"Essentials of Spontaneous Prose"

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside your own house
4. Be in love with your life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yrself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh..."

As ever,
Jack

"more luck than brains"

The title is a reference to a discussion with Ana Menendez, a Cuban-American author that came and spoke to our class about her work, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, and about her career in general. She describes the events of her professional career as a combination of luck and laziness, and was extremely funny, inspiring, and encouraging. She's also a Fullbright fellow here at AUC, and a writer-in-residence.
This class is incredible for me in a way that a class hasn't been in quite sometime. It's not particularly challenging in a conventional sense, but it has made me think very critically about the direction of my life and making sure that it includes things that challenge, inspire, and motivate me to do something with my time. Insha'allah.

the Poetry of Physics

On this late afternoon, in these few moments while the sun is nestled in a snowy hollow of the Alps, a person could sit beside the lake and contemplate the texture of time. Hypothetically, time might be smooth or rough, prickly or silky, hard or soft. But in this world, the texture of time happens to be sticky. Portions of towns become stuck in some moment in history and do not get out. So, too, individual people become stuck in some point of their lives and do not get free.

Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman

Time, like so many other things, is difficult to describe. This book is an interpretation of that definition - thirty different accounts of the structure of time. It's beautiful, ephemeral, ethereal, and moving.

among the many things that attract me...

interesting titles.

like Márquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold or Memories of my Melancholy Whores or Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Poetry as Insurgent Art. There is something about finding titles like those that, I don't know how to explain it, but grab at me. Beg me to pick them up, take them home, and swallow their words one by one. It's an odd relationship I have with books, and the titles, I guess, can turn into love at first sight.
the one I just finished? no different. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.


I had read Milan Kundera's The Farewell Waltz already, and it had been alright. I liked how it was simultaneously simple and complicated, but it wasn't what I was looking for. Laughter and Forgetting was nothing like it. It was incredible.

The book travels between short stories, history lessons, and personal anecdotes to tell the story of the fall of Czechoslovakia during the era of the Russian invasion, a story which the author claims is defined by a hopeless laughter of a fallen civilization and the forced forgetfulness that they face in the aftermath. Kundera overlays memories of his father's dementia over the ceremony of Gustáv Husák becoming an Honorary Young Pioneer mixed in with harsh accounts of fictional eroticism and innocence and death and love. It's beautiful. I loved it. And I think a major reason I did was because it was so personal, almost like pages of a diary stuffed into a compilation of short stories.

Read it. You'll see what I mean.

Driving Doldrums!

In the winding mountains of Tennessee with him in my hands, I listen on the radio of some woman droning on about the American craving to return to the spirit of exploration. The spirit of the Road. And baby, ain't that the truth. "...I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there."

"'Sure baby, mañana.' It was always mañana. For the next week that was all I heard - mañana, a lovely word that probably means heaven."

Well snap your fingers, light a cigarette, and call me Marylou. I'll cross this country with or without you.