Can already feel myself getting

bored with my writing before I even start typing.  What this is a symptom of, I don’t know.  Guessing the time of day, how slow it is, day before xmas eve.  But this remaining shift time will be keeping myself interested in all ways, tints and manners.  Should I go for a quick walk again, photograph the low clouds and how their misty claw stretches over the hills west of our property?

Music on, keep self alive with music.  Still haven’t finished the coffee in tumbler.  And I can make more.  I’ll head to New York with my book finished, self-printed and published, img_9776-1ready to speak on whatever.  Kerouac.. journaling… reading more actively.  I’m losing my mind trying to stay motivated.  Finished a project for the winery, one entirely minor and quick to be brought to completion–  A picture.  Of outside.  What the gray does to the terrain… “stay connected,” I tell myself over and over.  Go slow, don’t rush.  Just finish the hours here at the desk.  What I learn from it, and what I hope to.  To both: how to keep self interested– no, not just interested, but creatively connected.  Finish the goddamn book!  Students this semester heard me say over and over that “Only you can write your story.” So, then… actuate what you advocate, Mike.

Rain again, this time in a gentle but thick rhythm and consistency, meant to energize and replenish the vineyard, yes, but to get my attention.  Keep raining, keep raining!  There’s no excuse for getting bored at work.  NONE.  Take notes… make a wishlist… do some research…..  Where do you want to be?

On the Road, teaching, writing, teaching from my writing, writing about what I teach.. learning from the travels and teaching/sharing ideas from what I learn.  Life is too valuable and too active and musical to succumb to boredom.  Boredom is injected, by self.  Nope…  I have a book to finish.  That’ll be my gift to self– the book, finished, ready to sell.  And me, soon after, ready for travel.  What I’m learning from writing that before-sentence, is that this is a new year and it’s glowingly inviting for such to materialize.

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1yeaR

Looking for online sessions to teach, but I have to find campuses that offer such, in English— found a few, my alma.. Foothill, the San Jose spot, a couple more.  Found my CV and Letter and other materials for FT apps… a positive.  Found some options for online courses this term, should I choose.  But either way, no matter what I decide, everything is about my teaching, the lectures and the writing of those lectures.

English 5:  Critical Thinking, going to approach the notion of conviction, and idea— making them your own.  And the connection to identity.  And how you don’t need to think “critically” to attain such, just genuinely, Humanly.

Giving myself till the end of ’16 to have a FT position.  However I do that, whatever I write to get me there, I will get there.  They will not keep me at the adjunct plank’s tip.

English 1A:  Composition.  Theory… again, ideas, starting with us.  How do you make a class out of Composition, something writers and these self-stroking pedagogues profess and profess but can never agree upon, or establish any definitional or conceptual clarity.  What is composed, what is composition, when and where and about what do we compose?  We’ll touch on self-assessment, voice, recital, and word variety, among other compositional cosmos…..

Carrying around my little journal that Mom and Dad gifted me, like a crazed writer, ready to trap any and all ideas— posting to teaching blog again, right after this entry.. thinking now, 4 books/class.. too much? HST, Hem, Plath, Kerouac (Road).. for 1A.  Then for 5: one of those ridiculous collections, HST, Plath poems collection, and Morrison’s ‘Beloved’.  Haven’t read that in a while.. there, I think I’m decided on texts.  But I’ll start the term, with the first lecture, with ideas not in the texts, in fact quite removed from..  English 5— “What are you doing here?” I’ll ask them.  I’ll look for responses with conviction, not lazy or dismissive responses.. I’ll have them evaluate each other, kindly but constructively.

