In the pursuit of intellectual and artistic freedom, I have decided to make this journal "friends only." Its in hopes that I will cease to censor myself, or at least less. I feel my friends list as is stands fairly complete, and if I haven't added you, its probably because I haven't talked to you since high school and/or you were a friend of a friend who I was never really close with. On occassion I might make a public entry, but I am going to use the new-found privacy to post some of my writing and thoughts.  If, on the off chance, I have any lj-stalkers out on the internet who would like to be my friend, comment to be added. 

To my friends, I'm sorry for what filth you'll now see when you view your friends page while logged in. *sheepish grin*

"You've got two of the best men in the country in your goddamn English Department. Manlius. Esposito. God, I wish we had them here.  At least, they're poets, for Chrissake."

"They're not," Franny said. "That's partly what's so awful. I mean they're not real poets. They're just people that write poems that get published and anthoolgized all over the place, but they're not poets." She stopped, self-consciously, and put out her cigarette. For several minutes now, she had seemed to be losing color in her face. Suddenly, even her lipstick seemed a shade or two lighter, as though she had just blotted it with a leaf of Kleenex. "Lets not talk about it," she said, almost listlessly, squashing her cigarette stub in the ashtray. "I'm way off. I'll just ruin the whole weekend. Maybe there's a trapdoor under my chair, and I'll just disappear."

The waiter came forward very briefly and left a second Martini in front of each of them. Lan put his fingers--which were slender and long, and usually not far out of sight--around the stem of his glass. "You're not ruining anything," he said quietly. "I'm just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want---some bastard with wavy hair?"

"No. Can't we let it go? Please. I'm feeling absolutly lousy, and I'm getting a terrible--"

"I'd be very happy to drop the whole subject--I'd be delighted. Just tell me first what a real poet is, if you don't mind. I'd appreciate it. I really would."

There was a faint glisten of perspiration high on Franny's forehead. It might only have meant that the room was too warm, or that her stomach was upset, or that the Martinis were too potent; in any case, Lane didn't seem to notice it.

"I don't know what a real poet is. I wish you'd stop it, Lane. I'm serious. I'm feeling very peculiar and funny, and I can't--" 

"All right, all right--O.K. Relax," Lane said. "I was only trying to--"

"I know this much, is all," Franny said. "If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. IO mean you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking aboutdon't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem, for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings-- excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Espostio and all those poor men."

Lane took time to light a cigareete for himself before he said anything. Then: "I thought you liked Manlius. As a matter of fact, about a month ago, if I remember correctly, you said he was darling, and that you--" 

"I do like him. I'm just sick of just liking people. I wish to God I could meet somebody I could respect...Would you excuse me for just a minute?" Franny was suddenly on her feet, with her handbag in hand. She was very pale. 


--Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger

The flight over the Andes, the poison air of Pucallpa, the brain-boiling heat and pore=flooding humidity had combined to give him a migraine; and the headache had combined with teh disappointement over the unavailability of air taxis to make him depressed. Fortunately, when Sailor squaked his signature line, Switters was instantly reminded of something Maestra had said almost twenty years before: "All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously."

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

"The key word here is roots," Maestra countered. "The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness and self-pity blossom simultaneously in early adolescence. It's about that time that we start viewing the world as soemthing other than a whoop-de-doo playground, we start to experience personbally how threatening it can be, how cruel and unjust. At the very moment when we become, for the first time, both introspective and socially conscientious, we recieve teh bad news that the world, by and large, doesn't give a rat's ass. Even an old tomato like me can recall how painful, scary, and disillustioning that realization was. So, there's a tendency, then, to slip into rage and self-pity, whihc, if indulged, can fester into bouts of depression."

