Diary

Sunday, February 20

Walter Mitty had a secret life.
At his day job, he dreamed he was
an underground writer. All that strange pussy.
Beatnik chicks, in black net stockings.
A Chianti bottle with a candle in it.
Bullfight posters. The reality is,
all Bukowski's women, until the end,
were ugly, from life on the streets.
Living in tenements, cadging drinks.
The love of his life, Jane Cooney Baker,
would expose her privates to his friends,
and get them to try to feel her up.
All they did was drink and fight.
Let's just say Faye Dunaway in Barfly
she was not. Henry and Wanda was fanciful.
Even the job at the post office, I asked a clerk
if he got it right, and he said, "He nailed it, what
a prick the bossman was. But he left out how
all your co-workers were bucking for bossman."
He was accurate about the sniping in the L. A.
small press scene, but he gave as good as he got,
there, too. He was not afraid to dish it out.

Brew bought discarded copies
of Sauveur magazine at the library, for 25¢,
to give himself ideas, for menu-planning purposes.
He used to buy men's magazines to see what kind of fiction
they were using, but unlike cooking haute cuisine, all he did
was jack off into a paper towel and throw the magazine away.
One time he wrote the editor of Nugget, or Dude, or Gent,
"My only complaint is my tongue sticks to the pages." They had
rejected one of his stories as having "too much self-reflexive irony."

I'd call it a pastiche, rather than an imitation.
Picasso's "Guernica" is based upon the myth
of Diana turning Actaeon into a stag, whereupon
his own dogs ate him. There are only so many plots
in literature. A man goes on a journey, a stranger rides into town.
A Manichaean struggle, the forces of darkness versus the forces of light,
the elements are always the same. Just, sometimes the polarity is reversed.
Bigfoot must die. Do the scientists try to kill the Creature from the Black Lagoon,
who was basically curious, innocent, and infatuated by Julie Adams, or is
Richard Carlson, Julie's intended, menaced by the Gill Man, out of dumb animal
aggression, fright, and self-protection. Would not a low-rent cinéaste remark
a similarity between the concept of a book cover and an earlier movie poster?
You can't shit the shitter. On the other hand, a good idea cannot really be improved on.
Just do a remake. Like Gus van Sant and Psycho. Here's the movie poster.

Here are Black McGoon and Brenda in the inky depths. Actually, Brenda's
uncredited stunt double, Ginger Stanley.

Which twin has the Toni?