"Anyone who was any good, who wasn't a rummy, finally made it,"
Ernest
Hemingway said. "Except Ezra Pound." But that leaves out
William Carlos
Williams. That leaves out Evan Shipman. Everybody
drank back then. Everybody
smoked. I identify with Kafka, Beckett,
and James Joyce. What does a writer
like me do in an age of heavy
television viewing. I got good at a trade nobody
practices. New Forms
of Ugly. Charles Willeford writing criticism. Bukowski
listening to
classical music and reading John Fante in the Los Angeles public
library.
Imagine if you took a veteran of the small press scene and gave him a
small,
desktop computer, an IBM PC, and then gave him an Internet connection.
A,
ha ha, dial-up modem. Then imagine New York being taken over
by marketing majors.
Talk about rage. Make a movie for cell phones
and iPods. Write for the pod
people. Write for answering machines.
Neocons Ate the Zombies. The historic
bat tower, in the keys, put there
to eat mosquitoes, the mosquitoes ate the bats.
That's my take on television.
The television viewers ate the writers. All that
was left was the Internet.
The democratic underground (DU) and the Rude
Pundit.
School, the military, work. And television.
New York is a city
run entirely by lists.
Jean Shepherd. Best Chinese restaurant.
Everybody finally
made it.
Except Norman Podhoretz.