Dear Jack...

From my window on the world, where I sit in silence and staring every day in awe at The Mountain, I've learned so much. About myself. About the world. Thus I strive even more towards a simpler, more streamlined and minimalist existence.

Yesterday, while it bucketed down and The Mountain and most of the city remained hidden from view, I sat in a simple but favourite coffee joint in Mostert Street re-fashioning my personal vision and constitution, so to speak. It's a work in progress so I won't delve deeper into it now, other than to say that anti-Beat Jack Kerouac features prominently in it; Kerouac and Ginsberg have influenced me enormously.

Interesting (from Doglas Brinkley's 'Jack Kerouac: Windblown World' (Viking: 2004)):

"With a ferocious intensity, Kerouac began keeping journals in 1936, as a fourteen-year-old boy in Lowell. His obsessive habit continued for the rest of his life. Long, detailed passages, usually produced daily, are ornamented with poems, drawings, doodles, riddles, psalms, and prayers. "I resort to these diary-logs in order to keep track of lags, and digressions, and moods," Kerouac noted as he began writing On the Road. Kerouac's modus oprandi in these handwritten journals is one of voluntary simplicity and freedom, of achieving sainthood by being lonseome and poor, with empathy for every sentient creature. Early on, Kerouac wanted no part of the postwar scramble for monetary success: "It is beneath my dignity to participate in life." To Kerouac, the "most ringing sound of all human time" was Jesus' refrain "My kingdom is not of this world."

Tomorrrow evening I leave for Prague.

A cherry-flavoured Beacon fizz-pop tastes like my childhood.  

Madeira breeze

Rumbling, rumble-thunder, sprinkler irrigation, doves in the weeping willow.
The 'quiet' before the/my storm.
Black eyes teeming with sugar cane, fishing nets, Atlantic storms/sunsets, and an ancient, battered-but-beautiful coastline.
Soft, dark and fascinating face hair, much softer than mine.
You look like my picture of Allen Ginsberg; but Allen is dead.

HOWLING at the moon

Some straightforward messages were driven home to me. This as I sat on the edge of my seat through the screening of Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's 'Howl' last night in Hyde Park.
Authentic, is what I've realized I'm not; I still edit and stylize my public media persona, and even more condemning, do the same to my stream-of-consciousness-into-stream-of-words.
In the mewing of Ginsberg, "I don't want my daddy to read my words".
Allen Ginsberg has got balls. In fact, he must have the biggest balls I've ever come across.
It takes balls to be true to yourself, to be true to your words, to be true to your writer's voice.
'The Write Practice' blogger, Joe Bunting, asked Ted Dekker how long it takes for a writer to find their voice.
'"It takes four to five novels," he said. So if the average novel is about 80 000 words, then you have to write 320 000 to 400 000 words before you find your voice.
That's about 1000 blog posts.
Or 400 newspaper columns.
Or 80 short stories.'
I arrived at Hotel Lamunu in Johannesburg's Braamfontein yesterday afternoon. I'll be staying here until Thursday. Jozi's 'inner city' has been dramatically reenergized, resuscitated over the last decade and more. It's not the apartheid-artificial city I innocently got acquainted with in the eighties. This is a beyond incredible city that many miss out on because of outdated and repeatedly trundled out bad publicity.
Thanks for triggering me Allen, even 60 years after howling the world out of its McCarthyistic horror, suburban smugness and complacency.

He's dead

Allen Ginsberg has just died, and his biography I've been reading intermittently for the last year, is dead too.
My eyes are glassed over with see-through mercury, and I don't know what next.
The last light through the me-and-a-bit high window into this unblinded first floor bathroom (the one with the large, beautifully faded Persian) is lifeless ad gray, against the lifeless now-olive green of the weeping willow. I'm not alone in my tears.
I will get out of the bath and mechanically dress, then walk to Melville to be anonymous amongst people I'll never know. That's where I wrote Two Pink Stripes maybe 5 years ago. In the street window of a restaurant and bar now closed. While drinking European draught and eating a meaty beef burger and fine, good fries. Often.
But I wish I was by the sea; I dedicate this photo (thanks Greg) that self-tweeted me, to Allen. He's dead, but we've just met.
Thank you.
And I choose a simpler, vastly more streamlined life. Without the s/trappings.
Living, but writing down the bones.