Itinerantdaughter's Blog

Writer Waiting

Oh this shiny new computer ––

There just isn’t nothin’ cuter.

It knows everything the world ever knew.

And with this great computer

I don’t need no writin’ tutor,

‘Cause there ain’t a single thing that it can’t do.

It can sort and it can spell,

It can punctuate as well.

It can find and file and underline and type.

It can edit and select,

It can copy and correct,

So I’ll havea  whole book written by tonight

(Just as soon as it can think of what to write).

Shel Silverstein, Falling Up

“God help us all when your progeny hits this earth.”  ~ my BOYFRIEND

Hunter S. Thompson to Tom Wolfe…

March 3, 1971
Dear Tom…

You worthless scumsucking bastard, I just got your letter on Feb 25 from the Grand Hotel in Roma, you swine! Here you are running around fkcing Italy in that filthy white suit at a thousand bucks a day laying all kinds of stone gibberish & honky bullshit on those poor wops who can’t tell the difference…while I’m out here in the middle of these goddamn frozen mountains in a death battle with the taxman & nursing cheap wine while my dogs go hungry & my cars explode and a legion of nazi layers makea my life a goddamn Wobbly nightmare…
You decadent pig. Where the fck do you get the nerve to go around telling those wops that I’m crazy? You worthless fck. My Italian tour is already arranged for the next spring & I’m going to do the whole goddamn trip wearing a bright red field marshall’s uniform & accompanied by six speedfreak bodyguards bristling with Mace bombs & when I start talking about American writers & the name Tom Wolfe comes up, by god, you are going to wish you were born a fcking iguana!!
OK for that, you thieving pile of albino warts. You better settle your goddamn affairs because your deal is about to go down. «Unprofessorial,» indeed! You scurvy wop! I’ll have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible «new journalism» shuck you’re promoting.
Ah, this greed, this malignancy! Where will it end? What filthy weight your soul has made you sink so low? Doctor Bloor was wright! Hyenas are taking over the world! Oh Jesus!!! What else can I say? Except to warn you, once again, that the hammer of justice looms, and that your filthy white suit will become a flaming shroud!

Sincerely Hunter

It is said that when Buddha’s son Rahula was born, the sage muttered, “Rāhu jāto, bandhanam jātam,” which means, “A rahu is born, a fetter has arisen,” thus naming his child the equivalent of “fetter” or “chain.”

That’s what The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan, is.

“[Washington Woodard] worked hard all his life at being himself, but there were no principles to examine when his life was over…The life that he could recall totally was not worth recalling; it was a box of string too short to save.”

Writer H. G. Wells, a former acolyte of Henry James’, writes of James’ novels:

like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverentially placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string. … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea, which has got to the corner of its den.

“You’re only here because Mom says it’s our Christian duty!”  –– Stephen King’s It

“Hearing a rumor that one of Lafayette Square’s most delightful young women, Emily Beale, was in love with [Clarence] King, Hay asked what he thought of her.  ‘To see her walk across a room, you would think someone had tilted up a coffin on end and propelled the corpse spasmodically forward,’ King replied, effectively closing the subject of Miss Beale.”

––The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, by Patricia O’Toole