12/24/15

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a writer:  post 007

There’s no getting around it.  Self-publishing, on paper, will be expensive.  But I’d have something physical to sell.  And then, there’s no guarantee I’d sell everything.  It’s not like the wines in the tasting room, at least one will connect to the guest, they’ll buy one bottle and the speech and visit won’t be a total waste.  So, I have to start with the blogs, have them produce SIGNIFICANT capital and then print books, and ones between 100 & 150 pages– but don’t regard this as anything but tired brainstorming, dreaming about my own winery after visiting Sunce in Kenwood.. I have wine review ideas for what I sipped, the bottle I bought IMG_9885(Merlot, of course), but am too lazy to it now type.  Nursing a Racer 5 and already ready for bed.  Tomorrow, Wednesday, but my conceptual Thursday for my teaching workweek.  Have to blog everything, everything, on this desk papers from Spring ’15 and my hard-drive, the light fixture I broke from Jackie’s bathroom (tossing a plastic blue carafe a couple weeks ago over the shower doors’ frame and clipping it, it falling onto the toilet and Jackie laughing and me thinking “OH.. shit.”)… The Kerouac books, of course, more papers and other paper shit; old bills and receipts and my wallet, phone.. my wife in the other room, watching one of those BRAVO “reality” shows.  And she very much deserves to do whatever she wants.  Again this morning my beat-ette up before this lazy writing me, upstairs getting dressed and folding laundry, readying for work while I struggle to stand– no coffee in the house so not that motivation to shoot from bed and cruise to the kitchen for my Keurig-pressed coffee.  She’s more a writer than me, in many ways, with her devotion to her teaching and all the countless times she’s hurried to her classroom on days off to get ahead and write caches of lesson plans for the coming weeks.  She writes a plan, and incises herself into that story.  She brings everything to fruition, while me, I, the supposed and assumed writer struggles and fumbles.

What if I stopped with that adulation?

(12/8/15)

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Too tired for the novel

and, or, its journal. Now wine tonight, not a drop, so I’ll sleep well I’m imagining and I’ll wake gorgeously early to type away on the Massamen novel. Will it be done by the 14th? Well… it has to be. I keep thinking “It has to be 200 pages, or 300, or something paramounting…” But I write what I write in that time, that’s when its due, and that’s it. So there will be a printed MS by 6/14. I have to teach myself better project management.
Back at the winery tomorrow and I’m looking to write at the Yulupa coffee spot after taking little Kerouac to school. Oh.. and I won’t give up short standalones, fictive and or non. The novel is my grand project, I think of it like these actors that work on sitcoms but work on a movie in whatever spare time they pin. In fact, a piece of flash, or rather micro fiction before bed, after this entry. Time now’s 10:02, and I can’t wait for bed as I’m sure I’ll early wake for some writing and some thinking, reading some of those Kerouac dreams– and print pages soon– and officially kill the other blog, the teaching blog, and then go further into wine’s story.

This thought of wine and how finally I have control over its story and thematic makeup, and how to place it in my story and it has nothing to do with the act of sipping, tasting or drinking, but just observation, how so many walk into the room with this blank canvas or palette, and with that I see and I hear and my senses are elevated as they are now– empowered isn’t the word, but more of a voluminous story compounded somewhat cubist-like.. not sure it rings any bells for any of the readers, but I’m getting somewhere I know with my story, with the shorts (my TV show, if you would), then the novel, my movie.. This can be done this will be done it is done.

3 days till 26.
I mean 36.

(5/26/17)

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More on the

wine exploration, my new attitude and forum for the bottles, tomorrow. And in morrow, early wake. This morning out the door late from the easing of little Kerouac… but before I forget, prompts for morrow writing: 1, meeting with 1B students; 2, stop at Cellars for tasting and MOCK SOMM material; and 3, the SB from VML I sip now– oh, and 4: the Comp Book, how it fills and how much I must have forgotten. I know there’s a gem or dozen in there. I have to wake early, a Hemingway session, write the MOCK SOMM piece on the Pinot from Porter Creek. With this new wine campaign and writing momentum, I’m noticing more about myself as a writer and lover of wine, what I sip and how perceive it sensorily and meditatively.
The VML SB tonight has more melody to its words and overall ‘sip thesis’. More coherent, and more definite language to its composition. Everything I’ve shared this semester with the students has taught me something in the way I interact with Art, and wine, and Life,

always wine always mine--
always wine
always
mine–
and my own ideas. but I have to dive further into these puddles fermented, and link it closer to Literature, return to my vinoLit anchoring, what had me blogging or start blogging in ’09, what my sister-in-law suggested.. and yes, I rejected her at first but I’m glad I started these blogs and just putting my reactions into the world, into reader’s thoughtful realms. And now, more mature and more energetic and more focused from having a son and thinking of how he’ll one day read his diarist father, I’m more set to subdue any self-doubt or defeatist disposition. I too think of my students this semester and how hard they’ve worked and how farcical it would be if I didn’t throw more of myself into this new writing momentum, this newly catalyzed revolution about my words and entry pattern.
Tired, took a nap earlier but have since been sluggish and a bit moody, but I remain with my speed and sight with wine and the thoughts connected, everything from the MOCK SOMM column to the writing for that website, to wine itself, and what I make this vintage and what I’ll write about that, the process and how the fruit will look when it comes in.
There, alarm set for 5:20. And I will be writing. Then after dropping off little Kerouac, to the pool, and I don’t know for how many laps, as many as I can handle I just want to swim and stay healthy so I can write and be around for my children and have more energy, achieve that Wellness that Phoebe writes of.

