Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—
Q: Bukowski wrote a story called “You Can’t Write a Love Story.”
A: But he did. He wrote a whole book of love stories. Women.
He wrote a ghost story, too. Pulp. Lady Death asks him to find Céline, “a great writer.” In the end, the Red Sparrow finds him, and he dies.
Somebody told me to write a ghost story and I did. About someone telling me to write a ghost story.
Where does something like that come from? In perfect form?
Could you write a story like that? On command?
I was at a table of five writers. All five of us have a different version of events.
Thelonious Monk had teachers. He studied. He practiced. Alone. He played with other people, listened to them. He went his own way and then stopped playing.
Why did he go his own way when he as sharing cigarettes and the public thought he was playing wrong notes?
Why did he stop playing?
No one knows.
Albert Ayler, other musicians called him Bicycle Horn, and wouldn’t play with him.
He cut an album called Witches and Devils.
He played what he pleased. Then he jumped off a ferry boat and drowned.
Why? Who knows.
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, then shot himself because he couldn’t finish A Moveable Feast. He couldn’t write an introduction to it. All he could come up with is, “This book is fiction.”
It wasn’t fiction. It was a memoir.
It was fiction. A memoir is fiction.
If a man posts his books on the worldwide web and nobody reads them is he really a writer? Did he really do the work? What did he spend his life doing? What did his life amount to?
Why aren’t his books published?
Why isn’t he invited to booksALIVE to talk about his books?
Is he imagining his life?
Will somebody else remember it differently?
What difference does it make?
To anyone?
To him?
He will get up in the morning and write. Or he won’t.
Something will happen to it, or because of it. Or something won’t. Nothing will.
Nada. Nada y pues nada.
What does anything mean?
What did it mean to Phil Dick’s loved ones. What did it mean to Jim Thompson’s loved ones. What did it mean to Hemingway’s loved ones.
Mariel Hemingway
writes of Woody Allen visiting her and her parents in
I think of Woody
Allen cooking the lobster for Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Or was it
I think of Judy Davis being afraid of getting Lyme disease from a tick, in Husbands and Wives.
I look up Judy Davis, Lyme disease, in Google, and get a hit on a poem I wrote.
Also, it was Celebrity, not Husbands and Wives.
We get old. Our brains are saturated with trivia.
We can’t make the connections we used to.
We make the wrong connections, and aren’t aware of it.
We need a fact-checker.
Who gives a shit.
You get the idea.
The gist.
The radiant gists.
Who said that?
e. e. cummings.
Who is e. e. cummings?
You know. i: six nonlectures.
(It was William Carlos Williams.)