Genii

When I was a kid, I would draw maps.  They wouldn’t be maps of anything, really.  Some realm I dreamt up sitting on the bank of the river or hunting rabbits.  Oddly, the realm never included cities.  I had never been to one, so I guess it wasn’t possible to imagine that sort of thing.  Later on, once I had lived in and out of the urban and suburban worlds, I knew enough to form my own commentary.  If I drew a map of whatever the hell place I used to imagine as a kid, I would have cities set up, but confined and not allowed to encroach on the desert anarchists and agricultural religious folk.  The country people would have all the guns and all the beauty and the city people would stare at themselves and at the creations of other city people and see more of themselves and believe it was beauty enough to stay home.  They would leave us alone. 

 I think I’m good enough at writing.  I sit around and drink until my fingers relearn how to pound out a story and i let my mind wander into some other place.  Possibly, the only reason I write is to create.  I am grown out of drawing maps, but I can still create in my own mind, and, I hope, in the mind of a reader another universe.  One where rules are bent, but still a universe recognizable.  I use the art of wordsmithing as much as I can.  When my brain is working away, plugging at creation like a big Cat diesel, I find I use pretty words.  I use packets of information on this fictional place that slide past the minds defense against the fantastic.  Assonance and dissonance, repetition and resonance, analogy and metallurgy, to convey whatever universe I create to find a new truth.  Water isn’t refreshing, it’s “mineral copper tasting cold.”  Fuck, that’s cool.

I don’t just build the car, I throw racing stripes on that motherfucker.  At least when I’m on.  I am not, however, a genius.  No, I surely am not. 

So I sit here in a newly reorganized room reading poetry disguised as prose.  or an old man rant rendered as art.  Depends on your opinion of him.  The author is crazy.  Like anyone of any quality, he does a lot of things I don’t like with his writing.  It’s sometimes trite and sometimes shit and sometimes it just rolls out of him like another plastic useless product sold two for 19.95 on the late-night paid programming of writ.  He does a lot of bullshit.  He does not punctuate and misspells to an alarming degree.  I find around 75% of his work unreadable. 

Then old Buk, Chuck (the buck) Bukowski throws out something akin to:

“I only feel the tiny clutch at the throat, the automatic transmission blues of loveliness, that somebody has it, that they don’t even hate me…that they even wish me what?…” (Ellipsis the author’s idea)

Jesus. I think I can write and then I see “…the clutch at the throat, the automatic transmission blues of loveliness…” and know that any attempt I could ever make at that sort of double entendre or that level of elegance would net me another horrific SciFi story about a post apocalyptic junkyard.  See, the clutch at the throat turns into a metaphorical mechanism, and the mechanism is compared to another mechanical device that uses a clutch and then it all turns into a commentary on beauty itself.  Not only that, but the resonance of that statement is deep and abiding love all things.  Maybe it’s that he uses no M’s or G’s so the caveman in us knows not to look or to find a woman (that statement will mean nothing to anyone not hyper-interested in paleoanthropology).

 And for the record, I though of Chuck before Girlpants did. 

New John Pine.  Nothing that great, comparatively.