Ready for calling the night, ending this fiddling with the synthesis of sentences wrapped and wound around wine. Wake early, I’m telling myself, wake early and write and post and show the pages to an already literarily-deprived world.

Oh, and tomorrow’s the first day of May. 36, soon 28 days at front. Need to get in that pool at ’24’, swim like I’m evading a shark, or one of those jellyfish with the poison that could kill like a thousand men with one perforation.

always wine
always
mine–

(4/30/15)

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Seen Speech

vino
Lit

IMG_5609I remember my intentions with wine today– charging ‘good phone’, ready for notes on ’12 Mendo Ridge Pinot, and the vines.. where they are what they’re saying and how I’m to look at them. Last night’s Merlot opening suggested to me that wine today should just be written in dialogue form, no notes, no thick-witted daffy descriptors. No, today me as a novelist and short fiction writer introduces itSelf to wine, and offers to not so much speak for it but translate its visual nudges into line, lines.
My ’12 Merlot, especially the last glass, offered something to a lean of: “I want to be seen as a song, a set on stage, with this light assertiveness…” Last sip was a little over 10 hours ago, so I’m remembering what I can.

Little Kerouac next to me on couch now, ready for school, ready for his day, this FridayIMG_5040 (which isn’t a Friday to me as I’m with my promissory morrow– the frenzying Saturday behind the bar, where people nearly have their iphones stolen (only happened once, and by accident, but the lady’s reaction was pricless, next to that drunk group, she saying to the reacher “Um, excuse me yeah that’s mine, thanks…”). And I’ll note everything, everyone today, in the spoken, the characterized.. characters, characters, in bottle and out. And there’s me, the adjunct, the writer obvious and then not so, not sure which I prefer.

Older photos from the last winery, some inciting me, others keeping me thoughtful, wanting to write that novel, finish it– the Massamen project, where I, or he, will disclose everything, everything about the wine world that people thinking of entering it on an occupational front MUST know. That it’s NOT fantasy. It’s a job, like anything else. BUT, you can make it your own, which now at the elevated age of nearly 36, I have decoded, mapped and staged.

IMG_5607Back from Jackie’s little school cruise down the Yulupa blocks. There was too much in my head in the way of wine and writing and the students, the Massamen novel, the final weeks of the term.. on the drive home, couldn’t concentrate on a thing, solely from the ideas, certain perceptive entertainments accosting me. Nearly ran a red, but here I am with the remainder of cup 2, left. Will try to take a picture every hour today, to capture my day’s moments should I not be able to scribble something, those notes I jot quickly, now more so just singular words and concepts/points for expansion (again, as I tell my students, 1A & B).. and I realize no wine writer’s like me, certainly no ‘wine blogger’, no hyperbolic glossy disingenuous rat of a somm’, that I know. But why take it in that direction.. they do what they do and I with my words and chapters and scattered Beat projects.

That quiet in the condo, that I experience occasionally, kindly confronts me, pushes me into these wine thoughts, the vinoLit approach to everything I sip.. just have to remember today: ‘dialogue’.. speaking, the wine speaking and what the sippers say in their momentary reactiveness. Can’t remember if I have to be at the vineyard at 10 or 1030 on Fridays.. I was given the option, just now, so I elect 10, or as close as I can come to it.. still have to get ready.. clock pushing and pressuring me.. but I don’t cower, I answer with more wording, more wine fantasy, more personification of my Merlot, and how it recited for me, to my ‘palate’ and senses all.. not sipping tonight, leaving rest for morrow’s eve, see how it fends off invading oxygen.. the writer provoking its intrepidity.

order no need stare
at vines and what they write so
i copy scribble

(4/24/15)

