Through the last (X) years I have compiled, collected and filed. I have learned (from other writers), while avoiding all intellectual commitment in my 9 to 5 working life: to the extent of doing nothing more taxing than counting ball bearings and packaging nuts and bolts -- all so I had enough mental and emotional energy left over to pursue my own course.

I have gotten innumerable writing projects underway and have, in fact, carried enough of them to completion to be satisfied.

I have had countless ideas, duly set down in personal journals. I have read classics including F.S. Fitzgerald, Cheever, the Beats, etc., etc., as well as a bunch of postmodernists, many of whom I found unsatisfying. Needless to say I have read a lot of outsiders like our own McGinnis, Koweski and Drehmer, who I have found just great, thanks.

 I have put together a zine library including writers as diverse as Zoe (Please Don't Kill The Freshman) Trope, Josh (Negative Capability) Saitz, Violet (The Free Press Death Ship) Jones and Jeff (Crank) Koyen.

Stephen King has given me insight into what makes a popular contemporary writer popular. James Joyce (“Tell a good tale, a lie, or be gone.”) and other Irish writers showed me how a country can be largely formed by its literature, even – or perhaps, especially – amidst political and national strife. In Science Fiction, the ever-dying genre, the latest practitioners of post-cyberpunk and beyond, into weird, interstitial, slipstream, and new fabulism showed me that the dark star of lit will not go quietly into that good night.

I scraped enough bucks together to stay at the Algonquin Hotel, site of the renowned Roundtable and where the mildly seductive aroma of Salinger still lingers. You imagine you might see a few Bananafish swimming angstily in a lobby aquarium, while a cabaret singer in the Blue Room belts out "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" and a 21st Century Holden Caulfield awkwardly asks a couple bridge and tunnel girls if he can buy them a "cocktail".

But I enjoyed myself more in the Chelsea Hotel, haunt of Burroughs and the Beats, Dylan and a thousand folkies and rockers and the place where Sid snuffed Nancy, for no good reason at all. (The obituaries of the longtime residents who lived there and died of natural causes are invariably oddly cheery and almost upbeat; nearly making you believe that all you need for what is considered a life "well-lived" is your own apartment at the boho hotel. And after all, that could be true.)

So I present my zine, The Whirligig, the ongoing story of an outsider writer's journey, supplemented by the work of writers of the new, who are not yet genre-labeled, as perhaps they never will be.

The Whirligig will be available at the end of September. Let me know you're interested at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Further info will be happily sent, as will guidelines to Issue 2, for any writer or poet who wants to show me and the world something new.

Last update : 14-08-2007 21:43

Average user rating

   (0 vote)