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In perusing my name on Google I came across a letter written by one of my former students in the 10th grade advanced class, Jason Levine. The New York Times published it, among other letters to the editor, after I kicked up a dust devil in the community. In an earlier blog I mentioned that I taught English  — and also administered an alternative high school – in Dix Hills, a suburban school on Long Island, which I usually referred to as the hills of Dix.

I wrote two letters to the editor of the New York Times  which were extended essays about my experience as a teacher in the school district. Each letter had about 10 years between them. The idea that on Sunday my essay(s) was distributed throughout the state, on every corner in Manhattan, in candy stores, luncheonettes and all the rest gave me a kick. Although I kicked up a lot of dust, not one teacher ever said to me, “You know, Matt, you pissed me off, but it was a well-written article, it had to be to get into the Times.”

So much for intellect in the schools, saying so much more about envy. I had my check delayed, I had to see the superintendent of schools for a chat, although he danced around the subject because he knew I had every right to say what I did and he wasn’t going to fuck around with the free press and the New York Times, much less.

As I look back I see both letters representing an intellectual acting out, an expression of my resentment in an institution that did not take education seriously but enthralled King Rote. I was serious, the school was not. Serendipitously, reader, the publication also told me that I could write.

Jason’s letter is under Pages; a new review came in from the compulsive reader. See http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1875. If I got it wrong, google compulsive reader.

The complete interview can be found by going to Subtle Tea under links. Look for it under the magazine’s archives. And to get an idea of how David writes, see his review of The i Tetralogy.

D:. . .Could it be that, as you’ve said, “chaos has order to it”? Reactions?

MATT: I am not into systems, although there are about 250 different kinds of therapies. As a therapist I struggled for years for a way to how-to, a method, which is using something to do something to someone else. I kept evolving and changing, and I never did capture the elusive butterfly. How i struggled! There is a part of you, David, I see, from this question and from our correspondence, that casts a very large net into the sea, like some indonesian fisherman trying to make his day’s wages. I cast smaller nets, for I have discovered in my journey that seeking transcendence is serendipitous; in fact, I hope it is. It might be very sweet that way, as the girl kissing you before you make your gentle moves. Perhaps I have been conditioned by early readings in Existentialism, for it is a very courageous philosophy, in part, a product of W.W. II. What if no one comes for you while a nazi bastard is pulling out your nails? Who do you go to? Who do you call out to? I am essentially alone in this world, and in some interesting way I draw some internal strength from that. I think metaphorically Judaism gave that also to me. Can one imagine millions of people hating your very being? Now we can. And what is one to do?

The character “i” is a denominator, the world is his numerator, and it crashes into his total sum; he is very much the way I might respond to such horrors. In the better ways we think of ourselves, he represents the way I face life. I wish I were as strong as him and perhaps I am. (Our fictional selves are always better than our real selves.) The only way out for “i,” as I see it is for him to fall back implosively upon his own self; he is a questioning man, a doubting man, a secular man conditioned as a Jew, but also free of that. And so he screams about the chaos he feels. He is impaled with a stake through his mouth to the wall. He is my better self, he is the self I choose to be if I were faced with ultimate horrors — I need no god, no system, no belief. I need whatever my DNA has given me, whatever I have learned. I refuse, at least cognizantly so, to be conditioned. I suppose I am only concerned with the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti phrases. it. And my task is to be free of him as well. To be a disciple sucks — just take a gander at Christ’s dozen.

D: You don’t hold back in your sexual scenes and fantasies in your writing. Some readers may consider many passages to be pornographic. Do you believe in such a distinction: “pornography” or “sex scene”? Tell us your thoughts on explicit sexuality in literature and in actuality.

MATT: I did not set out to write pornography or sex scenes. I endeavored to get into the minds of men and women whose only pleasure was in the body — and its parts. In the concentrated world of the concentration camp what pleasures existed? The constant use of the body in porno flics is curious. It is as if no other pleasure in the world existed except getting off. Men are often props, so are dildos, chains, fucking machines. Pornography is a land of portals and descents. I feel, at moments, it is a defense against feeling dead. I am surprised that many in the porno business do not do away with themselves. Perhaps the beating and pulsation of flesh and its liquids keep one sustained.

