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Don't Get Old
2002-10-02 - 9:30 p.m.


before/after
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Sometimes you gotta' shake the can until the last gumwad comes out.

Then you can fill it with new, and more interesting trash.

Sometimes, with writing, immediately after you write is a bad time to appraise what you've done.

It needs some time on its own.  Maybe come back and edit, maybe not.  But you really don't know if what you've written is good until a few weeks go by.

Sure, sure, there are times when the thunderbolt hits, and after you get up from the computer, you strut around naked with a hardon, flapping your leathery sack and making sounds like a bat, knowing you goddam well killed it.  But, like anything, its a process of creative flow and abandonment.

So some time goes by, and I like to re-read some stuff.

Of course, there is always something foul and putrid, usually, especially if you're emptying out your head to get to the good stuff, like a singer clearing his throat.  But you don't talk much about that.  Its like the tough kid in high school, he never talks about his losses, even if his losses were better than other people's losses.

And it put me in mind of the arc of certain writers, and how I looked at them.

In ways, a lot of the bulk of their most recognized and published stuff came in the middle of their careers.  Their early stuff raw, and lacking maturity, viability outside the mind's womb.

And their older stuff always struck me as finely crafted.  Wordsmiths by that time, but the work often seemed to lack that ZANG.  That ozone smell in the air and the standing up of hair right before the lightining strikes.

Some of the older stuff is self-indulgent, no doubt.  'I've got a fat contract, and I've always wanted to write this.'  The beats and their various forms of Sam Spade drifting through their conciousness coming out from their childhoods expressed in the decline of their years because they can.  And I don't spite them for that.

Bukowski, Burroughs, and, I think, Kerouac all did that.

I don't mean to dispairage any of them, least of all Jack.  Jack will be remembered for centuries.

Vonnegut just has emptied his head as he has gotten older.  Its real non-linear, and if you read Timequake, you wonder if he's just playing out the string.  To late to teach an old dog new tricks, but maybe a lesson to be learned is not to fuck with your fine legacy.

Shakespeare presents some problems.  I like him, some people think he's oppressive.  Everybody has their own opinion, and an such a specific thing is not what I am talking about here.

Looking at Dead Will's work, the arc is something strange.  I get a darker more complex feel the later in his career that I go, the language more intense, intracate, precise in its loops of logic. 

I guess, if its to be believed, Dead Will lost nothing as he got older, and doddered into opium and rum, which is hard to believe.

Much like Oswald, I suspect he did not act alone.

Then you have the one shot artists we all love, like Fitzgerald and Salinger.  They did their legacies well, but missed out on any sort of arc.

Fitzgerald had rough tastes in booze and women.

And Salinger left generations of teen angst in his wake, budding artists all of them left without a mojo father, and now all we really have is strange stories about him drinking his own piss.

Which I do not hold against him, or anyone really.  Its yours, you made it, just don't do it around me.  You can still be loathsome and write well, just don't get old, man, and lose the connection.


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