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Home, and finishing the [no edits]

rest of the Tribunal. A new start, a time to decide what it is I truly want to do. But I already know and I beam and glimmer in the presence of love; family, wine, writing, Literature.. the classes I teach, the students. Tomorrow, assured to be a challenging day, but it’s what I do, it’s who I am.. the teacher, the Literary soldier in front of the students, not letting a thing disrupt or sway me. Surprised how much coherence in character this red shows. And this is sold, where, Trader Joe’s? Definitely has a Zin zap to it, on the “finish” if you would, but maybe I’m misreading that. Maybe it’s Syrah, how should I know– Have to think about the morrow’s 1A– ‘Communication’, the consistency.. communicating ideas and moods and Morals.. remember, with me: MORAL PHILOSOPHY FOREVER! Dad would be proud, I know. So in communicating, we are demanded to write, to each other.. so, exercise: Literary Letter.. then, to the reading assignment… Mentions of Geography and memories associated, and money– “I dig life.” An appreciation of the Now.. the present and all in it, even if it’s turbulent. And as these characters ‘dig’ life, they dig themselves a hole. I can’t help but snicker at the significance with my own life. Sal and Dean are younger than me, yes, and I refuse to dig myself into any hole, whether shoal or abyssal . And how Dean calls “IT! IT!…we have no time now.” Precisely my feel after today, and I have support from Ms. Alice, and the students, both in 1A and 1B. Watch me tomorrow morning, watch me, watch the reaction, further confirmation that I’m where I’m supposed to be, doing what I really want to do, to quote… Like that character rocking in the piano seat, engaged and connected only to music, my music, the Beat that only I hear, that’s what it means to be ‘Beat’, or at least to me, now, today, after today… I breath in this hard chair, with its thin wood structure and posture, and I stare at my glass, empty, remembering I still have Dav’s most recent letter in the bag, my teaching bag, I haven’t read it yet– did I tell you I finally got it, the other day? Well I did. Amber still hasn’t responded, and I haven’t written my friend Lila in Idon’tknowhowlong. Life is moving, on, or past, and people I once cared for don’t care any more, they just pass.
The concept of ‘where’ I can only find fascinating, after today especially. Where we find ourselves and where we are and WHERE we want to be. Wishes and reality co-mingled for some reflective harmony, no? Where is more than a concepts, it’s a precept! It determines, it defines, it normalizes (if we let it). Today, one of the most filling and reverberant precepts I’ve ever encountered. My time for bed, near, and 12 hours from now I’ll be back here, writing, planning for 1B, and writing some more, so caffeinated that not even a police blockade could stop the writer. This is only the beginning. And I’m nearing page 5 for the day. Why not vent till then? But I don’t want to vent, not even a little bit, a smaller bit, no, I want to reel in positivity and expand in that fashion, and why not? I’ve been given a restart! Only cheerful in this day, with Alice and little Kerouac with me, here in this cozy condo. So, again, I win. And I always will. Haven’t felt this bomb of optimism since… huh. Not sure. Well, I am, but only few know the answer. I hope tomorrow gives me fog, to contribute to my Now’s myth, to lace my tale with a certain spell, one only found on this Sonoma side of the mountain. I’ll run after class, the 1B, tomorrow, thinking about all this, and laughing, as there’ll be no time noose for day next. Sovereign in the restart, the topic next… I miss the river, the Deschutes, riding my bike along that one bike path by Circle 10, or 11, when I was younger, with not these cares and stresses. But today I’m not stressing, or I’m not anymore. I’m reborn. Again, reconstituted and precise.

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2 of day’s 3 (no edits)

Woke to thoughts of a character, Crystal, in dream, her dilemma with Life outside winery with how busy it is AT winery, post-harvest.  Her vacation approaches but the executives want her to give a couple talks at dinners and tour once, a short trip yes but it would break into her time, her time, time she deserves.

Jack still asleep.  Me right to this keyboard, into coffee already…  Jackie downstairs with me and I think about the day and refuse to plan even a bit of it, no not a drop.  A new printer would be nice.. so much to think about in these hundred days and how to do it and am I going bout it all right– can’t think about just have to act, and a run, maybe, that would take away from the sitting.. the sitting, sitting, and writing, getting something onto paper but I can’t print ‘cause that machine upstairs has seen its final day I think.  I can’t let go of the dream I had.. she’s young for a winemaker of a winery that size and at times of anxious, overstressed and worried if she’s doing a well-enough job or not but the medals and awards and articles speak for themselves, people tell her.  She doesn’t think it should be like this, though, all this hassle and– yes it’s supposed to be work and a bit stressful but not like this!  It’s wine!  She designs her own label from time to time on small sheets of papers but won’t show it to anyone.