With thoughts and conjectures such as these, I felt there was an intimate link between the rabid violence in the death camps and sexuality. I explored that. As I think on this now, I feel that pornographic desires create a split between what is real and what is not real. In other words, one atones or expunges the committal of horrors to other human beings on a daily basis by washing away these sins in total and ravishingly lustful sexual acts. At least, in the sex one may feel, an antidote to not feeling, as one whips a prisoner to death. In short, the pornographic passages in book serve a literary purpose, as if brothels did not exist in the camps and ashtrays were not made from skin.

D:  What are you up to lately? Any writing projects following your The i Tetralogy novel?

MATT: About 25 years ago I made a writer’s pact with my self. I would only publish short stories in a book if they were accepted and published. And so this small body of work came to be. In the summer of 2007 I will publish about 10-15 stories in a book titled Down to a Sunless Sea. It is a line from Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan.” My son will do the cover; my companion will do the introduction which she informs me will be an exploration of the pain in me and the pain in the stories themselves. Once we write something we never own it. Some stories are traditionally crafted, others are experimental, some are sui generis; one is an attempt by me to get into the mind of my daughter’s disease which, only in part, led to her suicde.

I will give away copies to friends without the pressure of marketing them; i have done my life’s task. One other book is a science fiction fantasy which needs real editing but essentially is the tale of a creature on a desolate planet awakening to intelligence within his grotesque corporeal presence. It is a story really about my becoming aware. After that, I may try my hand at poetry, for it is the most concise of writing.

D: Matt, you’re a balls-to-the-wall, important writer/thinker, and I appreciate having become acqainted with you. I wish you blessings on your path. Have you any closing words for readers/fans?

MATT: If I have any readers out there, struggle with Kazantzakis’ injunction: “Reach what you cannot.”

D: In an interview with Tracy-Jane Newton you have said, “I am Talmudic without being an exegete.” Care to gab about that provocative statement?

 MATT: All psychotherapy is essentially Talmudic. The response to the question, “Nu?” should also be “Nu?” An answer ends it all; and like a down note in music we just can’t wait for that. For real awareness to develop, we need to reasonably frustrate the client. Therapy is not answers, nor advice-giving. I recall a supervisor in training who told me the anecdote about a client she had who began to masturbate in front of her. Granted, there are a plethora of responses to this by a well-trained therapist; however, I found hers, although bathed in Freudian sauce, quite apt. She said to the young man, “Given what you are doing, can you put that into words for me? I believe the ideal teacher, not to be attained in reality, would finish a dialogue with the student without answering any questions, but would have taken the questions posed andf refashioned them into better questions. At the end of questioning we come through a larger window and again more questions are posed about the newer vistas before us. In this culture, frustration has become almost taboo. But if you experience it in reasonable doses, “What larks, Pip! What larks!”

As a writer I beset myself with questions; I have a simple rule of thumb: I need to go through the “layer cake,” assuming it is a five-tiered one. Only after I am down to the fifth level do I feel I can unearth a literary geode of some value. I probe with questions, they are my snout. I said it best in an essay: “What I really do know is that fearlessness makes for authenticity in writing.” When I am threatened by confrontation, by merciless intellect, when I have to face the world bravely, I switch to a remembrance of my dead wife on a gurney in a hospital morgue; nothing after that can stop me. I know no fear. I am a curmedgeon with a heart. I know that about myself. And i share with Freud, without being grasndfiose. his passion of the mind. Endless literary chatter I abhor, so exegesis is not of interest, a defense against feeling. I am not a Scholastic counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, theological jerking off. I question which is critically Talmudic. If, in fantasy, Jews gave up the Jewish star as a symbol, I would rush in with a question mark. That is the best symbol of Judaism for. And I am damn proud of that.

. . .

D:. . .What’s your take on resurgent and popular Jew hatred? I don’t pretend that Jews, Israel, and so-called Zionists are blameless, but do you feel, as I do, that there is a media bias inf avor of disgruntled Muslim theocrat-warriors againsts Jews and Israel? Feel free to expand the focus.

