share my poetry at Washougal High School in Southwest Washington this coming Wednesday, the  26th at 7:00pm. Chris Luna, Clark County Poet Laureate, will also be reading and his wife, the accomplished poet Toni Luna. I'll be reading my poem "Legacy" from the anthology  Washington 129  as well as older work and perhaps one or two from the collection of poetry I wrote while dealing with prostate cancer last year. Washington 129 is a collection of poetry all by Washington State poets. Here's a chance to support poetry in Washington State by going to the Sage Hill Press internet site and purchasing a copy from the publisher.

Randall Jahnson

I'm elated and surprised. My second short film script is done and emailed in PDF form to Randall Jahnson. I am enjoying this process all to hell, and I fear I'm learning that I ought to have taken to screenwriting as my first choice in writing. I enjoy it so much and my imagination seems to flower more completely. When I think about my misspent writing life, I realize that when a book became a movie, I always referred to the movie in my head when I talked about the book. Another interesting thing to me has come up because of screenwriting. Except for my science fiction novel, I have a hard time not writing about myself. I'm the main character in much of my poetry and fiction. Not all, but a great deal of it. However, my first two short film scripts are completely imaginary affairs. I'm not in them at all except as writer. I'm floored by this realization, and hope it doesn't turn into depression based on lost opportunities. What the hell! It's fun now, and I'm still alive and writing. Who knows how it'll turn out?

BEATNIK ENTERS A MOVIE THEATER WITH JAMES CAMERON

Only four days between last entry and this entry. Still waiting for an intelligent agent to seize on one of my novels and sail with it... when next to me on a long bench at the Starbucks in Kelso someone across the bench from me knocks over their coffee cup and a tsunami of coffee heads toward computer to the left of my own—commotion, confusion, lights, camera, action—as someone experiences one of their most embarrassing moments while another feels pure terror...but, as noted earlier, I'm now onto a film script for a scifi movie, having decided it might be more fun, because novel, than writing another novel. Enjoy the use of the word novel in two of its historically connected forms. 

Having usual steep learning curve when attacking a new procedure...script writing. Long ago, in the 60s, I did have a TV script agent-forwarded to the Bob Hope Chrysler Theater. The script was returned for being too short. As I rewrote it, the Chrysler Theater's lights went dark. Missed again, have another drink—my reaction in those days.

In order to proceed with a semblance of professionalism, I Googled "script writing" and came up with far too many suggestions about how to write a script, some of them frankly contradictory. Then I Googled "horror film scripts" and found James Cameron's first draft (May 28, 1985) for Aliens. How better to learn than to read a pro's script, eh? I read it through yesterday afternoon and this morning. I recognized he followed roughly the form most experts recommend, but, at times, as his excitement mounted, he'd slip out of form and go for the gusto, he'd forget about camera directions and write prose. Typos sprinkle the script. Then I noticed a comforting thing about his "scene description" elements. Many of them were cliched emotional directions. I could see the child in James Cameron, getting carried away and appealing to the child in his viewers, in some cases, appealing to the youths who are drawn to his movies. This was comforting to me, to see a great movie maker and how his sometimes immature emotions are laid bare by the script he's writing. Fingers crossed, emotions tingling, I embark on the script writing ocean. And, he's a vegan.

BEATNICK SILENT SPENDS A TRANSCENDENT AFTERNOON WITH JOHNNY DEPP

I know. This entry's long overdue. Writing going well the past couple of weeks. Had some bad days too. Some days, I feverishly hated writing. In the past that was never the case. Character-driven novels were easier to write. The writer can follow his characters along until they reach some  state of stasis, whereas plotting a mystery is difficult. When I feel I'm losing control of the plot is when I feel the most fear and want to quit. I'm haunted by the thought my brain will give out before I finish the novel. I'll feel the book is escaping me, and it's so damn clever, really. I truly want to complete it, see it made into a movie too, take the money and live out my final years in a condo by the Willamette River in Portland. 

Today, Mertie and I went to see Depp's Transcendence, an interesting film about neuroscience and the merging of neurology and computers. Imperfectly plotted and slow in places, at least it was better than all the Marvel Films full of bang-bang, crash and thunder with religious, choral music in the background they thundered at us in "Previews of Coming Attractions". Comic book action films are so out of date. Supposedly futuristic, their themes are as old as a cave man's brain with good and evil battling and choral music to stimulate feeling in the dull witted comic book brains of  illiterate youths. Nothing new. Nothing to learn that Fellini didn't teach us a way out of many decades ago. 

Life is ambivalent, ambiguous and paradoxical. Seriously, if we allow movie people to keep making bucks by playing on the good versus evil synaptic connections in our brains, we'll never escape duality into the technicolor world, the real world of human experience. At least, Tanscendence tried to escape the duality trap. Huzzah for Johnny Depp!

THE SILENT BOOMERS AMONG US

In an essay I'm currently working on about those members of the Silent Generation who decided to throw their lot in with the Boomers, I wrote. 

Author as a Silent Boomer

"A “Boomerized” Silent’s reality is the result of our having been torn between the generations that came before and after ours, of our being equally drawn to the courage of the Greatest Generation and the vision and science of the Boomers. Divided between allegiances to the Greatest and Boomer generations, we have borrowed from both camps. We know something about reading the Bible and can enjoy the beauty of an old fashioned hymn. We’ve also read On the Origin of Species. We’ve tasted the gritty dirt and limited vision of the Oklahoma dust bowl and heard the ocean spanning song of whales in the silences of deep space. We’ve glimpsed the black hole within the human breast that can make us do awful things and the monstrous black holes of the Cosmos, eating space and time. We have, with interest and curiosity, watched Gone With the Wind, John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima and a few foreign films like 400 Blows, reading along with subtitles. Later, we found Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Most recently, with perhaps a touch of skepticism and with our hearing aides tuned to theater settings, we have watched Hunger Games and the Twilight series and most recently, with great interest, Drive.

"Looking at those movie samples alone, the distances between a Silent’s points of reference become evident. They’re quite a stretch, aren’t they? Spanning those distances has been an exciting cultural journey in both space and time. Will all you Silent Boomers out there who have successfully bridged the gap within yourselves please stand up and give yourself a hand! We should be quite joyful."