And I sit on the couch biting at the French Toast sticks and waffle with Jackie, knowing I have so many papers to grade but today I think I’ll just look through them and organize, maybe grade a couple.  What I really want to do is write in my loft, around noon or something and just write about my character and her finally finding her wined voice, and a balance of the having to make money from it with her voice, her intention, what she wants and how she sees wine, her oenological beliefs if you would.  And the time wears this morning, I find myself not at all stressed just thinking about what I want and my beliefs and those papers– and I’m not flustered!  How?  This is a first for me!  And next term, no Mendo!  I can barely accept it, that I’m free, that I have balance and more time to write and publish/print (like the word ‘print’ over ‘publish’, always have) and run and be with little Kerouac.  No rain this morning and I’m fine with that, the difference and Newness with the stage’s post-front glaze.  And no mocha this morning just black coffee.  Even Ms. Alice is surprised and I realize a bit impressed with my corporate coffee removal.  And that adds its own Newness as well, having all coffee in house.. and the loft calls me, no beer just the coffee and the espresso I have yet to sip up there.  Poetry in my moments and thoughts.. spells but I want these incantations to be implemented into prose, into my ongoing brainstorming of Crystal, the winemaker who just wants to make wine the way she sees, the light into which she dreams, visions, and that’s a centering similarity between her and I: we have visions, there is a way we see things for ourselves, and we just want to be left alone in our avocation’d vocation.  Thought about having her novel be narrative in Lit shape but I can’t do that to her and I don’t know her story like she does, I don’t want to speak for her, I’m not qualified, so I’ll just narrate from removed.  Not the most telling fan of 3rd person narratives but that’s what she deserves, me outside my comfort zone.

Back from taking little Kerouac to school and I stayed int he Suburu a bit after parking, listening to an American Jewish man speak, or read from a piece, narrative, that he’d written being a journalist and going to Isreal/Palestine– just the passion in his voice and the cruciality in his topic and address.  Wine has nothing like that, I thought but then refocused on his passion and voice and how he cited line by line and note by note, specific by specific the crimes Israel had been committing in these occupied territories.  I’m writing not that I agree with him completely but his coherence and voice and passion were something I noticed obviously and want to emulate.  But I need to stay focused, and I can be journalist like with this Crystal piece and character development, report on her findings and growth and struggles– and if anything were to be on such a ‘newsy’ level it would be the employment situation in the wine industry, how everyone’s expendable, how They, managers and ownership, want us to “sell a fantasy” when it’s anything but in the tasting room, in the office, encircling the entity upon which we depend for pay.  Activism in this man’s voice over the radio and I was humbled and embarrassed.  I want to follow my own cause, and I want to speak be heard and be read and invite discussion with opposing sides, debate bigshots like Baldwin.

And I clear my desk as much as I can in this mental triangulation and myriad of curiosity that will lead me nowhere I know if I follow it too long.  So I take the old writings off desk, the papers from spring ’14 that I still have and don’t know why, and I look at my coffee cup, cold and encroaching emptiness– and left, about $17.  Putting in wallet.  Why am I letting the dayoff stress me like this?  Don’t go to Palooza, you could be writing during that driveTime.  More coffee and take a reading break if you need a break at all.  Noticing the reality in a way that I never had: yes I went to grad school to be consistent and follow through with the aim or “goal” of being a professor, but next year, February, will make nine years of adjuncting and for what I have to ask.  Today, no moving and no talking, just writing, write it all out, every dilemma, wish, thought, inconsistency and inanity.  The rain stops and I start.. hoping for a notably dose of madness today like Kerouac in Ferlinghetti’s cabin.. the delusion will be poetic so I have another cup of coffee, watch the ghosts lift from it’s opaque surface in the cup, cherries on sides, Alice’s cup, she would say I don’t need another and I know she’s right but she doesn’t know what I’m attempting and I don’t blame here, but this is honest, honesty.  Still, the rain at bay, quiet for me, wanting me to continue my story, this hundred day war with self, with my dreams and wishes.  Know I have errands to fold today but I’m not of interest right now and I don’t know if I will ever be, see, the books need to be returned to the SRJC library but who cares, are they gonna make me FT?  Of course not.  And the haircut, and taking out Mom & Dad’s trash bins (this I will do).. but what then.  Something, some newness, here, locked away, when will I feel the madness and the Creative lunacy that will strip me, peel me, break me from that goddamn wage cage?  The only thing for me is here in this written logging and meditation.  “One fast move or I’m gone,” he said.  I feel the same, and have been since turning 35 in May.  And I have till day 100 to organize, solve all problems and be the writer and father/husband and son/brother I’m written to be.  The story doesn’t have to accommodate me but I have to ‘it’.. the IT that Macy wrote about in Spring ’14 English 5 is obvious– it’s the sense, the Equilibrium, total happiness and control and identification with intention.  “That’s not possible,” you could say but it is, it most affirmably is!  No waves here, though, no gulls …