MATT: I chuckle over an anecdote in which a grandfather is asked to comment about Hanukah by his young grandson. In effect, he says, “They tried to kill us, they didn’t kill us; so let’s eat.” Oh, yes. Are you laughing, David? So much cultural savvy in that response. Your question is a difficult one, so I begin with humor to defuse it for myself. And now I’ll deal with it. Hold my  hand, as we go through the layer cake.

i feel (note that verb) that in some unconscious construct the Jews have come to represent in Western civilization a nether, dire and collective memory that is reprehensible on several levels. Let me struggle with this, which I am doing right now. I think that intelligence, of any kind, goodness of any kind — I associate to Reich who wrote a book whose title escapes me in which he posited the thought that in each generation there are the murderers of Christ — that human beings seek to destroy that which is good. I believe the Jew, for whatever fractal reasons, has come to signify that. Jews threaten by their very existence and so they must be eradicated. Do I have proof for this? Oh, I can go on and on, but for the moment, now down to my own layer cake level #4, I feel it to be so. Thus, everything flows from this perception, intuition or conception. If you see Borat’s film, he scratches the surface ever so slightly and there it rears its scabrous head. In Tucson, where I live, he went into a bar wearing cowboy gear and began to sing a “western” song, “Throw the Jew into the well.” In 10 minutes the whole crowd was singing it. In the Borat movie he asks a gun dealer what gun would kill Jews best and without a blink of an eye, the dealer says this one, and gives it to him. On and on.

The Jew is an unconscious pariah now made conscious, the gift of the United Nations, fellow Semites in the Middle East and a media that takes sides; it is uncomfortable for the world to observe the people of the book become warriors, yet my reading of the Hebrew Bible was replete with battles waged by Jews. Two thousand years of encrusted stereotyping hinders us all. Of course, I do feel there is much wisdom oedipally in that Christianity, a son religion, rises up and overthrows, the father, Judaism. On his desk in his Victorian office, Freud had dozens upon dozens of pieces of statuary that he collected from his trips to Rome over the years. He understood full well that Moses was an Egyptian prince, and that that culture modified in so many ways how Moses behaved and acted. (Freud also did not know what a menorah was.) He was a secular Jew, but he well-reasoned he could not escape being a Jew in ant-Semitic Vienna, and so he wanted Jung to represent psychoanalysis to the world as a Protestant because he knew how revolutionary it was. Jews have had to adjust, assimilate, change, alter, amend and emend their behaviors for centuries. And what we have learned from this psychic an arduous effort is “to eat.”

D: You said in an interview with Norm Goldman: “I believe that chaos in itself has order to it.” Though this was in reference to how you didn’t obsess over structuring your novel,, it seems to refer to an overall concept. if so, can you explain?

MATT: When I look into the heavens at a Tuscon night sky relatively free of earthshine because of local ordinances, I cower for a nanosecond. The immensity of it, the chaos, unnerves me. When I observe this phenomenon free of labeling, free of conditioning, I sense something that eludes me. I tire of religious and spiritual associations, because there are tethered to mind sets; as Krishnamurti suggested, Can I look as if it were for the first time? I used to try that with clients. . .who is this sitting before me? It is murdeorusly difficult, but sometimes there is a glimmer. I would use a metaphor to help. This client is a trie, that one a crashing car, that one a mouse and so on. It helped and it didn’t help. But one tries to encapsulate this presence before one self. So it is with the chaos within me, without me and the chaos in the heavens. If i can keep myself free from postulates, axioms, mental geometries, the teeth-chattering of the mind, perhaps I will come into an understanding. . .perhaps. I have felt as a child that there was more to me before I was born and that there will be more to me after I am gone, that truly the present existence is a dream. I feel this deeply down and deeply so, without evidence. However. I give it no connotation or denotation. I will discover that. Last night about 5 a.m., no pun intended, I was dead asleep. In that state we have no sense of self; it is as if we are dead. perhaps the real horror of dying is not so much the dying process but the fearful conception of having no awareness. Well, each of us will get our bowl of porridge. The chaos signifies to me that patterns do not apply nor hold; that chaos may very well be, by definition, a pattern. I feel this is like a man trying to lasso a steer, to rein him in. However, at moments, I feel it would be braver of me if I could give up the desire to give order to chaos. That is human hubris

TO BE CONTINUED

When I was teaching 10th grade English in a nouveau riche Long Island suburb, while I was going for a degree in social work and then a three year certificate in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and writing for me in study halls, late at night and Saturdays, I did not grasp the energy expended as I was driven to succeed — intellectually. I have never been driven by the holy dollar, a defense against the feeling that I could not cut it in business, a legacy of watching my father being a failure in most everything he did. Success for me was in learning.

