So this page is about reading books.  Both good and bad, but within a certain type, that one might considered hip.  Apparently I can’t write one, but I can certainly read them.   It is taking a stand about society that, although connected in some ways, is also standing apart.  Look to the beats.  Look to William Burroughs.  Look to John Waters. Look to Herbert Huncke and Taylor Mead. Look to everything that scares or disgusts ordinary people. This literature is not mainstream.  We can use words like cool and hip but that is just bullshit.  It is really about a lifestyle.  Not these want-a be’s wearing stingy brim hats and trying to look cool.  It is about living the lifestyle. I do not want to give book reviews. You make the judgements.

“The Last of the Live Nude Girls” by Sheila McClear.  This is a story of a young women who comes to NYC and ends up working in the “peep show’ business.  She tells a simple story, with clear, clean words.  No this is not porno. Nothing fancy.  But it is a story that rings of the truth.  Of Times Square and 42nd Street before Gulianni cleaned it up and fucked all of us from living in the underground.  I recommend that you read it.  She also gives a great bibliography in the back of the book.  I will be reading for years.  We live a bit of the seediness of the peep show women and how they lived.  Not suffering.  Not being too degraded.  Just living their lives and surviving.

“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac. I think this is obligatory reading.  It has a certain sensibility about it that is worth trying to understand.  I have read the book a number of times, and even listened to an auditory version recently while driving across the country.  Kerouac, although devouring himself with liquor and right wing politics had in his youth a distaste for authority and an America going own the wrong trail.  You can learn a lot from Jack and his friends as they crisscross the US in search of something.

On writers and writing