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Brainstorm 1

Six students in first meeting.  Surprised.  Pleased.  All showed with enthusiasm and sincere interest.  Changed my mood for better.  10:24, and three still remain.  Love enthusiasm in students, when I see it.  Makes me feel like I’m successfully executing instruction.  Coffee still working for me, internally.  Need to write letters today.  Want to write one to Shelly, an old friend from the old neighborhood who now lives in NYC and is a therapist and who studies and practices Zen, Yoga too I believe, and has been sober for THREE YEARS!  Good for her, I noted yesterday.  I want to see how and why she does what she does.  How she builds her Personhood, and how she views love and life and occupation, the job.. and what New York is like compared to San Carlos where we grew up.

10:44.  And the last two leave.  I envy the student life, researching and having binders and notebooks and thoughts to develop and brainstormings for essays.  And I can have that now, I will immerse myself in student life and practice and I will start with this book, ‘Big Sur’, all the different voices of Kerouac and the Beat Generation and the notion of “Beat Time” that Paula, a student in the SRJC 6PM 1A section introduced in her first submission for the semester.  I read the first couple pages of this novel and only experience paranoia and uneasiness and curiosity; depreciation of Self among other things.  I need a binder for my findings, like Morgan, one of the students that showed today and just left with Ms. Suzanne, another strong student in this 9:30AM section.

Now the first student of the 11AM section shows.  He’s usually the first to show after 9:30 lets out.  I compose myself, and think of me, this Me, as a student, and I’ll add this to my to-do’s for Friday night’s retreat, after getting home from Mom and Dad’s– made dinner plans last night, couldn’t resist; the company of Mom and Dad always generates ideas and material and reminds me of when I was a student in Mr. Coleman’s class, the conversations with Dad– I always thought Mr. Coleman and Dad were essentially the same person, just different vocations and avocations and placements.

Another 11AM-er shows, sits, opens her laptop.  Ready for work.  So am I.

Still only two so far.  I’m wondering how many will show at SRJC.  I’m actually anticipating about the same or maybe less, hard to tell, each campus with its own climate– I need to get a couple articles for a critical paper I want to write on Kerouac and his Buddhist voice, and his maturation in Zen; the centeredness of his core.  Okay, time to get to work…

Turns out they just came here to have a quiet place to work and type and build their ideas, these three.  Coincidence, me too!  I take notes on the notion of ‘toska’, mentioned by one of the students here, the second to arrive.  And I see much of that sentiment in Kerouac’s work, and the healing nuances in his short prose style, meant to mend this malady.  I’ll start my formal writing on JK with a 500-word reaction to the opening three chapters of Big Sur, the irregular meter and punctuation pattern and his mood and fear and paranoia.  And even a low estimation of self, the name Duluoz.. there something in it.  ‘Dull’, I hear, but ‘u’ and ‘oz’ I’m not quite sure of.–  But then with a little internet excavation I find that Duluoz, pronounced ‘de-LOOZ’, is French-Canadian slang for ‘louse’, a contemptible person, one unpleasant and unwanted even.

My students, Erin and Aurora, not saying a word.  “Are you guys okay, can I help you?” I asked.  “No, I’m fine,” Aurora said, Erin shaking her head.  I am let to go further into my work, and I find gem atop gem– sources that provide precisely what will build my ideas and topics for my papers.. the etymology of Kerouac’s alter ego’d name.. and why, search for identity in going to Paris, to track his lineage and family, and Self.  To find some steady source and honing of Personhood.

Dad and I have always talked about Self and the notion of and what it takes to be “intellectually” sovereign, to think for yourself.  And this too is at the anchor of Kerouc’s ambitious vessel, both holding him back and pushing himself forward.  As seen in ‘Road’, Kerouac’s search for newness drives him, the hunger and thirst for the visual, for the experience, for new Life.  Duality, I’m thinking, hence the doppelgänger, if you want to tag it so.  Conflict in Kerouac, the universal attributes of such.  And escape, running from something.. think of his writing style, the whim’d or “spontaneous” prose that’s known as his.

Love feeling a student today, and I credit my students.  Aurora just asked Erin and I another question about Kerouac, to gather thoughts for her paper.  Then silence.  Right now, we’re three writers in our own composition bubbles.  Kerouac talks about the natural elements around him as if they’re menacing (chapter 3).  Highlighting not so much paranoia but specific fear and a sense of victimhood, being the prey in a situation, much the way he was preyed upon after the publication of ‘Road’.  Another thought Dad and I often take apart apply then put back together is “intellectual honesty”.  Kerouac is exemplary in such ideology and application in the way he writes, especially if truly with cathartic intent.  And if that catharsis is not reached, then what?  I don’t think Kerouac’s brain went there.  I think he just leapt, hence the long paragraphs in ‘Big Sur’ and his narrative in the Duluoz works, all of which I will concede I haven’t read.  But I will.  When I was in grad school, my Theory Seminar professor, Jake Fuchs, had one author within, upon, and about which he build his pedagogical life, Alexander Pope.  That was his.  Kerouac is mine.  At this age, I know, I know, I’m certain.

Fire about me this morning.  The search.. that’s what student life is about, searching for what YOU want.  The ideas.  Being on your own Road.  And going backwards to chapter two, JK mentions a “fear of eerie death dripping” (10) and I can only think of that idea of Toska, something inside you, whether emotional, perceptive, or thoughtful, that’s nothing but parasitic, eating at your reason and composure.

Everything on this desk right now, at class’ head or front or helm, conveying the scholastic sensation.  Textbook, notebook, calendar, pen, laptop and bag.  I’m a student, studying.  And I don’t want a thesis or specific forward for this research yet.  I want to enjoy the journey.  I’ll get to a destination eventually.  No rush.

I feel like the three of us in here are a study group, occasionally getting offtopic and talking about news events, like the Michael Brown matter in MO, but then we return to silence and typing and our papers.  This is what the American Scholar is.  In a room.  Quiet.  Writing.  Steadied.

(11/26/14)

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codified growl

One month from today, the Kenwood Foot Race.  Feel up for it now, but I need to do the Lawndale run a few more times before I can be prepared fully for that stretch.  Only gray in sky.  Quiet outside.  Not that I’ve been out there.. it just looks quiet.  Little Kerouac, quite involved with his objects, stacking one atop the other, pushing it over, repeating, doing differently each time with order of stack, stacks.

So pleased I skipped wine altogether last night.  I’m quiet awake, but still quite drained from yesterday’s 5.9 mile run.  Under an hour.. that’s “good,” isn’t it?

Prose, not to be paired with coffee in its brew.  Throughout day, more verse.  And if I need fill any unexpected void in book’s page span, it’s to be done with verse, rhyme, poem.. something musical, always.  Don’t want to be seen as a ranter.

 

Lost track of where I was in my lap– off to

escape through meter.. don’t expect this scrivener

to come back, how much has elapsed, couldn’t disclose..

comatose from introspective overdose.  Syrupy sentences,

high fructose.. only scribble in true show, cowardly critics

looking to divot my digits, all ignored.. I’m in Medoza

sipping Malbec on hidden ridges.  Just

beginning my scene, beautiful day, pardon me but I’m

new to these ways, involuntarily imbued in

the daze.  Grazed by stray blades.. spend the weekend

on mend, the responses sent–  me, not a pawn with

pen, senselessly sentencing, rather muddled in

melodies, taking odd shapes on the wrong date.

Amalgamating pieces, I’m sprawled, debating

re-creeds.. Can’t take any more caffeine,

or I’ll be having a cracked spleen, all their traps seen.

***

Definitely don’t need any more caffeine.  And why can’t I bring Self to scribble in Comp Book?  Why am I so addicted to this device?  This isn’t writing…  And I’m in more a poetic mood anyway, this morning.  So what’s the halt about?  Just skimmed an article about writing simply enjoying language, toying with it when they hit blocks.  What I should do, true…  Jack looks out window.  Walking away from these keys, I do same.

(6/4/13)

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