I was more propelled than motivated. I associate to a tsunami  at a resort as the lawnchairs, tables, grills, benches are pushed in front of the monstrous waves, detritus being given a monumental shove across the land. I wasn’t steering. I was just holding firm to the rudder as time hurled me forward. I chuckle at individuals who believe they are in charge. Fear drives us to control. I wander through my days now. I am retired, whatever that means, but definitely not retired from life, whatever that is. I watch midwesterners flock down to Tucson and “living” in adult communities which are really geriatric Disneylands. I observe them working out so as to keep death away. For many this is the best of all possible worlds. I avoid conversations as they don’t want to hear reality. I am beginning to enjoy my biases and prejudices about midwesterners. Flatlands make for flat personalities.

I near my end, knowing the time left is less than the time I had; I am going down the slope of the bell curve into the silt of eternity. I defend against this (See Becker’s The Denial of Death) in ways fully cogniizant to myself. Wouldn’t it, in fantasy, be wonderful if we could run from it, do something about it, avoid it, perpetuate our lives and all the other imaginative approaches we create to stave off death and dying? Death is the final loss of control and since control has been an issue in my life, I will die a miserable death, or so I conjecture. To surrender, to cede, to give up is difficult for me. I persevere, I am the tortoise not the hare. I come at you, I stick my jab into your mug, I tell the unvarnished truth as best as I can. I don’t lie, only to myself.

I wake up to glorious existence. I will go to sleep never to wake again. And so all that I have done will be a feckless mote somewhere in the void. How a waste of time to ask what it means. It simply is what is.

Although Freud was not far off the mark when he summed up life as being love and work, I feel there may be a third way as well. Using his jargon, it may well be a drive to be. I read recently that a scientist feels that DNA and RNA originally existed in the primal annals of time, and that to survive these molecules wrapped themselves up in an evolutionary sense with flesh and bones and body matter. In short, the cocoon we wear which identifies as Tom, Dick and Harry really is an apparatus for DNA to survive, the life force of the universe. That is a drive! So I feel I just am, what will be will be, that I have no real purpose, no real meaning, that I am driven by biological forces to live as long as I can to protect the elan vital within. My god, I am pregnant!

When I read recent reviews of Down to a Sunless Sea I feel not a few of them are so skewed that I cannot imagine what is going on in the reviewers’ minds. “Mortise and Tenon” which is essentially about a controlled and repressed young boy now leads a reviewer to say that he may turn out to be a serial killer.One reviewer repeatedly used “anal” and “oral” in a bizarre interpretation of “Herbie” that I felt subliminally she was competing with me as a therapist. A lousy shrink uses those words with a client. If you wish to see a good rendition of a cinema shrink, see Judd Hirsch in “Ordinary People” (1980, Redford). What I conclude with is a cliche, I imagine, in that we project on to stories our inner scripts, wishes and fantasies. So, the writer ultimately never owns his story. And how very curious that is.

Since I dissemble in life, others finds it hard to decipher me, which makes me lick my lips, for I abhor being packaged into categories. For those close to me, I talk straight, an arrow to the brain. I know how I present myself (or do I?) in general, and if I don’t like what is thrown back at me then I need change course or realize it is a consequence of what I put out there. Much the same with my writing. Here i do not play “games,” nor dissemble. All of me is in my writing cosmetically touched up to give it shape as a story, to make it interesting to you. I am a master of disguise, all writers worth their salt are dissemblers. We are constructors of lies, much more fascinating than truths, for in a lie there can be much truth. So Gregor Samsa is a bug or not a bug; the truth is elsewhere, go look for it.

Writers create little worlds, we are the gods of these worlds. We mean to write this, but the reader sees something else and often the great reader sees right through the author to where he or she lives. And what do I write about? I write about my pain, my cowardice, my defects, my betrayed hopes and aspirations, my depression, my frustration in this world, my frustration with myself. And I reach into a wardrobe of fake noses, funny hats, weird shirts and comical shoes that flap and curl up on the toe. It is all costumery as I make a presentation of self heavily disguised in oufits, outre and outrageous. Send in the clowns.

I feel that writing is an ordering of disparate self-shards. I’m Susan Alexander working on puzzles, inchoate pieces strewn about, some sections of the puzzle filled in, others imminent. It comes down to making sense of one’s existence, but there is no sense, there is no rational order here; that is a self-perpetuating myth. So a story is gossamer, a temporary wet web loaded with dew soon to evanesce when the sun’s rays are nigh. I write, perhaps you write, for the momentary pleasure of having one’s world subsumed in words, just for a pulsating moment.