"Yeah, but, Maestra--"

"Don't interrupt. Now, unless someone stronger and wiser--a friend, a parent, a novelist, filmmaker, teacher, or musician--can josh us out of it, can elevate us and show us how petty and pompous and monumentally uselss it is to take ourselves so seriously, then depression can become a habit, which, in turn, can produce a nerurological imprint.  Are you with me? Gradually, our brain chemistry becomes conditioned to react to negative stimuli in a particular, predicable way. One thing'll go wrong and it'll automatically switch on its blender and we know it, we're soused to the gills from the inside out. Once depression has become electrochemiscally integrated, it can be extremely difficult to philsophically or psychologically override it, by then it's playing by physical rules, a whole different ball game. That's why, Switters my dearest, every time you've shown signs of feeling sorry for yourself, I've played my blues records really lour or red to you from The Horse's Mouth. And that's why when you've exhibited the slightest tendency toward self-importance, I've reminded you that you and me---you and I, excuse me--may be every bit as important as the President or the pope or the biggest prime-time icon in Hollywood, but that none of us is much more than a pimple on the ass-end of creation, so let's not get carried away with ourselves. Preventive medicince, boy. It's preventive medicince."

"But what about self-esteem?"

"Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace--and maybe even glory."

All the while his grandmother was assuring him that we was merely a cosmic zit, she was also exhorting over him never to accept the limitations that society would try to place on him. Contraditory? Not necessarily. It seemed to be her belief that one individual's spirit could supersede, eclipse, and outsparkle the entire disco ball of history, but that if you magnified the pure spark of sprirt through the puffy lens of ego, you risked buring a hole in your soul. Or something rougly similar.

-Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Good news:
Found out (rather late, might I add), that I got an "A" on my philsophy midterm thats worth 40% of my grade! Whoo-hoo!!
Was informed that I should be living in the chapter house next year with some wicked cool women
Baby brother Alex got a job
Getting beyond my writers block and writing not-complet-shit poetry

Bad news:
Ralph Harold, the Caucasion Invasion has died due to his transmission. RIP, Ralph, you were good to me. 
Have no idea if I will finish my writing portfolio on time
Have to buy a new car


Also, go read some Wallace Stevens. I discovered him on a suggestion of a friend, and am in love. He's pretty and inspiring. Here's a bit to wet your appetite:
 
Continual Conversation with a Silent Man
The old brown hen and the old blue sky,
Between the two we live and die--
The broken cartwheel on the hill.

As if, in the presence of the sea,
We dried our nets and mended sail
And talked of never-ending things,

Of the never-ending storm of will,
One will and many wills, and the wind,
Of many meanings in the leaves,

Brought down to one below the eaves,
Link, of that tempest, to the farm,
The chain of the turquoise hen and sky

And the wheel that broke as the cart went by.
It is not a voice that is under the eaves.
It is not speech, the sound we hear

In this conversation, but the sound
Of things and their motion: the other man,
A turquoise monster moving round.

Wallace Stevens

"Mein Freund, das grad' ist Dichters Werk,
dass er sein Traumen deut' und merk
Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn
wird ihm im Traume aufgethan:
all' Dichtkunst und Poeterei
is nichts als Wahrtraum-Deuterei." 
- Hans Sachs in the Mastersingers

["My friend, that is exactly the poet's task, to makr his dreams and to attach meanings to them. Believe me, man's most profound illusions are revealed to him in dreams; and all versifying and poetizing is nothing by an interpretation of them."]

Enjoy that, mutha fuckas. 

Ok, back to Nietzche.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavently connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across teh tops of cities contemplating jazz who bared their brains to Heaven under El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes halluciniating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their public beards returing through Laredo whith a belt of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paitn hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with walking nightmares, alcohol and cock with endless balls, incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Patterson, illuminating the motionless world of Time between.

[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to percieve in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

****

[anyone lived in a pretty how town]

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells of down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

somones married their everyone
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers and they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dreamt their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes

Women and men (both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

****

[pity this busy monster,mankind,]

pity this busy monster,mankind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange;lenses extend

unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
                                        A world of made
is not a world of born--pity poor flesh

and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this 
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if--listen:there's a hell
of a good universe next door;let's go


- All poems by e.e. cummings 

 Edit: I made a mistake in the last stanza of the poem- the pages stuck together. Here is the poem corrected: