the lonely crowd

I have just finished The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. It's a biography that digs into the American author's French Canadian roots. And, the thing is, I understand the author as he is portrayed, and I think that a lot of us do. Here is a man who could never be fully American, as his first language was French, and who, once he left his hometown to attend Columbia University, could never again be from Lowell, Massachusetts. He was at once too French to be American, too American to be French, too Lowell to glide with ease among New York's intelligentsia, too worldly to reconnect with his factory town roots.

I am attending a cousin's wedding here in New York, got to visit the beach where I played as a child. It's a homecoming. The beach that night was black and cold, but the lights of the houses were just as I had left them almost 30 years before. Nothing has changed there, but I have changed, and yet am still fundamentally the same. In Viljandi, moving between the hard-drinking-smoking white trash and folk hipsters, I will return to the same base dynamic. Even the globetrottingest most dissident Estonian hipsters are still Estonians, and to espouse Estonianness is to spend one's life before the mirror.  In Estonia, bar fights become "rebellions," lonely tsarist poets become icons of national literature.

Molehill, meet mountain.

Still, I am happy to be going back. I am happy to be going anywhere. I've got a pretty good reading list set up for my return: Dos Passos Manhattan Transfer, e.e. cummings' EIMI, and, of course, Jack London, the other Big Jack. I also have Anais Nin's Delta of Venus. Pity me, the few female writers I most connect with are Nin and Tina Fey. Also setting up my music website, though it needs much improvement. Astonished to find I created, with help, listenable music. Got a new book coming out called Missionary Position. Still looking for a publisher for Montreal Demons/The Demons of Montreal. Doing light rewrites in brief passings. Amazing how eight or nine months can help you see things for what they are, and bring out those great motifs and ideas with a brilliant shine.

There are many other things going on too, but those I cannot reveal to you, at least not this time.