For me, I go for the heart, although a significant part of my life expressed a passion of the mind. I am into the expression of feeling, I am into know/feel as opposed to know/think, although a happy medley of both I believe makes for a good life. I write to express my passionate feelings about many things. I write, first, for me, and then for you, if you feel you can connect up to what I am trying to say. Maybe, at the very most, a hundred people will read my two books. I will not be suckered into the mentality of marketing, the abyssmal avarice of wanting attention to be paid, I am no Willy Loman. I write for those close about me, I write to leave patrimony, and I mostly write to explain my stay on this pipsqueak of happenstance we call existence. I can be gone at any moment, at any time; I will not be remembered except for those who choose to remember me. I will become as distant to the world as a medieval serf in France. I cannot explain too well, to you, to me, why I perisist in drilling this literary hole into existence. What only comes to mind is an association to Sisyphus who realized one day that meaning was in the daily slough of despond and not the arrival at mountain’s top.

I just put up “Query for Down to a Sunless Sea” under Pages. It has served me well, for some reason. Perhaps my credits, after all these years, are substantial. In any case it is working. Rip off the structure for your own purposes. Received a new review at http://j-kaye-book-blog.blogspot.com. Jane’s introduction has been helpful; I detected some time back that when you send out a book for review throw in as much pr material as you can. The reviewers are so jammed with tasks that phrases or mini-paragraphs help them get the Zeistgeist of the book and the review is generated that much faster.

I have worked hard on not getting frenetic in terms of marketing. Often I come across writers or would-be-writers whose faces are awash with envy, mis-directed ambition and the lust of getting published. Often they are in strait-jackets in terms of their needs and aspirations. I see no joy in their faces. It really all comes down to who you are; if you are empty or vacuous more than likely your books and stories are. Let me go deeper: if you know who you are, if you are inner-directed, your writing will reveal that. Style is you, so stop working on that, the master says. Get a grip on yourself and from that flows all you need. They have software for spelling errors, and so on.

Better still: allow your unconscious to work for you. It is the lucky writer who in a paragraph or a single page writes a terrific passage. Try not to censor yourself as you write, you can always delete or hand erase. Let it pour out of you, and then cut back and revise. Write 10 pages knowing that you will cut back to three. I believe it is essential to write the 10 pages first. The best writing in my work is the unconscious mind spewing out stuff and my willingness to listen with the third ear, as Theodore Reik called it.

Remember: writing is a conscious attempt to order and organize unconscious thoughts as they flow from your lobes. It is our feeble attempt to give rationality to that which is irrational, but try we must. Aren’t you just blown away that “Metamorphoses” bugged out of Kafka’s mind? Writing is mastering an unconscious steed as best as you can. The unconscious is your best guide to who you are. After all, look about you, do you really feel you are in control of anything?

I just completed several paragraphs when the computer ate it up; so I’ll try again. Man and his Gods by Homer Smith (1952), a medical doctor, and with a preface by Einstein, is a masterful take on the fables we believe in, our religions. Piece by piece he demolishes the fanasty shards they are constructed with. He is calmer than Christopher Hitchens’ god (not a typo) is not Great. Although Hitchens is savage when it comes to Mother Teresa (charlatan), and can make you laugh out loud, Smith demolishes religion in orderly fashion. In fact, I used the book’s title in The i Tetralogy.

The best historical fiction I have ever read was Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea and The King Must Die. Renault can describe a gem-encrusted Attic saddle so well that you can cut your palm on its facets. Her prose itself seems to be  English prose in Greek style; hard to explain but she is a master of narrative and description and both books are a spell-binding duet.

 By way of an introduction. Harlan Ellison is a science fiction writer of the first order. He grew up, I believe, in the Midwest and almost became a felon. He is Jewish, which meant that he was a stranger in a strange land. And he is mentally tough. He is not muscular and all that, but don’t mess. In the sixties Gay Talese wrote an essay about Frank Sinatra, talk about sleaze. I believe it was called “Frank Sinatra has a Cold.” ( Esquire 1966.) Talese was following Sinatra about with his bodyguards some place in Vegas. In any case he comes into a poolroom. At the table is Ellison minding his own business. Sinatra announces to all at large than he wants to play alone and that they should get lost, or words to that effect. Ellison doesn’t move. Sinatra repeats himself. Here i can only give you the essence of what Ellison said: ”I don’t know who you are but I’m going to break this cuestick in two and shove one up your fuckin ass and when I’m done I’m going to use the other end to string up your two goons by their nuts.”

And so Sinatra exited. It takes a tough American Jew to make a tender baritone.

You will get a measure of Ellison’s greatness by reading one short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Want to Scream.” I also read one short story, whose name eludes me, that had me in its thrall and the last two words were “Fuck you!” Only Ellison. He looks like Larry King on steroids.  His writing is fearless!! That is his appeal to me.

Other short stories that come to mind are, of course, “Metamorphoses” (Kafka); “The Lagoon” (Conrad). Conrad’s short stories are like flowing mercury. “The Burrow,” Kafka again and what an anxiety-ridden tale that is. I believe the fiction writer can learn his craft very well by writing short stories and the ones cited are perfection.

And I would say that Report to Greco was the greatest book I read in mid-life. Why? It made me feel!!

I am of a mind and time of life when reading no longer counts as much. No, I am not counting on my personal literary treasure trove to last forever, drawing upon old memories of fabulous words and remarkable pages. I find it more intensely meaningful to grasp my life from moment to moment free of the written word, other people’s smarts. Living is not to be learned from books. Living has to be lived and learned from second to second. Memory is not living; recall is just a mnemonic device. I struggle to put away books and to go long stretches without reading them because they lose in comparision with a rigorous effort to attend to the moment. Krishnamurti has affected me in this. So this little essay is a remembrance of things and thoughts past.

I will share influences with a comment here or there as I wander about my inner library. Krishnamurti’s Think on These Things opens with a short essay, “The Significance of Education,” which is a dynamic and scathing indictment of what is taught. It is the kind of essay I’d give to a student of education and after he is through, I’d tell him to stop studying teaching and get a life. The Flight of the Eagle is a treatise (wrong word) about seeing, the difference, if any, between the observer and the observed. And finally, reader, I’d suggest you read The Awakening of Intelligence, of life’s questions done through dialogue in several European cities over the years. Krishnamurti was a remarkable human being and he writes with telling insight. If you play safe, stay away; if you want him to embroil you into life, stay close. Not for the weak-hearted.

A friend of Krishnamurti was Nikos Kazantzakis — all the great minds get to know one another. Three books that melted my mind — The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis and Report to Greco. The writing is luxuriant but not ornate; the great issues for each of us are explored and examined. Kazantzakis’ injunction, “Reach what you cannot,” has been my guiding light. I often cite him in my writings. The man’s mind is a transcendental pomegranate, bejeweled with insight and feeling. Above all, he makes you feel! He wrote most of his novels in his seventies and long before that he wrote two volumes in verse describing the further adventures of Ulysses, and by all accounts, he equaled Homer. I am indebted to him as a writer.

Other writers float before me — Buber’s I and Thou  which is a religious existential syrup that draws you into the chocolate depths below; Sartre’s The Flies which to my mind is the clearest statement of atheistic existentialism and a terrific play. The appeal of existentialism was made in my twenties and I still am charged by its vigor and bravery in facing the stony silences of life and death. “Existence precedes essence.” You bet, it does! Camus’ essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” is still intellectually thrilling. When a Nazi is pulling out your fingernails and church is not there, when god is not there, when significant other is not there, there is only you, and if you can fall deeply into that you will emerge stronger and freer; you will have defined yourself. You will be inner-directed. You will not escape from your freedom; and you will scare the shit out of your local Obama, Mc Cain and Hillary supporters.

I’ve enjoyed Mailer who puts his balls against the wall, who takes risks. He is very free and open in his writing. I recall reading in the dull Fifties The Naked and the Dead. Mailer had to substitute “fug” for fuck in order to get it published; at sixteen and naive I couldn’t make head nor tail of the word. At 16 I also read Stendahl’s The Red and the Black, and I could not grasp the content but I did learn that Julian Sorel was a “parvenu,” and that one word has stayed with me for decades. I relished and enjoyed Swift’s misanthropic masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. Not many people know that Yahoo comes from that book, those lustful and licentious living groins beating their tummies for heavy-hitting sex. And Swift has Gulliver reject his own rescue from the sea as a masterful statement of how corrupt and forlorn we are as a species; after all, he wrote “A Modest Proposal,” a tract which suggests that we eat little Irish babies so we can save capitalistically. Not a few yahoos thought he was serious — or was he? In New York City, the commune of satire and sarcasm, he’d asked the deli master, “Is it fresh?”

In middle age I reread The Nigger of the Narcissus. It lost its initial hold, not its power. When I first read it I knew I was in a room with a genius, not only a literary one. He knew men. He knew their minds. The book, if it had Freud’s name under the title, might very well serve as the master’s statement about group psychology. And while I’m on Freud, his Moses and Monotheism and Leonardo Davinci  are brilliant excursions into anthropology, history and literary criticism. One hasn’t read psychohistory until you read a short essay that Freud wrote about Moses holding the decalogue; within a few pages he bombards your mind with sound conjecture, history, analysis all within that prose of his that winds about you. Seek it out. (In fact, psychohistory began with this essay.)

Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey is forever fabulous, poetic and science-driven in a palatable and often mystical brew. This is a man who was involved in the unearthing of a mummy and then leapt into the vault and held the mummy close to him as the Egyptian day began to close, because he wanted to sense what it was like to experience this as if it were 3,000 years ago. This is a mensch! His mind was capable of communicating to the reader in wonderful prose the passage of millenia. Mysticism is hard to get across, but Saint Exupery’s small book, Wind, Sand and Stars, I hope I have that right, is a meditative series of short essays about flying over the Saharan wastes, often at night. The moods are intense and the questions posed are for all of us.

I read in my twenties Canetti’s Crowds and Power which to my mind is the greatest sociological and anthropological work of the Twentieth century, by a novelist who also won the Nobel Price. One chapter is worth the price of admission, “The Self-Destruction of the Xhosas.” It is an uncanny work of science driven by the engine of a literary mind. What better introduction to real cognition and intellect.

I will close and come back with more at another moment.

Jane and I were perusing the most recent issue. I was looking for contests to enter with my latest book. Jane was reading selected poets. I scanned an article by a pontificating ass. We soon agreed that the poetry was dreadful; I composed a poem at the moment which reflected the existential and pompous in not a few of the poems. I concluded, given my background as a therapist and naughty human being, I would have a tough time of it in a writer’s workshop — or they with me. The cant and pretentiousness is too much to bear among writers. I come from a different world. So I’ve been thinking of knocking five to 10 poems out that reflect the intellectual discharge of self-inflated selves and submitting this dreck as a lark. I used to tell my secondary students that the real ending of the Emperor’s Clothes is that late that night the emperor’s guard comes and kills the observant child. Like Howard Beale, we need to, at least once, stand up and say all this is shit and I won’t have it anymore. We fear to tell the truth so we pull our punches. It reminds me of Alceste in The Misanthrope  who can play along, like most of us, or who can decide to tell the absolute truth. It is called the French Hamlet, but it also can be played as a comedy. I prefer it as a tragedy.

The older I get the less patience I have for fools, especially the pompous, the self-inflated and those who reveal intellectual pretense. Having had years of practice having to tell the truth and all its shades as well, I can tell you it doesn’t get easier. A sweet anecdote for you to suck on. I’m waiting on line, not impatient, but simply wanting to pay for the purchase and get on with it. It was a slow day in the store. The elderly lady before me begins to engage the cashier with stories of her grandchild and with that unfolds a lengthy vertical file of photos, pointing at this one, sharing that tidbit about another. The cashier is “enthralled” with her while I am in line watching this variant of insensitivity. It was a stroke of good luck when the grandma turned to me with her necklace of photos and tried to engage me as well. With that I firmly said in a tensely packed series of words that I had no interest in her grandchild, that I had an interest in purchasing my items and that she was stopping me from going on with my life. With that, both ladies shut up, and my purchase was made. Ordinarily we go along, we suffer fools, we are embarrassed into being”nice” and “playing nice.” I was not rude. I expressed my reality. Jane, my companion, savors this because, as she expresses it, we all wish we could do that on a regular and needed basis. As I grow older, it becomes easier and easier to do without the facades. You work for years with clients having them try to incorporate the express need to be authentic and real.

The secret of my writing is that I go for broke, say what I want, write what I want; yet there are writers who are as restricted as their daily lives. For those of you into writing, give up the false self and get on with the real truth that real writing requires.